burning down

The day goes on and on, like it’s cornered you at a party. The day just keeps at you, like some guy you’re going to deck. It makes the hard pitch, it has the patter and the pressure, but it doesn’t make the sale. The sun slips away, well past the point when it’s almost gone, it has tipped out leaving the sky aflame as dusk shows its hand. You sit and you smoke, a joke only you never laugh at. You sit and you smoke, watching the world burning down. 

The trees sway and tremble, the last mottled light dappling their leaves long past the point of transubstantiation, the sugar shaker shutting down for the growing night. The long shadow reaches over rooftops and past their crowns, as traffic spreads the flesh around, ghosts and glimmers dancing on street and steel. The sky yet to meet its impasse as the soft blue sky follows the moon’s latest revelations around. Negative space shimmers between the tattered shroud of leaves as the breeze tries to make up its mind. The smoke rises, the mystery and the altar, the offering between minds.

The wreck washes up the way it’s supposed to, revealing shards and ribs, the structure only architecture as the hull is humbled on the reef. Crows rise sideways across the incoming moon, the roost left to conjecture, twilight seething through every skin. Too early for the wishing stars and ancient wanderers, to late for love letters and lucky kisses. The work of the ordinary always being torn down and assaulted, Sheela-Na-Gig and electric guitars a fuzzy fete into the gloaming. The weight of want, the lessons of lack, smoke soaked skin and tobacco flecks on your tongue. Ever the once and future while declaiming time is a construct, the dumb proclamations of humankind digging its own idiot grave. The hubris a feature, the monkey climbing to show its tail, while you rant and rail, the inevitable right up on you.