dither

Maybe I am coming down with something, some seasonal affected ailment, some blood tight burden of a degraded middle age. All the smoke that I sent curling, all the names I have made to stain my breath, the cruel circle of simple maths. The quest always somehow half a fool, half the drag of half a heart. The path revealing every shade of lost, the wandering always some mistake of faith and navigation. The sediment settles over my last thought of getting up to fight again. The prophecy always shadowed in the telling, our stories always of a sort. Shadows fill in the bleak and blunt open spaces, somewhere there's probably a shining wanderer or a pointed star. Maybe it's the way I make it go, candle quick, then only darkness's deepening depths.

A pair of crows dawdle a top the brush-tips of two cypress trees, dark and sovereign marks of a vast and powerful hand. The strokes of light against the dirge-work feathers, the scrape and knuckle of that certain banished blue behind. The lovely sky a sudden all spurned lover, the laden weight of fade and walk away. As if the eye must always overcompensate when it does double shifts because of a haunted heart. All the empty carried through the burden of the workaday world, all the words that meant nothing as they were said. Language's greatest trick was letting us think we create it, like the stone thinking it made the river the water cut through its bones.

This is the heart of matter, the lilt of magic just reading the list aloud, the words only anything at all. The pop songs spill, the prayers flee our lips, kisses slipping over each and every flight of fancy or figured speech. The spell is the matter meeting its will, the work of burning always the scene change never the curtain call. The lights go out, the breathing quickens, every ashen invocation boiling in your seething mind. Faith a place you need to fall to find. The winds leap and the sun goes out, I am left with smoke and flesh. The magic only the husk unwinding, the coil of each breath a stitch in this ever diminishing return.