reserve

It all burned down, the cities that we’d visit, the little truths we’d work. Through the heat and the haze we met the maze and the Minotaur, scattered to separate trusts and secret paths, the blood and the no take backs. The stories were pared the memories clipped the dreams left to starve in the night. The matchstick broke the wish in a stroke, now all that gossips is death and smoke, the sky smudged and the earth aloud. Soot and ember falling all around, your wishes nowhere close. The loss all mine.

The silty light from the burnt gods, the ache of the earth adrift in the crowded atmosphere, the pity of the sun merciless too. Flesh sings and the bones all rattle, the place and time rolling through the deep rivers and shifting faults, being another blue bias. You breathe and drown in the sea of it, you breathe and you’re working the bellows. You sink within the blood of the day, you rise in the light you inscribe. All that live out the stilted witness, all that trail off as the words take flight, all in until we out at last. The sky, the sea, the reach of the trail through the trees. You a taste of the most that’s made.

I smoke in the leftover light. I smoke at the bottom of the sky, the burned down day and dream adrift. Here where neither mind nor meat matter, in the low tones and high dudgeons, the voice aloud that turns out to be mine. I spin my wheels and spit some words that not even the dogs will hear. The steeping gone past stagnant, all I impart wreck and rot. The dread lessons loosed all around, I stare at the ceiling and soak the sheets and miss every morsel of you. The memory and the meltdown, the reserve and the refuse. The distance that’s incurred.