the hammer sounds

The beat down gets busy once it knows where you sleep. It falls on you in the softened darkness of the room where you scratch at sleep, it hits you in your dreams and days, it strikes out of your eyes in the mirror. This pain begins the slow estrangement, the false duality of body and mind, the brain there to cool your blood as it charges towards its next fated engagement. You wake and the hammer sounds, uncertain of skull or heart or the set alarm. Just you rushing fast towards the place where you await the self, the bone and sinew, the sigil strung through your guts and marrow. The place where you just miss the moment every time. 

There was a moment half a moon ago. There was the morning star alight at dawn. The tire sound and the wounded man too blind to give direction leaning into the turn, street signs hard to read with your half life eyes. A handshake in the driveway after you picked him and held him steady, all in the dawn’s early light. The weight of the world heavier in half by the diffuse photons stippling the day with their charge. There between the general and the special, there on a scale where some thoughts are inevitable, though seldom helpful, came another story you’ll never tell. 

The body emerges from the shower, warm and slick and still not right. The towel sloughs away at the glistening skin, the sore joints and loosened bones click and clatter, sharp reports on several fronts as the pain reminds the mind of its primacy. The words come later, maybe beneath the sheets as the sleep won’t work, maybe in the heat and steam of coffee coming cup after cup. The words come and disperse their quanta, colliding at surprising velocities, the momentum of that famous formula spilling out your mouth. The impact of lack and mass getting a move on, the nail that stands out seldom outstanding, cudgeled and clouted about. The day never needs to spell it out, the words never needing much rope. The poet misses the point as again the hammer comes down.