Long past sleepless, the blue shadows flicker in the style of early fire and expired dreams. Objects loom and recede swaddled in restless light, the lean of screens, the bones of test patterns and cathode ghosts trailing like ellipses these stretched thin souls. No longer static under glass, hints and suggestions leap and strut along the ceiling and walls, the struggle of the story to remain unformed. The dead air always waiting with tension to draw, everything new and nothing changing no matter whether the postman rings again or how Lana Turner wears a sweater. The habits of the ancients, the customs of the form.
It isn’t always the channel, it isn’t always the cigarettes and Captain Kangaroo of the eternal ruin, that too close to the gutter to rise to the insult. Telephones that are answered on the second ring, letters of ink and paper blur beneath fallen tears and Paris rain. The reconstruction of consciousness, words and pictures and the uncoiling of the mystery as the pull of a voice and a match ignited on a heel. The spin of song, the skin bruised from remembering again and again. The primal compact of the stared down ceiling, the law of forevers made of never. That god revealed in the cracks like in the Dobyns poem, the fearsome stitch of the old oath breaker.
After the art has ended, after the love has left, just the stubborn husk and the curtains astir. The eyes stay open as sleep goes through the motion, dreams clambering on the rooftops, the night scratching out cyphers with broken nails. Blood gone wrong an open book idling in the backlots of thought, the changing of the station, the whispering of the grease. The movie keeps moving well past the credits, loosed in these fevers of flesh and the cloister of the known. Dawn arrives printed on a broken deck, the last games always played alone. The hand that’s dealt, the corner fought, the script familiar but the casting unfathomable. A wash of color before the fade to black.
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