manifest

You might stand time’s test, you don’t know. By now you might already even be a cult, who’s to say. I go by a book or two, but that’s mostly all I got. A corner and a call sign, a preponderance of words. So drolly as we fade away, so glibly as we grieve. We are seen or we are occluded, the dream unraveling in the day. These small pleasures, these endless sorrows, we do and we don’t and the scene goes on and on. From squirrel leap to bird scrabble, from root to vine these tendrils reach and stir. The clock is on until the clock is gone, we are counted until we no longer count, still we may stir the earth and atmosphere. You might be forever, but it will always be too soon to tell.

The coffee scalds, the coffee cools, the coffee swallowed just the same. Inky as the dreams of prophecy, shiny like a lucky coin. The incantation a conversation between chemistries, the tithing to the blood, the tide of ignition rolling through every breath. The stitches in the seams of seeing, time passing between bleed and burn, you always riding the wave you watch. The stretch where you meant to speak and the path of the stumbled tongue, never that permeating version, never a resolution to the tension’s secrets. In the field behind the fence the school is being mowed. Something in the way the grass smells, something in the difference between the sense and the expected ideal. Lost thought to current bird, flight forever a becoming and its lapse. A sip of magic mirror black coffee, the tape moved along.

It is the ache of each mismeasured breath, it is the pain of the shadow shook loose. The day presses on, never waiting for you to keep up. It rolls like thunder, a temblor set upon the moorings of your heart. The old frequency where the moon was always whispering away. The elder channel before the elders were there. So it was and so it is, always entangled, always in the dark. The sorry amplifier, this insistent bandwidth. Leaf blowers and riding mowers and Counting Crows, as the wind breathes clean and a kiss nuzzles the nape of your neck. The habits unacknowledged always make their mark, little scars and drear repetitions, letters and pictures and odd parking lots. The world burns and the calendar is counting, a cup of coffee, the talk about the stars. I take a swallow, I see you shine.