reypulque

The faint but pressing weight of a changing sky changes the context of the unspoken conversation, from face to skull, from rail to steel. All the tossed molecules of breath and soon to be breath, spinning and gleaming in broad arcs and measurable waves before the words woven with them. A haze of heat and scent cut and edited by the whipping winds. The change takes hold, a forgotten itch crawling beneath your flesh, burrowing up a shoulder, down an arm. It is the structure, and these echoes of architecture we imagine when the structure is absent.

The imagined reliquary, its strange alchemical relation to unseen powers, the maker and the taker and the jailer all called. Lights go out, and the porch dwindles slightly, the tangle of shadows that rise up from the suchness of things. The steel of the old deck chair, red with paint and rust. Brick work and cement and the scented confusion of potted plants. The root work expands, believing in a system of plenitude that is slowly being boiled away. We were once, and are no longer, yet still we believe memory is the same as evidence.

Smoke trickles from my lips, mingling with breath and the giddy tension of oxygen starvation, and I watch your eyes through a haze of my own making. Your eyes with their canny sharpness and their desolate starlight shine. Your eyes with their hints of ardor and calamity and calm. Your eyes like weary travelers, like the hush of a forest canopy, like the feeling of falling just left in a dream. I look away, too close to that precipice. I smoke and listen, waiting for you to leave with the day. Waiting for the honesty of another plodding night.