contrapuntal

There is a drift in the machinery, a part of all this speech that stays unsettled, the unspoken words always winning the day. There is a power in the unsaid to wreck and rile, the license for the disquiet stirring behind the eyes. She sees it all and says little. He talk and talks until the meaning goes away. Love lives within them, awake and alive. It is warm and bright and has their number. Love will not bankroll their hearts' great hopes. The drift will have its say. 

They move past the sweet in the sorrow. They take apart their piecework clock. They each sing such very different songs. His love conquers all, her sad future history. He is right, she is right, and so their path it parts. Tears flow and words fail, and the world keeps moving on. He is standing still and she is pounding her beat. Streets and stars and shared beds. Mementos, and love letters, and the detritus of the all fall down. 

He clings to her skin, he lingers upon her breathing. She skips and sulks, his words never quite syncing up with his fleshly heir. He is thinking bliss and babies, the fundament of the blood. She is thinking burdens and bones, his inheritance of ruin. The music falls in step with heartbeat and footfall. The seance of thought, the graveyard of memory. The calendar finds the slipstream, the machine kicked into gear. There will be words and acts and refutation. He aches for the unlikely resolution. She imagines no outcome, only the ghosts that haunt her heart. The love goes on, with or without them. 

the vital

There comes a day when the clocks and calendars abruptly stop chasing their tails, when the sunken stones begin speaking as clearly as the summer sun, when the murmuring earth and the whispering trees all sharpen the distant points of long ago stars. All the misfit dreams that haven't starved or broken settle on a shelf full of sheafs of dust and chronicles, their songs left to music box and calliope. The grizzled beard goes gray as the steel and granite empty from your bones. Your foolishness and your wisdom all sound just the same. The days, though ever as seperate and varied, all linger in this foreboding dusk as the long cruel night begins.

You find the break, you mind the cut, you feel the rain fall in the strumming beneath your skin. Heavy hands and rocky hearts, how far that wishing star? Every certainty some fairy story, some lullaby that trails off before sleep is called. The air trembles with motors and musc, the rumble of unkempt engines and the thunder of a untamed bass. The sky is all kinds of blue. You wait for the stars, you're always waiting on a sign only you can signal. The affirmations of change settling in your skin.

You go green with envy, you see red in rage. You see your chances dwindle as you abide the bent and burn of this new and unfriendly world. The stars come out, drizzled in distance and the secrets of creation. The victors bang their drums and thump their chests, unaware that your power is only kept in check by etiquette. The stories toss and tumble, while you draw down hard upon your roots. Let them claim and libel, their tongues the only flags they follow. The blood still boils through you, vital and indomitable with the anthem of your breath. Time is to be told.