loner

 I smoke as the day runs down, the sun on its errands and the wind with its teeth. Music plays, and I read and write and exhaust my portable diversions. The moon is out and is a mood already. Birth and bloom and reflected glory. Halfway to the big reveal, gravid with ache and intention. I sit alone, having missed my mark a million times, and fucked up more than a few good things. I sit alone, a loner in all the readings and in the real. Like any other name, it was given. Like my given names, it is no gift.

Blue smoke and the becoming moon. The chilled wind in rests and riots, leaf spun notation and the turn of the words. The neighbor children shout and whisper as the day leans deep into the shadows, fitful and wild in the climb to night. The dogs lie, glum and defeated feeling in the cool waste of the front yard, fallen leaves tangled in the chain link fence. I fill my ashtray without interruption or remark. Audiences with old weirdos are seldom sought, and I lose friends like an autumn tree sheds every leaf. I man my station beneath the uncaring dusk.

The twilight brings its sunken light, filling up each crack and crevice, bunching in the corners and hanging under the eaves. The sky still struggling with color, the moon passing on its stolen glory, the trees all shimmer and shake. The night closes in with its insistence and its stories, reminding me of the company I am keening for, telling me what I already know. All the missed chances, and the chances I imagined. The silences that have gone on too long to disturb, the conversations now too strange to start. A name given in passing, pointing out the flavor of stranger, judged and sentenced and doing the time.