hard bargain

The rain pours down and the hammer keeps beating on the anvil. The winds blows cold and the bellows continue to wheeze and puff. Smoke trickles up through the droplets, smoke drizzles out from between my lips. The cold stays on point, stealing the heat from my hands, coaxing the smoke on down the road. It’s the limits of the vehicle, it’s the motive in the mise en scene, it’s the ashes on the altar and the burning of the rope. It rains, it pours, there is little left for me to know. 

The storm strolls on as the shadows reach and the night breathes from the earth on out. Rain piddling in pairs and platoons on the aluminum sheeting covering the patio, rain dripping down the limbs of the sprawling pines. I sit and smoke, an avocation without fixed appellation. I sit and smoke, the unfurling of an unaffiliated flag. I am the crossroads at midnight, a hard bargain never driven. I am the four way intersection, blinking in the dark. All feasting sense and the mumbling of the peanut gallery, the words wander through in drags and dashes. The witness wearing out its welcome. The music climbing the strange crescendo, the sacrifice to the faith of the song.

It’s all smoke and embers. It’s all mosquitoes and accepted flesh, the currency of breath and blood, the turning of the wheel. The moon is a dreaming to the west, bathing in the depths of gray and change. I weigh out my measure, I meet the balance of my mass and the come and go, staving off the defaults of this instrument. I wait out the twilight as it turns out it was the night all along. It’s an ancient story, beaten out by tongues past countless thousands. It is the burden of the breath, the tending to the fire. The words offered, the fire found out.