They say the fire jumped the highway. They see the smoke will take the night. The wind insists in the wrong direction, the blind dog digs and bangs. The spice of soil cuts the air, the breath burdensome and shallow, the heart as thick as a stump. The trees are dry from years of drought, neglected along with the rest of the visible spectra, every day a little dose of dull edged doom. The light leaves quick, the stars are gone, shadows seethe from inside the topiary. Some fool or another rumbles past, answered in kind by the opposing direction. There is a tinge of panic in the ordinary. Dusk grows ever darker, setting off a handful of lights.
It’s all been wrong for so very long, everyone led astray or chasing geese. Wrung hands and rang bells, tallied and tarried and clocked. The sanctity of henhouse foxes and stray rounds, the crunch of boots on gravel and glass. Statues fashioned of marble and bronze, of latex and carbon and the current flavor of hubris fall along with fire from the sky. The lost and the longed for, me and my same old song. The sorrow and the sledge and the stubborn burdens of the earth.
I am among the most disposable, a dull, artless factotum, a scraped up placeholder. The envelope for a bookmark, the button for a bishop. Out here where the world still burns and the insects creep and bite, I sit amid the debris eyeballing the shifting winds. Little rest and no solace, the body declines as the tribulations build. From rose to thrown, from thorn to crown, the missives all kissless, the dreams all drones. The plaintive tones of the long gone troubadour still singing to steal your girl, the plucked strings and the salted silences of these eternal goodbyes. The alarm sounds amid the barking dogs and the porch light graveyards, fire truck and ambulance and the thumping of a helicopter. A train wails, and I look up: there are stars there after all. The sirens grow closer.