underscore

By the time the day cracks the curtains you’ve already been up for hours, the pause and pacing of the night watching all this inking in. You’ve put your imagination through the motions, recycling dread and dream as the probabilities and anxieties race around the track, figure eights and tectonic plates in the gallery of your incessant engines. Daylight pushes through the grease and the grays in your drowsing gaze, rearranging the scenery and glamming up the dust. Again you press against boundaries, call down the spirit to stir your bones, scorching the firmament with your scalding prayers and pro forma epithets. Again you let the minutes fall as they may.

You think in eras, you think in titles, you think in hints and harms. You think in things undone and in the doing, scouring the checklists and keeping score. Where you failed and how you measured and the surprise that was yours and yours alone. Old masters and young turks, and the newest schools you never quite get the gist of, wearing the skin of shibboleths and the ghost of primal scams. You built the golem and tricked the djinn into offering up their terrible autograph, blue breathed and shimmering into the very semblance of the shape. The schism left like the lines of the tightly folded fist, another shape to take to when the light is low. The spell there smiling straight through your eyes.

There it is, the insistence in every ease. Here we go, the oldest tricks in the book. The moon shrinks, the night takes it out of context, Leonard Cohen is dead and stealing your girl somewhere between scrawled letters and needle skips. The dreams wear out just when you start to get good at them, the nightmares dirges made from drear threats and jump scares, prayers slinking unbidden out the door. It takes strange turns between serpentines, zigging when they think you’d zag. The stories fevers squeeze from you, turncoat gods and fine print devils pressing your breath through the breach, terms and conditions and promises made of lies. The squirming of the shadows with the light implied.