mistaken

It won’t do to make believe, it won’t do to want and wonder. It was never what you thought. No one ever told you otherwise, mistaken from stone to star, the difference between the dreaming and who you really are. A lap full of ashes and holes scorched through the sheets, the knowledge imparted again and again, the same old record played from end to end. The tried and true dies in you day by day. The one you want doesn’t want you. This will fill your nights and curse your days, walking in your skin, the ghost in your own haunting. The warning label on a discarded box.

The music is negligible and the coffee a disgrace. Nothing to celebrate, just the lines you’re used to coloring in, just the way you make it fit. You’re not enough to go around so you play it tight and close. You never were much of a sender, never a sight to soothe sore eyes. Just a puttering about the edges of the day, a scraping at the sides of dawn and dusk. You know the habits of the birds and beasts, you ken the placing of the stars. There goes Saturn, there goes Mars, the Great Bear and the leaking moon. You reach the bridge and sing the chorus, faking all the rest.

The night lands hard upon shaky legs and slumped shoulders. Old wounds have opened again. The fan drones on battering the air about, mingling breath and dust. You want it one way, but it is only ever the other. The words move through you, and they only move one way, time tripping over its heavy feet as the day slips away. Eyes weighted with unspent sleep, the gears shift and grind. Bones complain under the fat on the frame, muscles grumble under unfamiliar efforts, the window gapes and the cats yowl. You wish without thinking, the same old wish for the same gone one. You keep on, mistaken and undone, the day spent save for the dreaming.