after only moments - an after moment

It matters most when the lights begin to gather in on themselves to form an unresponsive shadow - an apparition that doesn't need to be rescued as much as it needs to be cauterized before spreading into the size and shape of smoke colored memories. We don't belong here anymore, books of folded pages and table leg marks, books from people who lost the ability to communicate years ago so now they spend their waking moments hiding from the sun. It matters most when the lights begin to flutter, when the wings that carry breath away from the earth reaches just above our heads and for a second there is something hopeful about tomorrow. Little slices of lives like bits of sand, fractured ideas moving against the spiraling of thoughts moving in and out of thinking about the fractured rain coming down the sloped windows of my car.

i could use the air

I know what you're thinking. I've been here before. I've seen this simple book, the shiny metal spirals glistening in the new dawn, the reduced pages of black finger marks and broken lettering that any child of conscious thought could mutter out between visits to grandmas house and the old creek bed now filled with the dead and dying bottleneck flies of summer.

I know I've been here before, poised, readied drink in hand, thoughts remiss of the good old days of some forgotten dream I thought I'd push ahead of me like some protective projectile. But I'm getting ahead of myself again. You've only just begun to make the descent, to position yourself for the lengthy and sometimes untidy journey of an other's mindfulness. So, we've been here, not this now but the nows before this that were just as full of quiet questions and still life moving, things held by a sense of soft impermanence. Yet I am also moving in similar patterns, direct lines and those indirect ones caught gazing as the sun slides through morning bay haze, the color and shape of trees dissected by power lines and advertisements colored by graffiti and this feeling deep below the surface of my dreams that whispers every now and again to breathe.

do not duplicate

I found them in an old cardboard box with torn edges. They hadn't changed even though I had so very much so. I remember them clearly now in my hand, the tarnished gold and silver on the bent wire circles - the plastic one that made the doors beep - one to enter, one to leave. I can't recall which doors they open now, which they did. I'm sure the locks have all been changed these days. There are small ones for cabinets and boxes, other security containers that are a little less secure now.

How long has it been?
Made in the U.S.A.
Haworth.
L001.
Lyon Aurora, Ill.
ESP Corp.
Do not duplicate.
Schlage. 5x75.
Chicago lock co.


I am blank. The box affords no less mystery now than it did the years before this, the sliced hours, the seconds pushing themselves against an inevitable collision of dust and shadows. Now I listen to doorbells and strangers walking through the day outside, the trees and grass drying in the heat, the gentle wind falling down like the voices of children kept too long in dark rooms and antechambers. It's not like that of course. People haven't any idea of it except to say the windows do not lie about the here and now of things, the stress of silence, the distance of searching for things that aren't there.

Here again looking back over the years and wondering what it has to do with anything to be here.