the taste

 The daylight turns to wishing and the wishing to once weres, the thought along the arc of each particular orbit. Some sad scratching in the dirt, some bored staring at the stars, all this rough and tender telling left us. You wake when you wake, you sleep wherever you fall, from asphalt to silk, from silk to cinders. The hours take it all, limping along through right and wrong, singing to the stars you barely see. Reading the riot act to what wanderers are strewn across the smoke and glances, the heavy heart of wasted chances beating right along, flutterers and scuttlers and the spiders on the line. Light some incense, say her name: you won’t know the taste again.

There is the lonely bed of sweat soaked surrender. There’s the labor of the toss and turn as you burn away in the embers of bridges and the ghosts of the never known. Dreams sliding around inside like unsecured furniture in an urgent rental. Crates and boxes and that weird corner table. The bumps and crashes of each hasty retreat and every reckless get up and gone lingering on in the dusky sediment of your flesh. You lean into the ropes, you hit the shower, all your life and labor barely a dent in the heavy bag. There are words and there is witness. There’s the trail into the forest and the footprints in the sand. Gods and glands and promised lands, lost in the dark of our skulls.

You sit there motionless on the end of the bed as the forces again gather against you. You set slumped over in your chair as the news blathers away. Fresh hells, dull horrors, the whole spread there like the evidence on display for the cameras. You shuffle, you limp, you shit and shower. Some stray light, some sad hour, a meal from the microwave a cut from a can. Home is where the hurt is, this exhausted heart, these played out hopes that persist in this stubborn flesh. Vestigial graces plague our days and gnaw upon our nights, fight or flight or wait for the clout. The bell sounds, and you step back into it, the fight in the rounds the war by the battle. Scattered and foolish and clattering like spent brass, you raise your hands again. Silty smoke, the gift of fire, her name upon your tongue spilling from your lips.