even out

The sky goes gray slow, the turkey vultures turning the atmosphere to oil, gliding low as to float steady in the level of sight. The air fogs slightly at both ends of the lens, the anointed smoke uncoiling beneath the eaves as the cold dances enchantments ring a rosy around every bone. The unloved dusk and the quarter moon take the west and I watch it, swapping tenses in my mind as the symbol goes missing, meaning always a going concern as the words keep on wandering off. I stare until the vision wears smooth. I stare until the seeing evens out the thinking.

I’m still as a stone as the night pours it on, my heart alone running reckless, a rabbit with a hound at its heels. Out for the asking never for the answers, the structure of the story and the insistence kept as flesh, the horizon racing away as the hurt and the heavens endure. Cut loose and weighed down, the work of matter always looking the other way, while the hare won’t stop weaving through the looking glass. The cognition somehow tuned to the passion of the cross or the cleaned out slab free tomb, the plodding of the process or the glorious revelation. Thinking here the exhaust of the station of the smoke, fate left to the hard knuckles of Saint Fracas, the day somehow always devil’s dues.

It’s the camera without an aperture, it’s the picture without paper and ink, drawn to this yawn of stars and clouds and the way the shadows struggle. It’s the skinned knees of the fall from grace, the entanglement of people and places, the flora and fauna browsing and brooding on the outskirts of the boundaries of belief and perception. Cough and gasp as I lose my grasp on the instrument, the animal gnashing at Pavlovian bells knitted into the being. I hunch and tremble, beset and shivering at the gravid cold weighs in, every molecule a countdown and a reel. Breath slows, spilling into this surrendered skin. The balance always foundering, the self pestering away at the burn.