new

There’re days where it’s down to the charge on your phone or the cat in your lap, waking startled to wake again, this shadow steeped ceiling, this eternal alarm. Some stone rolled, no longer there, now risen. There’s days where you’re drunk on your porch and someone fires nine rounds in the yard next door, fireworks showering sparks showing above every roof. It’s just the soot smeared remnants, Rome everywhere in the render. Every day a fresh onslaught, caught in the crosshairs of duty and contempt. Surrounded and there’s no one coming. Alone with what there is it arrives. Oh brand new year, oh fusillade.

And so the day goes by, sunlit and wrung out, the rain taking a breather as it waits for a re-up. Every moment smoke and embers burning at both ends. The whole neighborhood a bit hungover, treetops reaching for the fruit of moon, core sore and drenched in leaden light. There’s a song now and then, maybe you sing along. I could be singing from the sounds in my throat. Folding each cool breath in the depths of my belly, firecracker and fuse, bellows and flame. The rules keep changing but it’s the same old game.

All is not lost as long as the moon is dragging at your billowing shadow, all is not lost whether falling down flights of stairs or still a-stagger after some iconic fancy. The venerable day and the nascent night in turn come tumbling, only as old as the observer, only as old as your transitory bones. Brick after brick crumbled to dust as the construction slows, an amble of expired masonry and poorly rendered cement, an uphill climb on dwindling limbs. Spewing steam and heat and hyperbole into the continuity as the odometer turns over, the cold night piled upon the unboxed date, the resolution blurred as the credits threaten to tell us all we already know.