You can bring it to the dirt upon my doorstep. You can leave it melting in the rain. So many motions left unopened, so many stations that only the wind will fill. We fall away and the world keeps going. Little by little or all at once we are a diminishing return. Pass it on while you still have it in your hands. Shout about it while your lungs hold out. Enjoy your once agains before they become no mores. The words are well worn, they circle the block just to say it again, the stories we think we are telling, the characters we want so badly to be. One by one, we go until we’re gone.

I say this as my heart takes tumbles. I say this coughing fits and furies, sputtering away like a dying fire, only with spit and phlegm. The dead just keep on happening. One loose string on the tapestry, soon your context begins to unravel, the world holes and consequences once your framework gives way. Tulip dead on April 19, my mother dead fewer than 24 hours later, the neighbor across the way since 1970 dead two days ago. There’re more, mostly that I didn’t know as well, some I didn’t know at all. Every journey, etcetera and so on.

I wait out the dusk facing east, I endure the sunrise facing west, at home and out of habit spilling smoke and salt. The day is a blur of screens and dreams, the night careless stretches of shadows thick with sorrows and hard truths. Another weak translation of some lofty far off star. Names no use to speak, faces only tricked out light. Another year with nothing to show but the burns of the slippage and the lowing of my bones. Funny how it turns out, this sigh all at once this snuffing of dwindling flames. Oh, bold candle. Oh brief bright. Now it’s only the passing traffic and this ember as I take another drag on all the empty up ahead.