broken clocks

It the color of clouds and the sweep of the season. It the smudges on the lenses and the thrall of the smoke. The crows all work their home bound wings, twos and threes towards the roost, gray clouds taking color from the chemistry and the runaway sun. Power tools and electric blowers ring out, here among the aggressively swept streets and brutally attended lawns, this fierce false flag of home. Gates and gardens hard at work against the world, cars and asphalt and all these ferocious collections here at the foothills of the great collapse. I smoke as the light goes down and the cold comes walking in whistling a merry tune. I smoke at the great intersection of the ends. 

We go through the motions. We clean up the dirt and the fragments, we put things back in their place. We work as the wheel turns, as the wheel turns we turn. Our paths are placed among the patterns, our lives the songs of dreams. Reaping, sowing, smashing into things. So goes the life of our lot. The rut and toil uncoiled all around us, we hopscotch about action and inaction, making it up as we go. We gather what we can manage, we are laden with what we were given or what we can’t let go, we labor against the gathered sea of inevitabilities seething down against us. We’re always at it— we can’t help but occasionally get it right.

It’s not like I was blown off course. I got here step by step and death by death. It’s not what I would have chosen had it been essay instead of multiple choice, but that’s not how options always work. I’m not what I was, I’m not what I am, it’s another circus act outside my expertise.  Trapeze or wire walking when I was destined to be down among the clowns. I should be sweeping up spotlights instead of taking each leap and inevitable fall, but here we are. I grouse and loiter and gossip about the moon. I dance with the dissolution, clumsy reels and slow circles, tending wounds and rooms and the dead. The sky grows dark, I watch the moon, waiting until I am right again.