stars

How bright the day, how hot the night, the long tumble over and under as we are tugged and tossed by the sun. How heavy the heart when the cut turns dull from sharp, the pointless longing stubbed out in your eye. The sky goes from blaze to shimmer, from burn to bitter as the stars simmer on the tongue. The porch light beset with wings and spiders as it stripes the yard, the weight of bombardments and the altar of illumination wrestling the shadows within reach. The remembered and the rewritten mingle in the miseries of the mind. What we said and what we say, as the world all slips away.

It all falls away. The names of the constellations, the secret identities of superheroes, the taxonomies and soliloquies and the name of the authors for attribution. If it isn’t used, it’s marked lose, and you do. Years drift by and it becomes strange to return the call, it seems suspicious to write back, all the go go go gets gone. The love you knew runs out of juice, picks its next neck, or turns out to be mistaken or lies all along. There’s a lot of same ol’ to this song. The star sign aligns with an old sock full of adjectives, and isn’t it just like you. I mean, I see Jupiter leading Saturn to the southwest, the Great Bear lost in wisps of atmospheric mist to the northwest, but the rest is just guessing if I even bother to look. Lost so long I seldom bother to navigate.

Sure the fault is in myself. Sure, I just can’t get it right. Rage and confusion, paranoia and just plain dumb have marked my life well past the remainder shelf, out of the bargain bin and into the trash. I’ve never had much, but this last destitution is the deep impoverishment. No help in times of crisis, no one to listen and to listen to. This last labor is failure after failure, day after day. The failure of my waning strength and withered limbs as I beat my bones against iron and stone. The failure of my intellect as I am stymied by half a hole and a full blown week long inferno. The failure of my humanity to have kin or friends that come to my aid as the slings and arrows are hard upon me. I am past providence, past prayer, past any ending other than the one everyone expects of me. Forecast by this looming silence as the world rightfully turns its back to me, the self slaughter they’ll say they saw coming all along. Fate and god share a cab with all these foregone stars.