counted down

Was it the sun on the skin, was it the wind in the trees, this ghost of warmth and whispers? The long descent so perilous and without incident that danger seems a sudden impediment rather than the course of the constant. All those slip-thin senses that catch glimpses from the corners, all the amalgamations of ought and is that guided our lives and nights now abandoned for these  imperfect implements of dull imagination. The primal fire still blazes bright, so we give our voices over to stories of motive and belief. And the sky is clotted with airplane and satellite, telling us all that we already know. The streets are full of cars and bullets, and screams we barely ever hear.

The hour and the clock can't help but disagree. The writing on the wall, or the word carved into the world. Time is telling by how it is told. First by a number, then by the sun, then by the circles spun about the sun.  You feel it in the air, like that hint of blood on your breath. You feel it in your bones, all these aches and lull-a-byes. The afternoon squirms with beasts and birds, and those awful children you love so much. It ends up birth where we place the blame, though the whole game is so gaffed that the surest way to lose is to play it straight. Secular sermons from the heaven besotted entangle claims for human nature, while they persuade the slave rebellion that freedom is only blood or chains. The times that were all inscribed in the tangle of root and bone, the times to be all laid out in their graves.

It is all theft and hapless reckoning. It is all faith that every evil is secretly good. Never mind that only the pig can know the price of pork. Forget that only the dead can fathom the cost of the cause. There was, for one instant, that blush of youth. Spring in the air and the absolution of the rising night. Instead I glean the lies from the ether, the stubborn sickness of the greedy human heart. All praise destruction and their petty ethos, all claim that special grasp of heaven's love. I am only remembered now as an angle, only needed as dollar or a drone. I keep this distance as my troth, forget my name as a sign I will never forget. The enemies of my enemies my foes as well, all consolation nesting at the end of days. That last number so isolated and remote, it can only be counted down.