A styrofoam cup without a bottom tumbleweeds down the street, dragged in the wake of passing traffic and blown by the fickle winds. Crows crown the yard trees and the undecided atmosphere trades in huff and gust, hints of stolid humidity with a washed out overcast sky and breezes of varying directions and alignments. I sit on the porch, a singular pestilence, a lingering extinction. Bathed in smoke and diethyltoluamide, my aura all sweat and flies, I watch the world as it leaves. Abandonment all in how you do the math.
It’s all arrivals and departures, the kept schedule and the novelty, the intermittent as we go. Gears and springs and cogwheels serve their purpose as the engine of the organism keeps ticking away, hollowed out save for habit and ritual, impulse and instinct and the way of least resistance. The husk held in place by attachment and kept alive almost exclusively do to the kindness of others and kinship burdens, the name never mine, purpose all played out. More fireworks sound down the block despite the date and daylight left to burn. I’m alone here with all the ways I never learn.
An ice cream truck trucks on by, on to more verdant and youthful markets I imagine. Dull, and sore, and occasionally vaguely mesmerized I burn my time here. Stubborn and stricken and all but done, not just not the one, but not among the ordinals and maybe unmet by the imaginaries. All the numbers save the wily statistics fuzzing up all the edges, waiting around the corner for your saving throws and star signs. We forget life is largely the crunch of numbers, countless multitudes born and ground down again and again for the fleeting spark and strive of the lucky, timely ones. Nature cares, but always has the gloves off. Inevitably rendered irrelevant in the rearview, us stragglers fall off in scads and one by one. All I offer is words that we already have more than enough of. I leave it to all the ones that want it more.