wingspan

There’s no telling the tension left between a soul and a song. There’s no tellings the depths once the falling is all that’s left. The thick air of cloud and smoke and heat lingers long after dark, the passing traffic pushing shadows and trailing light. The new moon night muggy weighted with every stone ever sunk into the sea, hot with every torch ever carried to the bearer’s incendiary end. This carbon burden all the chickens coming home to roost, the depths of our collective intransigence a furious beating long overdue. The music creeps somewhere between breath and flesh, somewhere between the wishing and all those impassive stars. The song something awakened from the dead. Wreck or reckoning, it beckons just the same.

How we lumber in the shadows. How we huddle in the sky. The dark upon the ground and the bounce lit heavens, the stars blotted by the backwash, the glow captured in the clouds. Would that there was shelter past the structure, would that there was home inside the house. Cracked lips and fingers and soaked through clothes. Punitive moves by the grotesquely wealthy to hurt and murder those without. The motives of extractionist ghouls the worst sort of evil, monstrous crimes committed on the whole of humanity to exacerbate the crash. We struggle and we suffer, but we see. Standing beneath brutal cudgeling, we take it like hard rain. They loose their goons and killers, we think we might need to bring a hat.

The night is full of silhouettes. The street is parked up with cars. The song drags on, soft and small, like the ember of a distant cigarette. Like a pillow full of prayers. The words won’t rise inside me. My heart can’t catch its breath. A cargo plane rumbles to the east, another secret born aloft by math and fashioned flesh. The night cools ever so slightly, just enough to feel a breeze. Just enough that the clothes don’t stick. I am what I am, I’ve lost what I lost, I miss who I miss. There’s no getting over this. The hoping is the hardest part. It’s so simple that you can see it if you look when the light’s just right. It’s so easy even I could do it. That means you can do it too. We have the wingspan to lift us above this coming tide of hell and fire. We have the heart to hold the heavens. We have the strength to break their surly bonds of greed and servitude. We only need to use it.