afternoon

It is as it is, this early autumn afternoon. This late day beset with blue skies, dead leaves, and fickle wind. The east is still bright as ever though the sun spills and levels, lighting the neighbor’s driveway and garage, pushing the tree shadows into traffic as they climb and rise. I smoke a cheap cigar, sitting uncomfortably in the place I settled. Sitting as I offer up the smoke that drowns my sunken heart in bitter and in blues. The tree before me stills, then shakes, the misfit wind wild and indecisive. My slack, pallid skin hangs there, some flag furled close to its pole. Some coat left hanging half on the back of a chair. The days brutal, stirring embers. The year too long by decades.

Father and child bike down the sinking street as shiny cars streak past. Light and shadow dapple the westward facing fronts of houses, light caught and slipped by leaf and limb. A song slows, a song ends to somewhat startling applause. The live recording of a moment long buried or burned. The music meeting its end to some pleasured act of hands and mouths. Little to differentiate the day from the others save name and number. Little to explain the steady gain this grieving has made in the sorry soil of my mind, only the steady plodding of bad to worse. A useless fool and a savage beast, I sit quietly as tears spill and the sinking is thick in my chest. The day grows old as I do, not knowing how to face the next inevitable other.

Sunset closes in, I still face the east. The butt of my cigar smolders on the edge of the green glass ashtray as flies flit and pester away. This grim desolation of my day ridden soul is only part of my illness and my self, the two now so interwoven that they are all but indistinguishable. I love deep and I love true, but oh how I seethe and rage, the sadness turning to anger more quickly than you can flick on a light. My sickness, my poison, just flows and flows. The long days turn to longer nights, all windows and walls and the westering moon swelling in your wake. The tall shadows swallow the street as the sun levels its assault as it makes its getaway. I will spend another night locked in the cage of consequences. I will stuff myself with heaps of just desserts. I rail and weep to no distinction. Daybreak to gloaming, I am as I am. The dwindling fire of a dull and dying light.