We should have agreed on a signal, a safe word phrase or a tug of an ear. We should have hid a key somewhere under a rock, had a meet up plan and an exit strategy. Instead we wandered the world as idle words and ugly appetites, breaking paths like kindling sticks, burning bridges like it was fire season. Our skies were alway stuck in some walleyed light, our hearts the box the empty came in. Parking lots strewn with tumbleweeds of loose refuse, paper cups and plastic bags, the cracks and potholes of our clumsy discourse. Lunch abutting the cul de sac, the debris of the deadbeat and the alacrity of the day tripper. Nothing about when the lights go out and the world is burning. No words, no map, no anxious bag by the door.
The wind comes along just to move the plot along, taken up the cause, cleaning off the stage. The puffed cheeks of a cartoon cloud heavy lidded and deadly behind your eyes. The scratched out sigil and the improvised prayer, the sway of leaf laden limbs, greens going gold in the leaving light. The default on the flesh gone to cold, slow and sorry beneath the ruins of another graceless day. The sun drags on, going on gone, the tipped hat horizon and the slippery halo. Stilled as all is leaving, only the heart sticks to stepping.
I wait outside as the light fades out. I sit and smoke, watching passing traffic and precious time. The earth tumbles and the heavens buck, atmosphere and scenery stitched into every sense. The wind on bare skin, the stone beneath the tongue. This distance swept with black wing and smudged skulls, the threadbare incantations still caught in the air, the intentions showing bone. The pages gone the moment the seal is broken, blood and breath spent for the hungers of shades. The light climbs higher as the land lays low. The winds are on the rise, the customs are in flux. The trees all sway and shine now that the age of words is over.
