smoking in bed

The trouble comes once the day is over. The blinds drawn down, the doors all locked. The animals indoors and the rain on the way. Stripped down and lullabied, I stare at the ceiling, smoke slowly filling the shade of the overhead light. The night finds me right where it left me, and it finds me wanting.

All these restless stirrings, this mirror of mind troubling on. The old aches and fresh affronts, the hungers and the heartbreaks, the alarmed sun and the wreck of the Hesperus. The stretch from gull to ghost, the star strewn stagger of the years, the devil’s due come scratching at the door. The path from mistaken to mistook. 

I am start of the story, I am the tip of the tongue. The tripping telling, the tired out trope. As the animal lusts and dulls, lungs clouded with the gathered grays and coming dones, the culture coils through each twitch and word. I reckon shore and sea and the sky becoming. From glutted dusk and gaunt dawn, these circles spun. I am the translation of blood to alibi, of dust to smoke.