stagger

How the day paces when the sunlight gets long. How the shadows reach as the day drawls on. The trees all mesmerized as they sway in the sky to some tune of sun and soil while trash dances down the windy street. Feathers bend, boughs break, the clock just keeps turning over in its grave. God shows up late in the day to claim creation. Everything tries to ignore him as he continues to embarrass himself before forces he doesn’t understand. The world minds its business as everything continues to happen all at once.

Years fly by unnoticed. Strength fades and beauty sharpens, all those sky blues and grass greens mix and mingle, memory mostly making it up as it goes along. The ensemble changes as the story makes the rounds, people team up and part ways, people die and are born and so on and so forth ad infinitum. The winners and the losers are further disambiguated, all down the return to dust. I look, but I don’t bother keeping track. 

The blue of the sky becomes an obfuscation. The disarray all around becomes a misdirect. You fall, so slowly or all at once off the map. People still notice, they try to steal from you and harm you and load up their laughter on your back. You become another object to destroy or exploit or ignore. Your story goes away. After that all you have is either detente or war. It all depends on which story will have you. The stagger and the stunning, the stressed syllables and the boots on the ground.