Outside my window there are birds and branches. Sparrows and finches busy in pine boughs, songs and burbles and a springing of squirrel. The day drawls on as the old wound weeps into sock and slipper, always a reaching between earth and root, this music stippled with want and star traveling from was to are. The muted sun casts winter shadows, a brightness ringing into aches and gray pauses. Restless memories and an artless heart, this simple drifting into dark.
The day drags its conceits and glad bags, it scrapes the driveway and scuffs its rims on the curb. The road rises but the tide goes higher. Thoughts turn to a relentless river, ruinous and cruel. Rain reckoned for later and the roof already riddled with surrender, my heart is bullet starved, my blues blackened gunmetal. In the nation of gun plenty still so many hurdles and murders, the self a sickness raining in hapless peals of fire and phosphorus down on strangers, kin to a people that think there’s safety in strangers’ corpses buried in rubble. Too many years wrought with no reasons, too many flashing fangs pretending at faith to be won over with lies and prizes now.
There were words I thought I needed to write, things that need saying. I’m sure they still need saying, but they don’t need me as mouthpiece or amanuensis. So no summaries, no famous lasts, just empty conceits and full ashtrays. A beggar’s bowl of attitude and euphemisms, rags and tatters my only flag. I’ll spend my final coughs and spasms feeding birds and beasts and maybe spreading something more than mayhem and woe. No wiser for the wear and tear, merely aware of the enduring, obdurate foolishness of my crummy existence. No ellipsis or trailing off, no motto for the meat, no epitaph for the mass. There for a while, then gone with all the good.
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