It’s the season where faith wakes up and sees its shadow, where the reasons are all by rote and the words serve to justify anything that’s indefensible, whatever is said is what is seen. I leave a trail of vapor and litter, smudging up the surfaces, gumming up the works. I am sin and missed syntax, the labor left to language to explain away. The last bright gaze of the horizon, the hour when the moon has to go. That breath clasped tight in amber, forever just out of focus in the snuffed out eyes. That ring of ashes on the brickwork, the shadows painted on the sand, the heart skips and stutters and the last flame gutters.
Another night where the shower gets took after midnight, the carcass all abuzz with the same old tariffs, flea bit and past scratching with the clock dropping granules down the glass. There was some bird or another haunting the bridge between phone poles in the graspings of the gloaming, there was an owl from down the block calling from outside the window, a notation by the lyric, a way of keeping score. The south end of the block has an obsidian sheen to the foreshadowed streets, traffic a tear and a tussle, but mostly crickets anyway.
I wake to the dog’s bark, I wake to the crow’s call, I wake to the sudden silence of the screen sleeping with the dark of the new day shuffling around the room. My sleep remains sporadic, and largely a formality. The days fade beneath the waves, the nights are nicked and scuffed by wings and popped cuffs, fables left on enable at the tailings of these trials. This name is little more than a tension between the neck and shoulders, a scraping breath over tooth and tongue, a stand out in a few poor reviews amongst an otherwise well received ensemble. The crow squeezes the sky under a handful of black feathers and through the rasp of its exquisite instrument, the sun in splendid descent.
