sprung

The day breaks and there you have it. The day breaks and leaves you to pick up the pieces. It’s an old story if not a good one. You don’t like it, you can always get your money back. The season that has been bursting through the seams at last collides with the calendar, all doomsday prep and crescent moon. Sun and birds and the laughter of children. Plague and panic and picnic ants. All there and then some, you take it as it comes. Spring has sprung, making it my 54th as the anniversary of my unexceptionable arrival upon this dizzy world. Just the latest in a series of descriptors loosed upon an unsuspecting earth. Somebody should write a song. Somebody ought to plant a flag.

The beauty’s still there, but it hurts more than ever. The beauty persists, but it won’t look my way. All this spun green and boundless blue, and still I only think of you. But all the absence adds up, and I can only fight so many asymmetrical wars before I got to swap a few of them out. It is the way of things, one more than the other. Even mutuality is seldom mutual. There are too many season under my belt to take a beating just for the bruises. I think of you, as the seasons slip by. I’ll think of you as the years peel off, knowing that despite all the changing, some things never change. Sometimes the beauty only comes with a whole mess of ugly. The truth is out there, but it never leaves a message when it calls.

I’m all locked up like the rest of ensemble. I’m all caged in, but I’ve been this way for decades. I do my shtick, I say my lines, I hit my mark from curtain to curtain counting matinees. The wheel grinds away at all us squirmers, from seed to dust. We name the moons as novelty, we talk up constellations of stars that never will know that we grouped them together. Our spells and curses entangled from our angle of the great commute. 250 million years to take a spin, and we pretend we know how it’s going to end. I serve the vast enchantment of our moment of hubris, destiny always written after the fact. I follow the mystery in scribbled lines and tiny rotations, the continuity all leaf and chitin. Everything talks at once. You get mentioned fairly often. My name doesn’t come up.