bemused

For a while there I thought you found me, the shambles in the brambles, the shadow casting words into the fire. For a while there I touched the world you left trembling in your wake. There were sharings, there were stories, there were parking lots dappled in rain and grays. Whole days lost to love and water, sticking to the spine of your medicine shine. You put a glorious crown on pity and mild curiosity, shared some salt and smoke, offered up a bite. It’s the return to the remainders I begrudge the most, but there’s not much left to me but regrets. It is in the dusty sun, with some gibbered notion that I can not share, I feel your absence most.

So goes the slipping of the seasons, so goes the burning of the years. Deadfall accumulates, wounds accrue. Waves of mutilation and sets of nested curses, the dissolution of the heart and the backyard body count. The documentation of dour days rife with squander and oblivion. The bewildering ways that life moves on and the transience of intimacy. Fingers stiffen as the world slips through them, attending to the service, surrendering to the burn. 

I wake with a start past sunset, the room around me lit by television. The days blur, the days stagger, the stillness and the static grow. Notebooks spill over, unfinished poems and letters never sent. Fragments of addresses, phone numbers flaunting their cryptic digits, phrases laden with mystery where the meaning was once. Something that I meant to say when the words were working, something that I could have said when the words worked both ways. That ghost of a laugh there behind your eyes, seeing the joke as it played out. That Mona Lisa smile, the promise thick with irony, your heart almost off the clock. The blank of a page proving something.