apparition

From thick within the shadows beneath the scrubby pines you see the moon nearing mystery. Folded between materials and atmospheres, you leave your witness in the dark. Outside your own lit windows you feel a strange voyeurism, the hushed and hidden expectation to see a stranger or yourself, fiddling around in the kitchen or staring back from your room. That dread sense that you will turn a corner walking in the night and never find your way back to life. The sound of your breath quickened, the sound of detritus crunching under your steps. You return to the house, an intermittent ghost, stepping back into the heart of the haunting.

This lighter to light the candle and burn the incense, these feet to stir the cinders and the dust. The heat clings to the air and binds the flesh, perspiring glittering constellations and busy rivulets down whatever is bared. A figure to go through the motions. A figure to still in the dark and return a gaze. The music is silty whispers and minor chords, headlights stretched across the wall. There’s something you sing to yourself that isn’t a song at all. 

Find me here where the leaves are dying. Find me here with all the lights turned off. There is a stirring in the air, something shuffling in the shadows. There is the sound of constant gnawing, the rats always scrambling in the walls. I move more slowly than the seasons. I fade more swiftly than than the feel. Once I would scratch around the periphery, dragging shadows and seeding songs. Now the ashes roost and gather, and the hours turn their faces away. Attachments dragged from room to room, the picture that you painted, the window where the sun touched your face. The house leaning into the earth, the yard spilling over with weeds.