below the belt

It’s been like this for such a passage, it’s been like this since the bleed at least, this other aim named aloud. The dusk doing most of the work, so when the night arrives all the stakes are already driven down. Hard to tell the lean of being from the falling stars you trail, cartoon sparkles and chirping birds when the hammer smites. Thoughts jostling with physics and fisticuffs, you hear train wail or dog bark or the savage laughter of imminent children. Flattened fair and square you catch the constellation by its dead give away, the reveal echoing through the realization, on your back below the belt. It’s all how the seasons hit, the settling of the senses. The sutra of hanging the frame.

There’s already a lot I left out; there’s so much more leaving out left to do. You can’t escape the associations. Nothing escapes unscathed, this faith of words surviving outside speech and flesh, a brevity trailing murdered darlings and bottle baby bastards. Pounding the pulpit or folded into a trust fall from the pedestal, every way laden and fated at once, from the improbable to the likely it arrives. I belly up and belt it out and stagger back to the Stygian depths from whence I started counting. The hours as evidenced by the heavens, the firmament emblazoned by the winter hexagon, the hunter whose specifics come and go.

It’s a story though there’s nothing to it. It’s a story because it got told that way. I went outside and watched while the dark caught up the clock. I looked up and thought hey there’s Orion, a muddle of dogs, belts, and cudgel. A smear of plots and archetypes, a becoming that happens again and again, breath and flame and the songs life sings. An experience so true and worn it feels quaint, an afghan strewn across the arms of a rocking chair, a saying worn down to words. I thought of you in ways that were about me, and some that were about you too. The easy depths at once too much, the letters scribbled with ache and panicked appetite, this animal too abrupt and abstract. It’s what I lose when I leave it there, written down as if it happened.