cornered

The night right here in self selected fragments and ritual forms, smoke and the vagaries of sleeping screens. A light on the ceiling, shadows refusing shape dancing around the room, music swelling because it always means so much. A swallow of cool water, the cleansing of the palate. The inked in instances and the cornered ghosts, painting in wrong names and guessed at numbers, instruments all hands up high reaching for the decrescendo. The sky still has to be torn down by hand. The night cools to the curation, as constant as any guiding star.

The scales tilt, the spin goes askew, the night takes its time and takes it personal. The magic rides the rolla bolla, it likes to add a hiccup or two, skips rope in rolling bones and turning tides. The room is read in blue bias light and knotted smoke, drummed blood and the vacancy held tight. It’s a card trick, but the sort you have to deal yourself. Shuffle up and deal your favored spread. With you like the words are with you, through you like the world as it moves. I tap away and the rest occurs. The night is always occupied.

It doesn’t take much to fill these shoes, a little grease and gristle, a little bone to pin down the heels. It doesn’t take much to end it all once the physics is figured in. This drag of breath, this staggered heart, the sorries and so it goes. The whims and wants of the inevitable desolation, this playing the board to the tooth and nail, the stir of the antecedents counting all the way down. Empty arms and wolf sized eyes, come to cases there you are, flesh and blood on either side of the appetite. We were always way past words.