spiders

The gray winds abound, casting its wild magic upon the dust and trees. I smoke in slow circles, pacing the fissures of old worry, tromping my way through the dirt.  I pause to watch the wires dance, swaying in the limbs above, trailing wild strops of smoke against the back of the sky. A flit from the corner of my seeing eye, I turn to make a spider still, dressed in its shine of startled armor. Limo black and a distressed red, the jumping spider waits to scry my appetites. Am I enemy or am I irrelevant? It moves on, reading me cold.

I couldn't count all the mistakes I made, considering I am usually making new ones with every move and breath. An alarm sounds somewhere in the baffling distance. I listen through the web of songs and dogs, hearing little but the wind. The cigar butt cools in the ashtray. Little measure never even marking the map. The ritual's always the last things we leave. A scrub jay complains from the bones of a chopped-down peach tree. I couldn't even pretend I could claim to disagree.

I pass a web clinging in a corner, a handful of dead peach blossoms scattered like shed spider shells, pausing strange before the sight. They swing and sway upon the lines, held as if in suspense of breath. There is a geometry of intersections, of paths and notions crossed, a sizzling of neurons whispering where sense and surface blend. The idea of distinction so different from its skin. I stray along the paving where the gravel greets the clay, a parapet of outers and inners to pace and grope and claim. The roads are always knotted so tightly, I always have some untying to tell before it's over. The wind walks through me, her secret friend my only absolute.