a stretch

You awake inside your latest indiscretion, fumbling around with the script. Outside the songbirds continue with their lists on loop, the window in the kitchen framing a falcon who isn’t fooling around. The days are said grace, the days are all ring a rosie. The circles that we travel in, around and around and around, up until the ashes and the all fall down. The secret paths and the tiny consecrations, the hands dirtied from your work, your words smoke to cover the scent. Stray gods and found altars. The profound and the performative arrive at the ritual separately, but they leave together. Off to find forever somewhere in the haunting of familiar hills.

I still put one foot in front of the other, just not so many in a row. I still walk in and out the door. There’s not enough singing to my liking. There’s too much stunt work and endless soliloquies. The plot is smooth and featureless, the ripples on the surface of a pond, the mirror furious at the dark. I’ll step right through the fourth wall just to warn the other three. I adjust the aperture and break the frame. I use my inside fighting and get stuck with the leftover art. The night finds me and really dishes it out.

It takes some time to shed a name. To unhitch the machinery, to untie all the threads. It takes some time to be something, even if that something isn’t anything at all. All the efforts offered up whether made or merely thought of, all the claims placed and taken, with both sides nothing of the sort. This is the puzzle, the etiquette of the entity, the entanglement of the animal. Repetition and these empty visions, the phrasing there remembering the shape of your mouth. There you go, dizzy from the dreaming. There you are, scraping up the paint of my mind.