rare bird

Midnight doesn’t leave a mark as these bones ring out the hour, the clock clotted with the myth of digits, the telltale heart chiming in daily decline. Hollow gathers around the sound, the ringing out getting around to where the tolling slows, the linger of the afterimage after a savaging of shine. Here where the light undresses into some feathery resonance, where the toothache grin bears each break, this hush hard upon us as the lonesome looms. Dead air love letters skitter in the street, no longer certain of the difference between static and stars.

It is the pace we are making, the dances all spin and spin, the buzz of collected imminence pressed against the now. Tensions that have never settled there sizzling between your image and your entity, the elusive and the elastic stirring the embers, bridges burned still blazing away  in your bemused gaze. Particles of smoke dispersed into a photon huff, high test bourbon and spotty bar ware, the weight pelting at the bandwidth. Lifetimes are short, but just cluttered enough to seem like there’d be room for more onces than just the one. There was a rare bird, a glimpse then memory and re-creation, a phonograph playing somewhere in the background.

This is the stared at ceiling. This is the played out gray to the clutched blue blazes. The colors named if not identified, heaven’s hosts unleashed across the visible fill. It isn’t so much the magnificence of witnessed plumage or the poignancy of the overheard song, this persistence of vision, this cargo cult. The world washed with the absence of your wonder. This revelation only words away. Hands hold tight and turn to stone, pockets full of fists and wishes. A lost letter on the wind, a whisper of sudden wings.