So what of the run on night? What of the rasp and curl of a smoke cured throat? These stories that I never get right, these dreams that never come true? A life cudgeled black and blue, bouncing bumbles and sudden stars. A burning root left untended like a runaway wish. Everyone loves an ashtray fire, the only light left to guide my staggered traverse. It’s only the hurt that lingers.
Midnight arrives to lose all meaning, the reading lamp halo on the ceiling, the cold seeping through the floor. Eyesight gone silty as my condition starts in, the resident aches in heart and bone laying claim to the fixed star fragments, the sketchy catch as catch can memory like a memory recently interred. Some commotion calls through the wall, cat or raccoon or enemy op as yet unidentified, but neither dog stirs. Still a few nights until the ubiquitous Yule and I don’t know from mice. The rats, though, clamber and gnaw away never heeding the chestnut on when to make hay.
The blunted brights of literary hues mingle with the sharp intermittent shift along the holiday spectrum, the window aglow with hints of traffic, tinsel, and off brand ambulance. I pause between breaths, the very air ringing with whispers of wind and rain. Awake without reason to the tune of suspended swords and the falling of other shoes, haunted by worn out demons and regretful ghosts as time grows unkind to the ill prepared, I take another fall. It only hurts where we are.