slump

It is the busted blue weight of this sky too early for all the other starlights, the long shadows and ghost town gutters, the shoulders slung so broke and old. It is the screams shook loose by the humdrum bass line and the fizzle jangle of the feedback guitar, earbuds boarding up the building. The weary reportage from a place torn by the wars to come, the high hill above the bent of time where the roads offer up their journeys, a bitter mouthful of smoke and oaths. The backbone backs down, and the high point shrinks into the rear view mirror, this listless passage gutting the husk. The day ends in smug punctuation and the scent of burning flesh. The coffee is still warm and goes down strong and slow. The calendar says there’s no more homes to go to.

The wind skates the pavement, slips the brickwork, fills every crevice with its long restless broke tooth tongue as it sweeps and swaddles, a lavish passing and a spill of flies. Traffic glides by as the day grows old, the hint of mingled means and seasons as the summer leans on the leaves. Hunched over this trash heap with bug skittered skin, all reason given only to sweat and ache. Dull in the clabbered atmosphere, the perceiver a slow sinking, the story of drowning as told by the fathomless depths. Despair in a shady patch, an anatomy of all ending. Clothes stick and billow, depending on the position and the breeze. A flag knows no direction save the way its blown. No clever name, no fitful description, just the beaten in your bones.

Maybe there is a letter, maybe there is a meal. Maybe you line up with the world according to your wants and local topography, the day breaks and you know what to do. The daily trespass and the old soft shoe might do, there’s no telling what people might be. What is there worth the telling, what is there that makes you stay. The tautology of the bilious palaver, the countdown of the hit parade. The nothing always has its fill, the grip a slipping rictus, the fall a long slow draw. Too much and not enough. The walk of shame, the dwindling of the light. The same old song breaking like a neck.