dead branches

The wind spills and the sunlit dust seems to flicker and strobe, light lost in tiny spaces and brittle bough. A dirty hat on a dirty head, a dirty mind for a dirty bed.  The bloom off the rose bleeding into the afternoon. Just suppose this was a lonely road, long and weary and never quite wide enough to allow a pass. Just suppose this was only about the direction you are not. Again this fit of blood and burn, this split of root and branch. Each of us our sea of reasons. Each of us our seasons of faith and want.

This is always once the fever fires, always once the riot arrives. We are blessed with the liberty of second guessing. We are heavy with the wisdom of lives we never live. Once the war, we note the rumor. Once the absence captured we argue after the reason never there. All these little candles and so many shadows cast. All these fickle fables there vaguely on my head. Half an illustration so mistaken it could be some invention of my memory or the press of lips against this burned down imagination. Rock n roll playing on some passing radio, dopplering out in some qualified infinity. Drum and guitar, all the stars we never saw. A cheap life echoed in some other's end.

As always it is dust and thunder. As always it comes down to blood and ghosts. Root and branch, bird and bloom. The old test chestnut, wrong objections and the trick of choice. Water needing nothing but the bluff of its own level, uncles and cousins and dense confusions of court and kin. The measure always hard pressed against its limits. The means a little crueler than you'd like. These graveyard trophies and wake up calls. Always an angle, always a debt. All the words shuffled and stacked against this prescience again and again. Forever someone I'll never be, forever somewhere I'll never know. Tears and prayers spent for the song and the habit, best of blue wishes and heaven's mysterious help.