misperceptions

 The daylight hasn’t made it yet, what with the end days lighting and the apocalyptic atmospherics, the sky like looking a toothache in the eye. Grazed with gasps of doom and lashes of grace, the stranger takes a seat, the table cluttered with cup and ash. This story oh these millions of miles away, our shared sky California, the fire speaking clearly with a breeze cracking wise. Buried in these doomsday hues and stark harkenings, the scintillant senses filled with the mundanity of cataclysm, this fraught constancy of dire reckonings and calls for returned normalcies weighs heavily in our soot tinged souls. The harbor and the hearth, the ruthless waters and the sacred roots, the deep drink before the pause to come. The drummer rat a tats between the clatter of engines and the raving of the winds. 

The heart still hurts in the hole where it’s buried. The beating hasn’t let up despite its cruel dispatch, the song so sore and squandered, the art of it spread so thin. The casual dismay of every lost day, the constant march into oblivion cut up all bite sized and manageable, one mistake exchanged for the next as it all sprawls out. The leaving and the loss meted out in deft script and pretty painted plates. The onerous unjustified ends come due on an eerie doomsday morning, along with all the righteous ones lined up already. A whole day of hooks and dismay.

It’s true that I haven’t been the same since I was run off the road, but I’ve still been consistently shitty all the same. My heart is always clotted by the frustrations of not quite managing to convey what it means, head lit with imagined conversations and sorting out misperceptions and wrong turns. So the world ends with me in tatters, so I was mistaken in my loves and loyalties, so all I managed in my too long life was to make headaches for others. The wrong I’ve done won’t be undone, and there’s nothing I am worth defending. I don’t have the words, and more importantly, the words won’t have me. I’ll take whatever bitterness that leaves a little kindness behind.