The day taken by its restless ends, a slide of blue above the travesty of the atmosphere knotted with the heat bleeding off the asphalt, the embouchure of each breath at once a testament to and a declamation to this enduring epilogue. The losing doesn’t happen all at once. Little by little the purchase is chipped and chiseled, the flesh flayed and the husk scraped clean, until all that is left is parts and pieces. The revered reverse engineered to fit, all the assembled smoke and mirrors applied to our eyes as the merciless incision is made. The game is fixed and the rigging runs right through you.
I was there when it happen, walking with the sun on my back when the heat finally broke. It shifted gears and the air began to tumble down, an avalanche of gust and billow, gentle breezes that riffled through my beard and casually brushed my lips. The sky another intimate as the earth rolls over. The burden of proof shifting its feet slightly as the sunlight sets off over the hills, dusk shuffling the deck. A fly lands on my left foot, sniffing around an open wound. The horizon hastily shaded in.
The sky and stir of leaves string these gentle scintillations together, look up and heaven is festooned with this shift and shimmer, change the only story I am told. Anticipation and appetite churn through the organism, unseen legions creep and squirm between the strata, cracks in the pavement and our permeable flesh. The dull song of bone, the seething music of breath and blood, the migration of traffic and trash. Scar tissue and road rash, the ceaseless application of force, impact craters and blast radius all the portents that need apply. The returns on nothing ventured in a world that won’t stop moving. The wait all worn out.