The ritual reiterates, the stagger in the shuffle, the gaffe in the deal as the heel toe slides and slides. The eternal bluff waiting on the call, ashes ashes then the fall, the gait beneath the gathered weight. The slow to the circle, the wobble to the spin, the blazing branch lit from within and spitting dizzy nonsense to set the world on its ear. Back bent to the burden this shambles scrambles along the drift and drag, all the love left written in the gist of the bones. The spirit itself babel, the wind in the declarative as the eternal takes a whirl.
The beauty is there in the architecture, the music is there in the flickering of the fuses, each wire the fretting of some invisible choir. The self that you are bound to be comes in by dozens in twos and threes, depending on the orchestra and the instruments and the agreed to terms and services. Pledge an oath to the style of deception that you favor, be the allotted self that freedom decrees. Reasons change with everything else, the endings and the origins altered to fit the current tempo and the latest fads. Even the magic doesn’t see it coming.
The song takes hold before the meaning is settled, it takes root in depths that endure. The beating heart, the thundering blood, the endless tide of breath and sky. These stories that we encumber and untangle, these truths we tap in the weaving of each deception, the heft we seem to hoist on our personal petards. We are the terms of the turning earth, the expression of sentences ended, and song lines walked. The path revealed step by step, the map made the world again anew, each day the revelation of a sea parted to inevitably come crashing back. Our lives written in smoke, remembered as sand.
