slow dance

I guess it’s time to face the music. Or maybe I should sit this one out. It’s hard to tell once you lose the road. It’s hard to tell, banging away in the wilderness. All these suns and moons spent foundering in the flowers. These years riddled with prayer and puzzle, emptied out to the sea and stars. These years wasted waving the flag, when everyone else knew surrender when they saw it. The dance doesn’t need to ask.

The heat up on its hind legs, the pillow soaked. A faint smell of soap and the stirring scent of old smoke. It is this cloister of shadow, the weight of wood and plaster pressed by the merciless sun into strip and swaddle. Hiding as the day goes to blazes, hiding as the music washes over, the infernal writhing of this worm split by spade and cooked on concrete. Low living for the lowlife all but forgot. A vestigial memory fleshed out from before holing up became  de rigueur, when the reason was more than the season.

Long past pretending I know the steps, past pretending that anyone asked. The drear days waiting for the ending, out beyond the draw of reminiscing, lost to the courtesy or the bother. The car doors lock and the windows whir closed. Beneath the plague actors and the brutish weather, far from the lovely or the good, maggots clamber through yesterday’s meaning. Outside the world burns while even the shade bakes away. It’s a slow dance, all this dying in dribs and drabs. It’s a slow dance, squirming to the reel of the damned.