elegy

The season settles again on the unseasonable, my bones ring with the resonant chill, something’s always missing after a death. The hard shift to past tense, sifting through the remnants as the days dull the sharps down blunt, the different drummer beating out a rhythm of body shots and heart attack threats as the consequences play catch up. Boxed up belongings and cherished mementos with the cherish switched off. The words I would put to work staring towards the horizon as the late sun reaches east. Something to sum up an everyday impossible absence, something to make up for countless failings, to honor a long life cut short by my insufficient best.

Another afternoon painted strangely on the senses, another day of spent dreams and trifling shadows. I clench my jaw, I grit my teeth, so comes the numinous glow of the mortal grind. The passage of the dead always hanging around doorways and gossiping in the halls, whole corridors gape where once were walls, propositions that plead and clout as we give due diligence to our naked druthers. Booze and blossoms and the brutal truth of past tense kissing booths, life and limb on the tab when the payment shows its paws, all efforts to the contrary made evident by the unwinding of time. Scattered seeds and broken oaths, cracked pavement and the troupe in the loop. My love another documented loss.

The days roll out, the days pile on and pass unseen, the days a story and a stone. I cannot speak to the loss whole cloth, the way the world will never recover for a loss it barely faced, the truth of the matter strangling myth after myth. So sharp in the certain, so graven in the grief, the light goes out never to be seen again. Words clot and words choke, no matter how softly spoken, no matter how aptly put. Here past the head and heart of poetry and art, where the world is dimmed never to be brighter again, I wish and want. The final wave on its way we gather on this shore.