The day makes way for the becoming moon, pushing through the burdensome late day blue, ever rising above. The cold wind looses whirlwinds, dead leaves dervish up the walk as the dogs rush from one emergency to the next. It’s the last cigar and the fleeting smoke and the small pleasures that aren’t any pleasure at all. The laws of you get what you give and that of diminishing returns the only rules at play, the others that have been done upon paying it back in spades. All cant and consequence, all bluff and burnish, the low lows ever lower. The ephemera of plans made never lasting long enough even to make that tin eared god chuckle. The light leaves like everyone else, keeping to the transitory traditions. The bones sing out, as bones are wont to do.
It’s all bare branches and graceless pavement, cheap little houses and shiny new cars. The cold spreads its gospel with magnanimous abandon, the world seeking equilibrium down to the least molecule, as all us motes dream of being the material that matters. The flesh dissolves slowly, meager gains and shocking losses barely registering in the day to day, as the old joints and busted knuckles cease to trouble the busy blood. Flecks of tobacco spit from tongue and lip, this sorry post erotic tactility all that’s left to offer as the shell is exactly as it appears, the depths spent in abstraction now loosed into the cooling atmosphere. Fingertips clutching the last burning ember as the wind chimes herald the arrival of the merciless night.
Seven crows fly high above the low glide of a turkey vulture in the soft blue sky, the moon now aglow still higher in the moment of deepening darkness, the edge of day as the sun wanders along its merry way. It’s this worn out format, prose poem in three shaky paragraphs, the dirge of this constant despondency documented as small worlds slip away. The language of loss and want and dreams as life goes on unworried by the way it’s playing out. The language of sloth and sorrow and the signals sent off into the expansive empty barely reaching past the cold fingers and the lapses of abstraction. It didn’t matter then, it matters less now. Some will fall, some will rise, the rest will stay the same. The alarm sounds, the sun goes down, and the moon is terrible and glorious as it rises.