as the days go

It gets me smack in the vernacular, the rings straight through those grinning idioms, the genre depending upon the part I play and the particulars of the blocking. Nothing more deadly tragic than a person in a farce, complications heaped upon them as they clamber with over corrections, slapstick always about the way they land the blow. Forever running for a life that’s all punchline as the sands slip away underfoot. The pause before I work in my act, cycle through a few routines before a short show stopper and a return to the choir. I pause to wake to the dreamed routine, tumbling through the days.

I fill the margins of unwritten texts, clocking in the commentary, scratching in the itch. We plant Atlantis in mouthed off about and claimed by unoffered maps, the wingings of the ancients recorded like their laws, the mistake of the persona for the act. I am buffeted by the dopplered thump of passing bass lines, the compressed air and the tag backs dragging its roil and rattle along. I am forgotten as I am forgetting the way the plot works out. From chance to word to bye bye bird sampled and skinned and taken as word. Foundering in the calendar as I’m kicked on down the curb.

Where is it that we linger when we lay out in the passages, waiting in these corridors where want and word collide? What is it that we wait for when we wait to want? These long desperate stretches, these sentences always seeming life. Something to wash up in the wake of this wonder. Something to bloom now that the dream has gone to seed. Whole tomorrows lost to the pause in the passion, the loss of the reason as the words are coveted, the story ever so it goes. A service paid to solace, a practice of the prayer.