A POST SUNSET CHILL

sets in and the sun

sheds the iron lung to which it’s shackled, so nearly audible now in its sinking. The clock on my countertop’s blinking, it’s practiced at this.

Moon’s where last I left it, stargazing while grazing the mother lode. Dust…each tiny particle conceived from the selfsame violence of which the stars are made, has donned its ballroom shoes, a tarnished silver. We cheek to cheek. We feather to feather. Between us a suicide’s making its first-time-ever body wed to the hangman’s noose; feet tapping to a symphony no one hears. She’s a scene stealer, her dance an auto da fe.

Who’ll cut her loose, wear her shoes? Not the flies lazily drifting ceiling-ward. Not the insect-killing aerosols rushing hastily from the nozzles of their canisters, crusaders on a mission. I’m her only audience: drop of blood on snow

filling in for the missing.

A ream of paper’s saying Kadish. Twilight applauds. Midnight’s restless and won’t stay to conclusion. I’m standing at the center of an emotion, a dysregulation: my flailings are of the fertilest kind and like art

are everywhere

spray painting my thought balloons on fences, chalking prosody on lamp posts. I feed exhaustion my revel-flow. Still, am I not the smallest of calibrations…barely

a collarbone?

That’s what the picture shows. A four year old riding shakily through the raw-scraped ocean of unsecured night, tugging at her viscera...the weight of her small animal life. Her twilight crew: mama and daddy-O seated fore and aft, eyes a fear in them. Their 1940’s cries drugging her like a heavy snow.

Sand’s my medium. My oars within, ushering our boat along; wind turns into an intubation, torrid zone’s overheating. Thirst’s a dirty joke and the self-help book I seek hasn’t been written. Those that have say black holes aren’t for swimming.

My nights incubate in twilight’s linear blue distillations and death chases after, turning ribbons into nooses. Comes with pic to rake the nits it insists afflict my tresses; hammers my head dress until all the knives fall out, replaces them with bona-fide feathers. Oh, how I fear feathers. But have never questioned, even now…the padlock which keeps the gate locked

on the why.

So many gates. So many whys shadow-web my life dispensing aphorisms they co-opt from the epitaphs on tombstones.

When hindsight leaves the earth

for a slag heap, who’ll bail out my corpse, find it a resting place? Who winnow the maggots from my flesh, write my history before time runs away with it, in a hurry to hook up with eternity, its capacious mate? My city won’t bat an eye. My laundry list with its entourage of impossible to-do’s will be ignored, my life a backroad no one will ever travel: a home for Eternal Night. So very quiet its footfalls. Hitchhiker without a passport, making no more sound than the faint rustle of a page being turned

in a white and wordless bible.