finite

There’s no question that I’ve made mistakes. Falling in love with a riddle is questionable to say the least. Knowing that, and the soul of wit, I tend to go on and on. It’s the mountains that we make, how we add to the heap, all our belabored myths and molehills. The trick of the pyramids, the gimmicks in the real estate. Plaques and names and epitaphs, the genius revealed long after the artist bit the dust. The promise of perpetuity always selling something. The web clotted porch light and the careless kiss of the wind. Heaven can’t wait to make you guess.

Bug bit and screen lit, I smoke in the hollow hunger of an unsettled night sky, swathes of bright cloud and boundless black reveal star and helicopter while I curse constellation and wanderer alike. The wail and ruckus of a train rattling through town stirs each chirp and echo with the dispatch of its there and gone. Such relentless momentum, such blundering certain thunder so fills the air, then this hush that rushes in as the atmosphere settles in. Like love, too big and loud to take a measured measure of. It’s absence, the world at once without. I cough and cough, spattering the unfathomable empty left.

If I had my druthers, I’d favor the faint praise sort of damnation. As it is, I take my lumps. The brutal years and aching days, the inevitable spiral down spinning ever faster, the world speeding past and slipping away. The worst sort of hackneyed vaudeville act, the prelude to a ghost, the engine spins the organism. The clockwork yoke of some fool god’s doubled down abomination, these thrift store motions, this roadshow full of adepts and relics. This worthless witness, a way with not one damn thing.