It’s the numbers where they get you, the assembly that is accounted for, the company intended to count you out. I burn a little something to make my breathing harder, I drink the dose of poison paternally preferred. Occasionally I’ll do some remembering meriting the memory, honor the absence I was born into. The dead man’s craft that holds tight the rafters, the remains left circling the grave. They keep score so I don’t have to, the lead dwindling by twos and threes. I take a drink on my father’s 95th birthday some 19 years past his death, another legacy I cannot look in the eye.
It is inked solely in intent, the drift of days, the litany of the long dark night. Every lost bet, every stagger down the hall to hear the alarm, to stare at the sky where the stars once were. You walk around to test the earth, you move to hold the weight of your bones, the words still too slippery to take flight. The sun beats down despite the cold, the sky leans blue just like the crayon says, the days so many incidents and anecdotes left in a heap at the bottom of the drive. You follow your compass and the rest of the rats.
And so it goes well into the aftermath, the spent events there clinging to the calendar as the numbers shuffle along. Sunlight in my eyes marks my natal star, squinting from the bright and the smolder, letting the radiance into my flesh. It’s this obdurate attitude that besets, so malleable and impermanent, all our meaning stuffed meat singing out so readily snuffed and extinguished. I sit out in the remnants of god’s laughter and the plans of humans, a scoop of Ozymandias in every soul, wreck and ruin in every lullaby. Someone banged on a piano some 50 years ago and the song is resurrected through phone and speaker amid the scrub jay racket and the schoolyard din. I blow a smoke and say my goodbyes.