The night comes hard softly, the weight upon you all at once, a limit learned by doing. All the moments left unstolen, all mistaken appraisals and summary judgments, the key broken off within the lock while the mechanism stammers and sighs. The somebody you wanted to be no one you’ll ever know. The ledger the red of debt, each breath the red of blood. You fell off the ride so hard so long ago, there’s not so much as a thought of getting back on. The horse made its choice, and there’s a whole world of falling yet to beat back the flesh from your bones. Debt, pain, and squalor your steadfast retinue, the night bumps the hardest once you’re down.
Time moves quickly among the orbits and contraptions, slipping around the rotations, counting on the eyes being fixed on the clock and the minarets. It walks with your ghosts, seeps in your bones with the cold, hides behind the mirror and inside your eyes. It plays with the numbers and delivers the medicine you don’t want to take. It takes everything, but it takes it from everything to keep it honest. It is the fire to your fuse, the boiling pot to your frog. It runs you down to rims, then it leaves you there. The road goes on without you.
Now it’s the long toothed hour, dead nerves and bad joints. The growing list of afflictions, the empty roster of kith and kindreds. The wishes still exist, but mostly as the curling smoke of snuffed candles, the stars so impossibly far that their burning might be over, the lover who never loved you, and never will. The bad art and self important raging. The cold hands of the earth, the deaf ears of the world. Before the meal is over, we will all be meat. The world of wonder devours as it shines.
