labyrinthine

The clock counts out the tedium-- hours spilled in fleet seconds and grim minutes. Machines light the room and stir the air. The tub fills with water, the mirror hides in steam. Nothing here that needs seeing, nothing here that needs saying. All these footnotes to the colloquial, all these margins smudged with grease and ink. The pretense of the lost is that there is a place to begin with. Claim the day as the night drags and draws. Write the words as you fail them one by one, then all together.

Yesterday it was a falling star. Yesterday it was a barn owl above, screeching unseen through the sky. Venus up there burning bright, the moon all but gone. The dawn shed for another day. A bottle of rum and a dead man's treasure. The clatter of glasses, coffee brewing scenting the air. The dull dispatch of daily complaints, the well slick with poison but never running dry. A sad passage, the ghost of a notion. Sleep a myth like the monsters on the map. The labyrinthine labor of a mind out of reason. The minotaur lost to the angles of the maze.

The night again, and again and again. This litany of vague motive and callow regret. Tense and meter, supplication to the false and the frightened. These aches that are life as it is, these words like life as wished after. Sorry lists and spent incantations. The troubled thoughts that make the flesh surrender. Appetite honed on bone and pavement. Stepping on lines and cracks, everywhere broken bottles and stray cats. The gaze swallows the lay of light and outline, headlights straining against the flat lines and painted posts. Stare and stare, there is no path you follow. The truth isn't out there, the facts elude the light.