toxic

I sit down at last to watch the sunset, but the sun is already long gone, covered by the clouds and smoke that thicken out sky. The sweet pang of the sacred west and my secret star unseen,  my heart swells on the tall grays and deepening blues as it all goes on to black. The day burnt down to this, this motor shook stillness, this bug clotted night. Thirty odd miles away another fire rages, consuming lives and dreams. The heat hasn’t budged and the smell of smoke and the flutter of ash abounds. The heart is how it sounds, one problem to the next. The soul is how it feels, alone in the growl and groan of the night.

I spend too much time alone. I live among people who’s hospitality I long ago used up. Even the ones that love me don’t like me all that much. So I live on in the ruins of my relationships. So I linger on in the ravages of my imagination, full of what ifs and maybe thens and memories played until the memories don’t work. A madman and a jerk I spend hours watching shows and reading screens and hoping that the dreams will one day come around again. The lonely rambling blues mingle with the black dog bitten nights, the colors blending on the sorry palette of my ghost, painting over all promise. My actions taking back all the lovely words. 

The gray sky dives a deepening dark, the porch light pushes shadows out into the yard. I take my place among the refuse, the useless toys and inherited benches that have yet to be thrown away. My joints ache, my back is sore, my foot is bleeding into a gifted sock. Monk and Rollins play on the box beside me as motorcycles roar around the neighborhood. I face her precious direction, the distance a couple dozens of miles and so heart breakingly far it makes my lungs weep, breathing in the breadth of it. A smattering of wings, the scattered words never to fledge again. The staggering gap between intention and the toxic truth. Never quite the one they were looking for once the looking is done. Never being the answer, another page left blank.