postscript

The ceiling shifts as the hour passes, up in smoke, gone to seed. Rain pelts the rooftops, it hangs gauze on the distance, casts a hush through the trees. The sun took a personal day, the storm just eases on down. The world remembered is the world erased, these sins of soil washed clean. The rainfall draws down the atmosphere, every drop an intimacy. Every single breath might shake the sphere, every single word renews that measure of wrath. Rattle the shingles, drizzle the trees. I pass unnoticed into darkness.

The shadows fill the landscape, the shadows steep the sky. The world sways and billows at its seams. A hush of rain, a kiss of night, the dose of stagger and chill. Things move on, scuffing shoes and burning bridges. Things move on, with you or without. The future mistaken because you misunderstood the past. Your life story at long last all postscript. Blue mood madness and the steady shedding sky. The measure only in inches until it is too late. I miss it by a finger width, it may as well be miles. I miss it as it passes, it may as well have never been.

The puzzle isn't in the pieces, but the pacing. The mystery isn't in the being, but the asking. Gods and makers and the mistakes of the tongue. Clues and cyphers found by eyes meant to find the trail. Invisible hands and ghosts with the most, the imagination is made to run wild. We place our faith in figments because once there was someone behind a curtain. Now every cloud and bush is scoured for great and powerful Oz, or poor worm- feeding Polonius. Every move and shift some secret in the trees. Heaven emptied save for stars and plucked harp strings, I sit beneath a drowned twilight, feeling my years. My prayers unspoken, my sorrows my own.