I live in the sworn at aftermath, in the avalanche of curse and consequence, where each effect unfurls. Fading flesh and bitter bone, the long high lonesome isolated in the epilogue, the glory just another story reordered with each telling. Here as it all unravels, here as it goes by rote, this kiss folded in a fist the diamond in the mire of my mind. Before the ghosting given by the dusk, until the rebuke of dawn, I bristle with static amid these fissile rituals. Sizzling at the subatomic but still beneath the eaves as I smoke on the porch, I am the promenade of ashes greasing the tongue of the greedy fire of time. These bones bear down, I fix my gaze beyond the horizon. Another wave of walking dreams.
This is the long way around it, full of dull meanderings and ornate tombs robbed for their heft and molder, words leavened into unseen fields and left in piles to mark the path. This thing of passing in and out of abstraction, the way we follow our footsteps back around to find our shadows seeding our journey, the way we mistake our strengths as we stare at our prophecies as they change their minds. The discovery is always part of the puzzle, the enticement of making a mystery of bricks, the man behind the curtain there pushing snake oil saying it was you all along. The self is always the last place you looked.
So I go sorrowfully into dusk, so I dread the break of day, the burden only shifted by the shovelful. The long night spent winding watches and sweeping streets, thoughts pacing with fists in pockets, ideas turning vicious in a turn. This heavy hand of shadow as the sun sets its shoulder to the horizon, the way I stare and stare. The words left to work the earth, the body failing at the fray. Something left as bone or smolder, feast and fertilizer. Standing as if spark had taken hold, the fragments taken, a purpose served.
