exception

It is only another ghost of an hour, a moment suspended from all acts and consequence. It is only cold notions and sad rumors, the crumpled clothes strewn across the worn floor, the sing-song voices rising in the dusk. The ashtray of emotion, the fitful rhythms of a song meant for forgetting, the rusted themes dragged out once again. Standards and ballads, and the stars all play their parts. Poems and prose, and the roads all dressed to impress. I come to the telling crusted with salt and dust. I come to the telling with the cupboards burned bare.

There isn't so much a story as the words stuck in my teeth. There isn't so much a telling as a spilling, all meaning spoiling on the page. The heart arrives at its decisions like an ambulance arrives at a wreck, sounding out only once the world has its say. Life is left playing in the ruins, too fay and tenacious to surrender when it should. Sickness and ruin, riot and dissembling, root and leaf and vein and limb endure all the same. I confess my many sins, agree with the abuse and invective aimed my way, and know there is no way out for me. Still I shrug and shamble, writing my misplaced and endless obituary by the word and the minute. Still the sun pays its tab and shuffles off again.

I owe my life to the angels of better natures. I owe my life to the kindness of strangers. All these debts of tolerance and assembly, all these years of blank verse and dull resolve. Depression growing worse and worse while the ability to recover slows, my life in shreds and tatters as the new year chugs along. All the books are glutted with word after mealy word, dust on their jackets, creases on their spines. The day essentially the same as every other, the notable exceptions only those that have gone bad or run astray. The night already gathering in the shadows, every wing bent towards shelter. Nothing to say, and still I don't stop.