The sky grows soft as the lights go out. It lets go of the brazen flesh and blunt features, gives way to the stippled starlight and the legions of unseen wings. Spun from gossamer floss and chitin or sprouted from hollow bone and feather or stretched leather and fur, they fill the skies and crowd the lights. They sweep through eaves and tree crowns, giving heaven a taste of its own medicine. They buzz around lamps and ceilings, seeking the decoy moon or the trail of breath that leads to blood. They flit and flex and ride the icy winds. They glide outside of every sense but that of imagination. Even the simplest scenario comes rife with flight, wings astride the night.
We work our rackets, we walk our beats, we rush towards our hungers or pace beside our deferred appetites. We seek shelter, bolt the doors and shutter the windows of the roofs over our heads. Some warm bed or unbothered corner. Some set of comforts and whatever luxuries are allowed. We huddle with those we love or with them that’ll have us, if we have any luck at all. Is it so much to ask to rise above the too much that is asked? Ladened with burden after burden, can’t the night just let us be? We pray to the powers or mumble to our pets, yet our higher selves still stagger in the dirt. We die unnamed, forgotten beneath the weight of merciless tomorrows and the endless now.
I grow old, and the machine starts to fail. Limbs wither as disease and decadence sap my strength, the somersaults into senescence built into the beast. The shoulders sag as the sadness gathers, heavy in the heart, stiff about the hinges. I shift and stir in my easy chair, I toss and tumble in my bed, a tuneless dirge where a singing soul should go. The old, self indulgent dreams have long since left me. The sheafs of possibility down to single slips and tattered scraps, destiny just another set of numbers. Feared and despised, I dig my unmarked grave day by day. I feel the earth, I watch the skies: my wounds will not close. What was I ever but the words of least resistance? What am I other than another empty husk, another wish for wings?
