rubicon

The words, if they ever did cross your lips, were never spoken where I could have heard. The curse you spat barely creased your brow, a stubbed toe has caused worse. The normal elective  invective, the crucial usual suspects spent in the heat of anger or striking ‘cause it’s hot, nothing outside the idiomatic curve. Instead, there was a door that was closed. Instead, the dam burst at last. The light that finds your eyes, the words reconstructed in your shock and awe, the place where you get your head together. The stone of the fruit glisteningly cleaned of fruit. The wonder left off where the tongue begun.

There is a touch that will not mend, a stubborn, bubbling wound that cuts right through. A mark that separates memory and history, a built in breaker that kicks in once the alarms go off, a step that move the tense to the past. Even so time hurtles on, the words go fast, until you’ve used yours up. Once the worth ends up in the red, there’s no fix that’ll stick, not horse and soldier, not king and crown. Only the day and the matter, honoring the might have been. Only the hope and the story, making up for all this graceless waste.

The words live on in sheaves and slabs. Hints and mementos and dark manifestos. Letters and gizmos and ritual abandon. The music is playing and the lights are left on. Still, the words go quiet as the house goes dark. No one speaks and no quarter is given. The days break off and drift into the sea. The moon through its motions again and again. How low the blow, how hard the fall. Loose like light seeping through the blinds. The silence hanging like a lock, hope a river crossed at last.