pass me by

So much for torches being carried. So much for flames that linger and endure. The world burns on and on, still searing from the weight of creation. Molten iron that steams and spews, the passionate irradiation of the immeasurable depths. Not a spark, not an ember follows this road. The only romance left here is that of distance, that certain staggered sweetness of the dissolute.

Never mind the less travelled road. Never mind all the differences-- intended and accidental. I left the trail so long ago that lost itself was left behind. Enthusiasm gets the better of intention for the poorly shaped and partly formed every time. All these stormy romances blown over, leaving hardly cloud or trickle. The habit of loneliness becomes the way, each misstep still leading somewhere. There were maps. There were signs. You get to wear the path that's left you.

A humming bird whirred between the ragged bottle brush bush and the tall scrub pine, fomenting its typical discontent. A teenaged crow baby talks a parent, trying hard to be that squeakiest of wheels. The sky is flat and blue and bereft. I read beneath the pine, slow and dull and spattered with dust and the hair of riotous dogs. Some small fiction meant to pass the time. Some story meant to distract and misdirect. The magic still happens. It is nobody's fault but my own if it happens to pass me by.