coffee hot, smoke burnt

 It all comes together as it falls apart. The insistence of the instant, the ripples in the pond. The skin glistening with sweat and kissed only by mosquitoes and the shrapnel of concrete smote to smithereens. There’s always a fire somewhere, there’s always someone cutting loose or falling out. The dreams seep in through the soaked sheets and buffeted air, the blather that they broadcast and all the ones that have gone. All the conversations left to sleep and the mind reaching the emptying of some sorry reservoir, the heart clotted with these days of ache and fire. The head always thick with spite and mischief. The itching’s a given, the scratching’s the art.

Softly, softly as they sleep. Gently, slowly as they sing. The places left unseen, the graces that elude. Prayer you never knew were prayers trickling down your neck. It has the aspect of an altar. It wears the affect of an ancestor. Burn what you burn, break what you break, there’s alway more give than you can take. The silly credo of the theist about something bigger than yourself, when that’s about everything that there is. You’re soaking in it, and other such relics of a marginal, stained mind. Out there dancing in the dark, the sky gone gray and the stars on pause. All the effects apart from your cause. The traction of your dissatisfaction in the way you misheard the universe. Fate is just dumb luck once the hand is played. The future just the dawn you expect to see.

The last scads of days have been brutal, the atmosphere all coffee hot, smoke burnt as the hammer comes down. Drenched day and night, unlovely in any light, the story grinds away. You might as well make your play: who’s going to stop you from getting away with it, those darn kids? The depths of each burdensome breath the perpetual tide of blood and sky, the stubborn turn of being and burn all about. The ones we lost, the ones we miss, the clock of hearts and the beat of the unfailing feet. All of us misfires and ricochets, the began beguines and the relentless begets, the picks and the frets and beatings yet. Some small sop, some little morsel, some moment between action and appetite playing out grand designs or sheer delights. The agency of the animal washed out to sea, the fierce fight against the flood. The moment between the reading and the write off. This soft shoe, this old one-two, the motion as it steadily slips away.