dusking

The blue bends gray, the stays of the cool blue day at last loosed, the sun settling for the other side, my fingers cold despite the gloves. I peer over my reading glasses, now years since I possessed a pair of prescription specs, squinting a little to focus my astigmatic left eye, watching the dogs browse the mud and shrubs as traffic passes and the light leaves me. Just like everything else I think, too typically me, true enough despite the dismal lensing, the dark filling up the creases and corners, cobwebs hanging ragged from the peeling eaves. Another day down, another night to do. Bob Dylan transitions to Erykah Badu, I scratch a dog’s ears absent of intention. I am mostly unscratched itches myself.

I catch a glimpse of a white pickup speeding by too briefly to get the make. Yet another of the long list of not my strong suits, I probably couldn’t have IDed it even if I had been gawping at it taking notes. The stretch of headlights now swabbing at the corners of my distracted gaze, I still don’t have a clue. My ignorance grows more willful with each year. What I don’t know a going concern.

Still on the front porch, the night now fastened tight, I do my thing. Thumbs tapping away at the smudged screen, I fill in a little of the blanks, my lonesome now confined to this awful blog. I contract as my world cools and dissipates, ain’t misbehaving a technicality rather than a romance, an outcast dusking away his dismal days. Lit by the bare lamp of the porch light the dark closes in, my shadow skewing left, my heart a fucking fugue. This vacancy brimming over, the long night hungering on.