medicine
The finches pick at the pavement, the new day all around them cool and still and blue. They forage for what is, ignoring how wrong it might be. The fields full of lilies so far from these golden thirst-laden hills. The tapestry weaves with each desperate stitch, that hole in the throat, that shape in the gutter. It is soft light and pretty flowers, all free lunches right until the moment the check at last arrives. We pray and sing and philosophize, shimmering like some dream made of heat and the relentlessness of the road ahead.
What of the morning star once the sun washes away every trace of her? What of the silt left in the coffee cup, the syrup the waitress seemed to miss? What of cigarette butts and lip-stick rims, fingerprints and manger scenes and debt, and all the boiling inferences and insistences of this wreck of a world around us? That goddess of love hung forever on that poisonous molten vagrant, like war hung from the red face of our aching neighbor. Rumors and words, every seal revealing the holes in the plot, the worn-through persistence of primal myth.
I take my medicine, shiver with the slow burn behind dark and dusty curtains. The ache that cleaves me to the spine of this world, the actions that sunder my heart from its flight, the dull threat behind my eyes that dwindles a little every day-- it is all romance, all bruised and beaten solace. The machine certainty of life even after the last dose of will is spattered on the speckled sidewalk, the notion that these tides of appetites curl and bristle with life always bursting upon some sad demise. The shrill notation that makes me hide from each new dawn, played so sweetly as it rises and fades away. The over-blown Bollywood spectacle of it all, danced out in the motions of distant cousins cast across the short strokes of oblivion, boiling away that perpetual resonance, that dead-eyed shine that will light the dissolution of our bones.
The finches pick at the pavement, the new day all around them cool and still and blue. They forage for what is, ignoring how wrong it might be. The fields full of lilies so far from these golden thirst-laden hills. The tapestry weaves with each desperate stitch, that hole in the throat, that shape in the gutter. It is soft light and pretty flowers, all free lunches right until the moment the check at last arrives. We pray and sing and philosophize, shimmering like some dream made of heat and the relentlessness of the road ahead.
What of the morning star once the sun washes away every trace of her? What of the silt left in the coffee cup, the syrup the waitress seemed to miss? What of cigarette butts and lip-stick rims, fingerprints and manger scenes and debt, and all the boiling inferences and insistences of this wreck of a world around us? That goddess of love hung forever on that poisonous molten vagrant, like war hung from the red face of our aching neighbor. Rumors and words, every seal revealing the holes in the plot, the worn-through persistence of primal myth.
I take my medicine, shiver with the slow burn behind dark and dusty curtains. The ache that cleaves me to the spine of this world, the actions that sunder my heart from its flight, the dull threat behind my eyes that dwindles a little every day-- it is all romance, all bruised and beaten solace. The machine certainty of life even after the last dose of will is spattered on the speckled sidewalk, the notion that these tides of appetites curl and bristle with life always bursting upon some sad demise. The shrill notation that makes me hide from each new dawn, played so sweetly as it rises and fades away. The over-blown Bollywood spectacle of it all, danced out in the motions of distant cousins cast across the short strokes of oblivion, boiling away that perpetual resonance, that dead-eyed shine that will light the dissolution of our bones.