flicker

The door is open despite the cold outside. Cobwebs cling to the screen, the latticework of steel and neglect cookie cuts the passage of perception, the sequential shimmer of the tv and the dull insistence of the bare bulb socketed on the front porch. A little bourbon and the air weighed down by the smoke of cigar after cigar. The attendant fiction spilling out into thought and feeling, stuck inside my outside mind. Glimmer and flicker, shade and movement at the borders of the periphery, the story caught between the babble of being and my lost voice.

Ritual and impulse, the bell tolls for no one in particular. Dawn’s furtive gaze rises upon the wasteland of cracked pavement and drowsy houses, a crow calling sharp across the street like a bible bound prophet, a few useless stumblers scuffing along with the building bright. The blue sky blue soaks in between the golds and grays, the last stars seeming to wane under the indifferent arrival of the local orb as commuters speed towards the traffic gathering east and west, hurry up and wait amid headlights and the contained curses of yet another day alive. Hollow habits hold me to this earth, however the world might toss and tumble, sick with consequence and irrelevance.

Things wear out, things wind down, matter always swapping spit and clapping hands. Days wheel by, months turn to years, time takes its toll upon us all. Take a number, mind the line. This worn welcome in tatters, I slow into the stanza, I miss nearly every mark. Memory is forgetting’s forge just as death is life’s lot once life becomes leftovers, food and fuel, ash and dust. Night comes calling again as smoke curls in the light from the doorway, night is here with the cold singing to my bones and blood. Old and done, pain in the pieces and pain in the whole, pain in the psyche and pain in the soul. Intention worn to inertia, motive broken down to just another sad machine. A tiny spark, a windswept whisper. No one speaks. My heart runs empty, my head full of broken promise and silent song.