All at once the chords change and there’s the melody. The piano trips over itself to explain. The light left on, the lights switched off, the lights no one uses any more. At least as far as the imagining goes, the music falling from your touch. The poetry just slipping off your hips. The hesitation that broke your stride just so. The living visible in your every least move. Of course I still listen. Of course I look. Only I see too much with ancient makeshift eyes, the maypole and the pairings, the crash and the arrival. Seeing the truth in empty rooms and lonesome smoke. The ashtrays of our ancestors. The window open to the street.
There goes the world, planting seeds and blazing trails. There goes the world, the tumbled remnants in your wake. The faraway star, the cartoon flower and goat, the assembled symbols used to tell the tale. Myths and mysteries, sweat and dust and the medicine on our skin. Starved of matter, starved of spirit, glibly drinking in the amber light. The fantasy that goes unnoticed because you’re living in its midst. The signals that you keep receiving but never get.
Oh, it’s all so sad and shabby and old. Waiting by the stage door with peonies and poems. Standing in the busy intersection as if you’re the only place to look. Time and again there but for the telling. Time and again the terror of the truth. The dogs barking as they charge out the backdoor, the wish every night it was you in the driveway. The wish against all the things that are, and have always been. As if I didn’t make it feel like murder every day. As if luck was the same as destiny.