Gone are the days of hunger artists, the hunger workers having cornered the market, cardboard signs and societal declines correlating quite nicely on the charts. Hit records that don’t quite hit so hard, and dancers loosed without a card. The bygone skies of lucid hues now all bare bones blue, the confessions of derelictions now all not mes it’s yous. Despite the local flyboys and the multitudes of flocks and swarms taken by the wind, the only flights left us down in the dirt are those of fancy. The words have long since turned, all the wings long since flown away.
Dogs bark, children scream, the sun does the Metropolitan Glide from the dismal east to the longed after west, the world largely working like it seems. The metaphor slips its leash and tosses all the cards. The grim entreaties and clockwork golems grind away at the grist of tricks and treats while the habitual madness of the species unfurls flags and throws straw men into any fire they can find. The long lonesome beating on the bones of the predestined alone while the galleries fill with high toned people lamenting their curried favors and crowded lives. Only the devastation will make certain everyone gets a turn.
There are no better angels, no psychopomps drawn on palimpsests to escort our inklings unto the after party. Salesmen wander door to door, taking rejection on the chin, thieves and middleman swollen fat as ticks upon our labors. Still it is all fairytales instead of fact checks, spells and prayers and the occasional poem tucked under the tongue, slowly belaboring the blood like castoff plastic in the belly of the whale. Lamenting lost love and saying doom with the best of them, I don’t make the cut. Out in the tall weeds with the rest of the rejects, I fill the empty with useless words and endless repetitions, waiting for the fire to die. Waiting for the ghost to go.
