ashes in my lap

The heart waits by the open window. The heart is an unfurnished room. Ashes on the nightstand, smoke idling towards the lonely lamp. The hands shift from foot to foot, uneasy with the devil’s work. The songs skimmed straight from the streaming, electricity busy in wires and in bulbs. Art and the unseen tiger, cosmic calendars and hand mixed metaphors, cobwebs dust and ash. Always plenty of flames and irons, though there’s seldom a candle lit. Always something getting going on with the being gone. 

I’m smoking by the gusty window, just below the black clip lamp. I’m pressed breathless between the pages of the book of days, something in the signal, something from the circuit. It’s in the charge I carry. It’s in the spark I pass. The days reckoned in fragments and fanfare, the placement of the artifacts, your picture in a frame. This place of speaking while I hold my tongue, the words curled up with the ashes in my lap. I’ve said it a thousand times, what’s another thousand more? This direction aligned with my intention, this daily indulgence kept at the back of my breath. 

There’s always some stranger in need of aid. There’s always some neighbor in distress. The dogs raising hell at some sufferer in the dark, the raging at the gate, wading in to break the ruckus and see what can be done. The lost, the maimed, the stragglers from some curbside campaigns all come looking for relief. You keep doing what you can even though you can never do enough. I’m all spilled words and timeworn routines, shtick and deep magic, circus skills and glib mystery. Smoking as the light leaks out, working at the language, always in some losing battle to hold the line.