the dope

Here below a single lit bulb the shadows lie still while the walls tremble with the laden weight of countless freight cars going through town somewhere out in the night, distant clatter a broken rhyme for the grime and clutter, books and props and clustered wads of intentions left to drift and die. All the wisdom left here just spittle dribbling down grizzled barbs, the ring around rhyme played out, only dust and downfall sticking around for the postscript. Every instinct left is tooth and fist, gnawed on scenery and oration aimed at the cheap seats. Like a late twentieth century clock, the illness blinks on and off and on and off since blackouts became the rule and exceptions found another pate to crown. The pretense there only to serve another shoddy plot, the room read down to the appendices.

The ceiling blurs and blends, a thatch work of smoke, breath, and regret. There the consolation of light’s limitations, a wan halo, the long reach into the deeper dark. That steep descent that Duchamp nude takes behind the peal of the paint, the room ringing out in the wear of the era, the heritable swaths like the rows laid by belt in the muffled hues hewn by time and dues owed to dirt. Myths borne by weary fictions and a mattress on the floor. Radiance and radio waves, aches bathed in blue bias light. The memory fades as it becomes more certain, scripture taken as gospel, the gasping of a carp writhing in surprise upon the rough sands of its sudden ascension.

There goes the day, sky blue sky and bright sun and all that sort of meshugaas, as one orients the order of these origins. The eyes opening to the light escaping from the curtains, the raven call among the usual gang of crows, that spark into this earnest remark. Dogs lazing with the stretch of the afternoon, dust ensorceled by the slow reach of the stars long game, this looming now commanding every available attention. A recorded voice reports treading water amid the flood of other tones and tongues, beneath the rumble of the league of machines, a truth easily reaching all it needs. The one thing, then the next, just as prophesied. This tumble through the lines that reach from the sky through kites of chiton, that reach in leaning teeters of rusted capacitors and hanging cables, from the feathers to the fence. The barely measured favor to await the next breath.