along for the ride

It is a little too late to watch the sunset, a bit too early to count the stars. I post up on the back porch, the twilight bleeding color away to shades of gray, the cement cold and unrelenting. A cup of coffee, a glass of water, the world as it turns taking me along for the ride. The words will wait I say out loud, as if there weren't enough to worry after. The words will wait I say, because it seems I am never ready. I miss the mark because it needs missing. The dark and the empty touching the edges and coloring outside the lines.

We may yearn, and we may reach, but we really only ever do closed sets. The scheme of things all remembered maps and bits of string, the wary witness and the weight of vision. Experience of this skin and bandwidth an unlucky  pin. The borders of our minds much more impassable in the breach of fiction, the brain telling its stories, swearing they're the gospel. Belief our only strength and our main undoing. The heart always some wild country, full of trees and secrets.

I wear my years like well-worn shadows, I while away each hour like a fool. I slow the moment with a swallow of coffee. I find my place at the steel rim of the cup. Outside the air carries some small commotions. A yapping dog, a clinking fence. The sky painted in dim stars and dark needles. The trees spread to touch an absent sun begin to breathe in reverse. The earth spins, dragging my whole world with its whim. The words course on, weathering through each root and vein. The words return me to my place, along the long and narrow. They take the meaning from me, and take me along as well. The world vast and empty, save for a breath or two.