stars apart

Another boom and the moon is peeking through the part in the curtains, neither cause for the streaming tears, those only the parlance of our times. A breath goes down wrong and it’s all hack and rasp, lungs like the billowing tattered plastic bags flying from a fence like the standard of some long buried battalion. The curtains stir and the moon winks, the world watching every move. Asleep and dreaming with eyes wide open.

Spent ordinance and the refurbishment of the spent narrative, the other caught in creased missives and exposed by the ever expanding nature of consequences. The sky reaches until the day and night touch, the moonlight spills and swells, the sun ablaze in blood and bone shining lies upon every skin and stone. The red queen always a black jack no matter what the eye might say, there’s always some extra legerdemain left in the tell that gives away the identity below the day. 

There’s the weather and there’s these perpetually refitted memories, moments that linger despite every last spark of life of them long since turned to dust. The gone goes on through the observable universe as the heres linger while every there puts more space to its where. The discourse of the everyday quickly becomes fresh omens and old chestnuts, as each and every star departs, leaving little consolation but the still recognizable constellations. We are spent, we are burning, we are temporarily here to stay. Here but for the auspices so far, the worst well assured by the constitution of the fuse.

least

I wake and try to find a way not to face the day. From the first turn of phrase to the rigors of the litanies it quickly slips away, sand to castles, tricks to light. The illness at once sets in, faint salvos and thunderous whispers, words emerge in fusillades and flurries. It’s the way flesh finds me in a heap and drags me to these dragging feet, the stations I pace and the muscle memory residuals, bait cut breath by breath. I succumb to the ritual of any available crutch, the placement of the lighter, the lean of the incense burning the mortal at both ends. The animal gets lost in the apologia, the gods too busy with their acrostics. 

I vie for distraction before the flags unfurl, before further atrocity carried out by the nation state is revealed, before the inevitable revels over the dead. Witness has given way to a narrow ambivalence and a sense of isolation in the decay of old traditions, words set ablaze in gleeful malfeasance at every turn. Ugly and flustered and full of beans. I fix my focus and follow cat and crow, the bolts loosed by wind and bent bough, leaning heavily into any loose chemistry left in the mix. Like a fever the press of stones and sticks arises from the languid brick lined pit where the bound words dwell, dull and drowned until summoned like a fiend stuck in a craft store star. Beneath the heat and tumult, I watch several fledgling crows figure out how peanuts work. 

It’s the rattle upon inhalation, it’s the thud and shutter of the heart, that ill meat between sense and sentience sputtering in sparks and strokes. That first hint of cognition in collision with some shape disappeared in the peripheral or some suddenly met mirror. The swell of shadows as the scenery overflows, unspoken words swarming a heavy tongue. These palpable pitter patters so close to the surface, these names that come craving articulation. Twilight gets stuck in my lungs, all cough and clamber and bees in amber, wheeze and spatter beneath the implicit proscenium as I return to earth. This long fall the slow fade from the world, the least of men and beasts, the passion a scratching at the lid of a coffin.