It is there in the playing out of the song, in the fade of the light, in the knowing sway of the neighbor’s palm tree as it seems to pulse with strange prophecy. It is in the lone crow speeding low above, almost something spoken once, almost a wish warm upon the lips. The clock counts down and the neighbors home and aggregate, I sit alone, a startled curve of smoke and spine, leaning hard into the rituals of the screen. An ice cream truck rings out, waiting to turn left at the crossways corner. I shiver in the gray and cold.
Old habits die slowly or they become the rituals that hold the world to the wheel. The sense to the getting up and the going, the place that sets the purpose, the staging of the ladders and the snakes. This crawling day, the creep of night as it rises, the smoke and the scribbles. Ancient ways and obscure machines work through the dull daily retort of flesh and breath, tatters flown like banners, forgotten claims and obsolete gods. The house I haunt, the madness I inhabit decays along with the reasons for the motions, the motives that hold up the stack of stories we carry wadded up in the name we knew. Every season another hard sell.
It is there, the light lingering on or just leaving. It is there in bump and grind, the common good giving way to the wide unkind, the clampdown in jackboots and body armor laying down beats without bars. Here I sit, ghost and pariah, belaboring my lungs and blood with these sorry refrains. Here I am at the dull end of prophecy, shrugging shoulders and clinging to receipts long past accounting. As frenzied overlords spew their ill considered decrees and prescribe lead and truncheon to each convenient outlier I clutch at the heaven’s skirts, the true and the tender in this land of brutality and vitriol. Each day I fail and fade, the remainder to a problem all but solved. The old lonesome, the same song.
