Weeds spill from the eaves and the puddles ripple concentric on the picture printed surface, rain changing the reflection as the day runs thin. The rain either a remainder of the storms that’ve passed or a reminder of the forecast prophesied by the local news. It’s blues and grays and scattered droplets out here in the sticks and stones, a call and response from the all alone, crows and gulls and turkey vultures all these silhouetted wings spread through the on high. I am weary in the spirit, I am worn down in the flesh, I am a curse carved in spark and steel, hewn into the blackened bones of the once was world. I scratch and smoke and stir, a few muttered words, a few shameful claims. Almost down to where the names can’t go, almost down to the flight of that last swallow, the sweet song that never touched my lips. The fire and the fortune, this mortal portion, spilled salt and spent breath.
The setting sun casts its gaze east, a bank of clouds stacked up like a screen for the last beams as the light subsides, drip and drizzle as the frayed senses sizzle in the cull of dusk. Sick with dreams and marked by consequences the habitual husk wavers, knowing there is only so many left, only so much more. Low enough it feels like I’m down to the counting, from the West End Blues to Saint James infirmary. I scan the scene from over my spectacles, slick curbs and muttering gutters as the suburb changes phases. The returns from work and daycare, groceries and diaper bags and all the shake and slag left of the shaping of days. Ambivalent traffic and whispering neighbors the tide of strangers through this threadbare alienation.
Once it was the weight of the moon and the dragged along blood, the ache towards meaning, the longing for love. Now it is circles worn through trampled prayer rugs as I spend my time tending to extinguished candles, the repetition of worn out rituals, the marking of moments given to staring at the clock. Remembered peaks and the rainbow’s end, the durable words dwindling into ruins and catacombs, myths folded into letters and syllables with the haste of the hidden stealing mystery as the mind starts to turn. The urgency all that’s left of the words that once walked in flesh, leaving prints and casting shadows. The light once spoke, the surface of the sea. What is left for me to say? The winter greens, the blues gone gray.
