cup and saucer

The year hardly started and it’s already getting used up. The calendar counting another month out, time parsed by cup and bowl. Coffee slowly steaming, gathered flower waiting for the burn. The weeks fly fleetingly, the flesh trembles unto dust, the treasured rituals disappear as if the never existed at all. The way you set the table, the order of the silverware, the water and the wine. The passing of the salt and butter, the napkin in your lap. The measure that used to meet you halfway seldom breaks its stride, leaving you more and more in the past tense. Chipped and scratched and nothing matches. Time talking in attrition with the rain falling down.

I was never much for being in. I was never much for keeping up. The world slips away, what’s the difference? I was only ever living at its borders. I was only ever living off the crusts. You lose track of the iteration of the incarnation, the name and the number of this particular collision, the plates of that truck that hit you. Just a few facets of the feel of the machine turning over, then onto the next blithering mystery. Just a sense of the song and the sway of the organism and the entity remembers to forget. So I move from dream to dream, living off myths and snippets. So I wake to this desperate grasping, the name and the dying. A few more stars swept, and I do it all again.

Last year was full of lessons, but mostly it made me do the math. The sting of betrayal and the shock of the context clues have long worn off, but the basics do stand out. When it comes for you, you will be alone. You carry yourself out, or you stay where you fall. I move from task to task, the hands of a clock and the footwork out of step. The days circle and spill, the here and now swiftly another there and then, the sun the moon the rain. The years dash past and everything is so beautiful as it goes. The words flock and swarm, nothing to fill the cupboards or keep me warm. The scratched out lines of poem after poem, ink and paper and the insistent presence of ghosts. Blinded well before the light gives up.