duende

It’s still a little ways from sundown. It’s still the wind and the dashing smoke. Houses papered with pressed leaf shadows, the sun still kissing the swaying trees, the green reaches of the dreaming earth holding down the ground. There is a chill beneath these eaves, there is a cold grown of the lonesomeness between blood and bone, the haunted feeling of a fire burning low. The direction of the gaze away, always seeing while trying not to look. The light always rising as it goes.

It doesn’t matter, but I keep saying it. Like a line from a play that was all but forgotten, like a spell drawn out so long it lands like a nursery rhyme, the sort of skip rope incantation that knows how it goes. Like the words of a song unheard so long, your own voice startles as you sing them. Not so much a name as a call to arms, the stretch of letters, a sudden spark in the air. Not so much a name as the antecedent of all that remains. The streak burnt into vision, the seeing that got stuck inside my eyes, the stumble and the fall. The days go on, the lights go out, I only smoke and speak.

I never learned to shut my mouth. I have yet to reach an age that I know how to act. I still take it to the pavement, I never remember to tap out. Cool winds and cold fingers, eyes as exed out as a cartoon corpse, the world seeps right through me. Fleshless skeleton or aquarium diver, I am the shedding of the vessel and the wailing of the form. This relentless lament as that fixed star blazes through my brain. I sing out from root to crown, I sing from stone to star. The only heart I have ever had, the only poetry I know.