blister in the sun

What use is it to face the west while the sun still saunters off, oblivious to friend or foe? Why stare towards the livid horizon with the day in fresh denial? It is hours before the dusk and no direction loves me any longer. The winds whip and chill, making me think how lucky I am I’m not smoking, and instantly making me crave a smoke. Whatever leaf there was to take a torch to, even as the winds skew wildly. Never a wish that I can quite pin down. Never a break I can play. Somewhere fireworks bang and pop. Somewhere there’s someone where they want to be.  It’s not the world, it’s me. 

Bejeweled translucent carapaces and their brilliant wings lit in flit and swoop swarm the air around me, the wind loose and reckless, the sparrows bodying the feeder in the nearer pine hard as it shakes and spills. It’s another no one day, a day veering hard into the razored reef, a blow the brains out the back of my head sort of day. I shouldn’t write, it does me no earthly good, and it hurts to bother. But I am only a small part of the worse off world, a piece of statistical lint readily tossed aside, a slow, easy death coming undone in flesh and letters. I’ll try to leave the preamble to the act off the boards more. Stick to the shiny descriptors, and the dull rhetoricals. 

Fuck who I am, fuck what I want. The world’s too far gone to include my bellyaching. Just this plenitude of parasites and storybook deadenders. Words like hornets from a kicked in hive, words like dust catching up. The tears never have time to dry. The new songs decades old, the new moon another wish for wings, the days so swift and heelless. The trees wave wild, sweeping away the tracks of the clouds, always favoring the away. The sun struts slow, never bothering to answer a who goes there or how dare you. The words spill and stray, squirming long after we’ve all gone, alive as soon as they are touched by a mind. The story of a nation, the burden of a flag, the sunset inevitable despite the loitering day. Goodbye the only truth left to us.