the fallen

From the moon haloed in the early morning sky to the moods of loosed smoke and dead men’s songs, the numb skulled day has dragged along. A life lived in effigy, billowing sails and trembling scaffolding, ritual stance and signal smoke. The seething soil, the spill of color, the bitter flavor of the held tongue spells and the lined up invocations. Angels once, then the inevitable betrayal. Cast out for the sin of change.

The outcasts and the unapologetic, the apoplectic and the Donnybrooks, the devotees of the forest or the books or the old ones yet unnamed. The purity of the drawn and the drained. Habits so heavy handed they wear a window between the worlds, repetition halfway to ritual. Coffee and cigar in the strange siren soaked first of many. Weed and steam at another era’s end. 

I sit and smoke in cool blues and wistful grays, in dog fracas and sparrow song. I sit and smoke with fresh dead on my hands and changes on the ground. The cagy scrub jay flits by in a lucid fit of bright and blue, getting a quick scan of the scene. A squirrel slowly slides down the pine, deciding whether the risk is worth it. The smoke unfurls, climbing the cold up the sky. I sit and I smoke and I say nothing. I sit and I smoke, saying my goodbyes.