It’s the next time your eyes meet the sky, the sirens sound and the dogs all howl. Such a sharp eared season with the summer on loiter. Such a sad sighted dream between here and the horizon. The numbers stand in stacks as the ceiling takes its time to settle, last long lights on emptying days, headlights in ribbons in stretches and strings as the road sets aside all reason. Sitting indoors facing the sunset, a life of yields and screens. It’s slip and slide living in second glances, a moonwalk into the rhetoric and the architecture of sensations slow to take.

The night goes wide, all those gnawing worries and wrecked romances salting the clock. The walls dress up as the thoughts strip down, fragile in the swaddle of anxious shadows, painted in the misread colors of someone else’s dream. Wind woven into breath, breath plied into voice, the stories all strung upon the tongue as this unbidden stitch work is extinguished on the page. Time told on and time told off, the dogs all bark for the thrill and in alarm, scars and stretch marks and tattoos now a touch from me and you. The moon goes missing and still hits its mark.

Here’s where the road ends, unremarkable and unmarked, so many shrubs and stones. Here’s where the words lose weight, every saying only so much spent breath. The time it takes is counted in your blood and bones, the years adding mostly the mad and alone. The day goes dark and the music shifts, another singer, another song. The world is over but the seasons do linger out in the yard beneath blacked out stars, moths and mosquitoes and the thinning partition. Words that would slur or drawl or fizzle if left to the air sink beneath the skin, below the dreaming. All this fuse to feed the fire, autumn tumbling on in.