the drop

Sometimes you know it because you can see it coming. Sometimes you know it because it’s already there. Right up on you, breathing hot and heavy down your neck. Sometimes you go a whole lifetime never knowing, not even thinking about it, watching it pass you by like the passengers you see flickering the lit windows waiting at the crossbar as the evening train goes by. A figure barely registered in the foreground of your everyday check the locks and the balance mind only to meet in a dream, someone you almost know, someone familiar wearing a strangers face. The end, the end, the end at last. 

Another afternoon devoted to sitting and smoking, hot black coffee despite the blue blazes heat, cold water guzzled like it was the fount of redemption itself. Epistrophy plays as a breeze swings its blessings upon us, the carcass dripping with fresh fat and humidity, the spirit a seed dragged through the gutter by the fierce and fickle wind. The smoke stirs slowly beneath the eaves, catching the faster aspects of the atmosphere and rising into the bright summer sky. The lonesome hits hard, hidden behind the eclipse of the heart. It gets the drop on me, and I sink into the stirred sizzle of the firmament. Falling never a direction but a velocity.

 There’s no knowing what might have been, though I mostly live there now. Wondering how I could have mitigated mistakes, how I could have made a difference, how I could have mattered at all. The dogs tussle as they await the next target to go off on, playful and restless in the weight of the weather. Some love song plays, the volume an emotional momentum every heart has known. Father of miscarriages and abortions, failed son, and lover in the past tense alone. All the tautologies play havoc in my head, the what’s dones and what wants. Waiting on whatever stupid, shabby death is due me, hoping you have something to wait for too. Love runs down like everything else. Over and ended seldom the same.