the drop

Again it is the slow sweep of green against the crawl of cloud and sky, the wind on its hind legs kicking up the dust, this strange drawling afternoon of shade and swelter set down in the particulars of these posts. A happenstance of rhetoric and idiom, of summer and sprinklers and the breeze borne whiff of water as the heat of the day gives way. An all but abandoned habit, feeling like ellipses leading up to the end, a glimmer of a picture unseen and unsaid. I smudge the screen, I irk the cursor with my fits of symbols and my empty hesitations, I stack a few phrases long gone fallow in the great unshaped nation of the waiting page. I hit all the hackneyed marks and tin-eared beats I yet inhabit, longing towards that final point. The punctuation one longs for as the pleasures all play out.

Again it is the blur of days and the blues blazes burn, the shiftless lean of dreams, wild beasts and dead friends fill the notable corners of the barely remembered as the going keeps on getting gone. Each day is a drag, the blade of being plunged again and again into this empty identity, the well plumbed depths long ago dredged and done. The scraped knuckles, the sweatshirt shrugged across the back of the chair, details gleaned and hearts turned cold as each witness walks away. The words laid out, the words left for dead. Better has been there and is done with it. Left alone in silence and ill transmissions, another illusion bled out like any baffled bystander, another refugee in a country gone wrong.

Another dusk, as the day drowses in its flights and fevers. Another flock of birds lighting for the blue. More oaths and idioms, more rhetoric and flummoxed reasons, this empty inventory, this list fraught with avarice and loss. This incessant noodling away in the margins, this petulant impulse to pad out my part, the foolish urge to never let an empty be. The spaces stretch between the words, greater than silence, more faithful than punctuation. Time takes and takes, this lingering less and less a small alarm, a light blinking on and off in some cluttered corner. I suppose it’s all the said left undone, these scraps and apparitions a lamp grasped after in the strangeness of waking, the room dark and unknowable, your name a thousand lives away.