Here at the long blue end of the afternoon, with the heat bearing its heel down hard, each breath heavy in ache alone , the ghost turns around and around in its tracks all wail and bruise and wound striped bones. Head hung low, elbows fixed upon the knees as the smoke rises, ordinary and inevitable, redeemed through ritual alone. The words follow where the mechanism transfixes, the senses wasted, an exhaust of symbol taken for sign.
Here in the sun’s last reaching with the shadows pressed like a stone into a palm, the illusion of some endurance of this tenured flesh, some supplication offered after a casual onslaught. You never know whether you’re a marker or the mark, whether you are the pot or the ante or the hand that’s bound to fold. There’s never telling where a game might break out, or the stakes that the gods have involved. I’ll believe it when they see me. I’ll believe it when odds stop with the defiance. Feel and fall, and the ephemeral fills it all.
Here the shadows reach until all that is left is sky, stars and wanderers and prognostication, obdurate thoughts and the mystery off the chain. Once a dreamer, once a witness, once a bearer of the flame. Trip and turn and burn again, carrot and slapstick, ass and fool. This is where the habit planted, this is where reasons ran, earth and river and tide of sea and sky. All that’s left isn’t mine or me, just the filter of nerve and circuit. The spark as it travels, that light as it fades. Heaven is only looking up, the whispers that pass us in our prayers.