triage

Gone are all the words of comfort, tomorrow’s endless horizon waiting for the day. Gone are all the ones who held you, left for dead, at least to you. The night’s long shadow a fete of blindness before the autumn’s last carnival arrives to deal its devils and thieve the bright from the eyes of children. The fresh wounds open, the scent of blood on summer lawns, stitches popped by further violence. The open book, the shuffled deck, this sad prophecy beneath the apathetic, unseen stars. The only pleasures taken done so in dreams, the only law coming out the barrel of a gun. Not your flag, not your faith, in this the year of fallen monuments and buried dreams.

The corner has gone quiet, not a shill or tout in sight. Cars race down the streets like its a Bruce Springsteen song, rattling the windows, setting off alarms. Summer does its thing even on a cool and windy night. The heart ambles, the heart aches. All your lovers now apostates, all your pleasures only figures of speech. The world is all festival and riot while you wait and wait for the one who will never come. Count the ways, catch your breath, go on with your story. You were never meant for the future, never meant to go to glory. There too long, then gone all at once. The babble unabated, the words all astir. 

I fear my fate is beyond the fixing. I fear my drear has turned dire, beardless in these gray haired years. The static like a station from the 70s, childhood a tide of truck driving songs and the Bakersfield sound, cocaine signatures and solos without end. The American Dream dying off with disco, bedtime for Bonzo and all that jazz. Paper tigers and wicker men, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, the Susquehanna Hat Company the last anthem of this looted, ruined republic. All the rats racing away from the sinking ship of an empire’s setting sun. A useless son of a long dead planet, truth and justice never the way in America. A bystander in this last desperate triage as truth dies slowly on the slab. All the natural appetites all but abandoned save the thirst for love. I leave the rebuilding to my betters. I am the last bridge I have to burn.