reypulque

the sky is falling

The heat sinks into the street, radiant energy captured by the dark tar-macadam as everything begins to swelter. The damp draping of some thin t-shirt, the exhausted seething of bare flesh. Truck rumble by on swollen liquid tires, and it is vapor trails and angels, wheels and exhalation everywhere you watch. And the girl with the coffee colored eyes weeps between distant walls somewhere. There's no-one to write, no-one to call. The heat distills this luxury of there's nothing to say.

Dawn is hummingbirds and dragonflies, buzzing haloes above the spray of sprinklers watering lawns; the day is wilting leaves and broken twigs and black heavy bumblebees laboring bright lavender flowers. The dusk has yet to show its face. So drawling August afternoons swell with sunlight and children, the sidewalks crowding with chatter and trash. Gutters full of bright paper and fast food plastic are swept along by heels and by traffic. Candy and pheromones, tiny drifting fevers that melt into the cautious air.

Fires burn, threading smoke through the dry and golden hills. The morning smells of stolen water and of burning. It is a fire ecology, cut with mistakes of commerce that colors California in seeming monotone. The tall grass and the manzanita, the scrub oak and the drifting redwood. All the world is fuel, and we pave the way for inferno and thirst. We burn the epochs before history, and our children grow up strewn through our careless streets and empty homes. We burn, and despite all the heat we only grow colder. Despite all this fire, the smoke makes it too hard to see.