desperate

Summer goes just like the wind, autumn settles in your skin, the days just fall and fall. The shell game starts again, stops again, arcane rules for an ill-wished craft. You never guess what is inside. From photo to caption to another contested acre. From year to year, the same idle report. You spin what spell is left, a haggard magic, threadbare and writhing with root and worm. The storm warnings fresh on your breath, you dig up a cache and shuffle the map. All these bright and fading treasures. These desperate measures in sacred trusts.

You might be that rare cut above them, you might be a girls best friend. The shine gleaned from exchange rates and gaffed numbers. The rare air all that luck allowed. The muck and dreck make you think there was a way there.  The blood and thunder make you think you are blessed to still be standing. Then there is the rough and tumble, you with your sunny song and dance. The old ways and the deep trough never want to drown me. The stressed syllables of the invocation more poor etiquette than power play. You bare your teeth, I don't know whether to smile or bite. The day breaks upon our backs again.

The stories weep and fester, they rage against each stitch. It is the work of telling that holds them together, the business of life and belief that allow our ignorance. The world is never words, no matter what your grimoire tells you. The spell is not the incantation, any more than the constellation in any way contains the stars. Things come and go, with their own reasons, at their own rates. Talk to any god on duty. Talk to the birds on the wire. You mark the inclination like you would the high water. You bear the weight of the inundation like with any cross you carry. The stiffness of the ritual, the flex of the weather and the claim of climate. You are the magic in the counting, your number always lucky when you win. I am the dull remainder, the wreck that is left once all the counting is done.