grayscale

Not that this is any secret, but things don't always go the way they were planned. The best laid plans and the God that always laughs. The prophecy that is always about to come true. The lights are on and the road is always open. The smile that arises to remind you of the reasons for teeth. How the day changes, how the heart soars and sinks. Still we speak of reasons. We stack phenomena and happenstance, and remark on how mysterious are the works and the ways. The years pass in droughts, the rain runs in rivers. Tell us again of the kingdom we can't find.

Our minds all wind through the same long wander. Our blood flows from the same ancient oceans, our stories all lapping at that long forgotten shore. We guess intent and see wheels turning, even though the only stirring is the wind. We stalk secrets where we would hide them, see ourselves in every maker's mirror. All these puzzles and these mysteries imagined, the problems we make by thinking that our thinking makes the models true. All the colors that resonate a song of fecund light. Dusk comes and the colors flee our sight. Gray shadows swallow every skin.

At long last the rain has come. The sky drips and pisses, the gutters burble and flow. The season begins to rock itself to sleep, and the crowds all gather and cling. I watch while the skies empty and the streets fill. I settle in against the sharp-toothed wind and the ways that elude me. The season of the blood bound and the celebrant. The world we wrecked and the life I ruined. All these stories that play at reasons. All these questions they had answered before they were asked. The sun goes down and I am the same shade as every other thing. I am painted in absence like the rocks and the rain. I am just another question answering itself.

departure

The miracles we abide diminish as we take to the sky, the scars of highways, the wreaths of flickering lights. The voices narrow as our words cling to steel and glass. We rise and enter the anonymity of transience, another set of lights sliding across the night, another shape to blot and blur the stars. We pass above our insistent settlements, these beads of home and struggle and urgent traffic. We pass into charts and schedules, a people bound by direction. A tribe bound only by the skin in the game.

So you pass into the meat of memory. So you fade into a ghost in the veins. The thought of you a faded captive. A voice left out to ring in the rain. Another dream amid the calamity of passage. Coughs and elbows, all these strangers speaking at once. Another hope aloft as the world slips away.

This is all the rind of language, the moment held like a breath on the page. Another animal condensed into a set of symbols. Another voice left to mark some stranger's eyes. The place I was, the name I answered. The drift of days and limbs and sheets. The evidence gathered by my absence. The words that will fill the world I left.