bygones

Break out the boxes and blow the dust off the ledger. Open up every seal. Dig deep beneath each surface, pry loose the floorboards, slice through the trembling flesh. Slow cancers and ancient grievances, love letters and other curses, all that is buried rising with the least graze of the eye. Intention loosed and memory jostled, we wake in cold sweats and anecdotal frenzies, the forgotten clawing at our thinking. Nothing is ever over, things become other things, a wheel of infinite begats and bygones alive in our blood and breath.

What else is there but these scrawlings and mementos, this flicker of lucidity beneath the dreaming? The slow drip of heaven in the accumulated cuts and bruises, the occurrence of the lost thought as hope momentarily arises in the heart. The rituals and replications, the wreckage and the reenactments, we stand still as time passes through us. The lives we would live, the people we would be, the chances and the cheats we carry with us though they are the flimsiest of fantasies. Woulda coulda shoulda in an infinite loop, if only if only if only it had been.

I crawl in bed early, an old man shivering in the spring. The blood goes bad, the veins give way, the body grows cold as the years take hold. The trees are green, the blackberries are in bloom, children laugh and play in the street. The first ladybug of the season freeing its wings on the bird of paradise flower, catching a breeze in a bright swath of sunshine. Life goes on, with or without. Warming my bones, the litany of those that were lost and those that left settling in with me, I am buried beneath the consequences. They don’t even bother with goodbyes, they go bye bye and begin the next campaign. Old bones and a husk of a heart full of alarming absences, I hold on to the long gone.