Grow Gray With Me

The fog that hides the day as night retires,
shades of sunlight grasping for purchase
struggling in undulating swirls,
hoping to find in ambiguity, some purpose.

The rising darkness from the depths of fire
billowing into the night to throttle the stars,
like open mouths cradling soundless screams
or the profound words of a dead man’s memoirs.

The way a tree feels when bound to expire,
stripped of all its lush extravagance
the machinations of a world that brought it life,
now turned to break it beneath those same elements.

The slow pyrotechnics of stagnant air’s attire
sustained in sanguine starlight while time drifts away,
held like the pot won in a game of marbles,
careful hands celebrating their display.

The decisions we unearth in quagmire
seeking more an end than a right or wrong,
transfixed by distant familiarity
the difference lost in the chorus of the song.

The way our histories resurface as satire
courage marred by fear, the bold now timid and pale
those truths that hide in the present revealed
once pitted against the rest and placed on a scale.

The thoughts that in twilight give cause to perspire
when the permanence of absence is paramount,
trickling through the cracks in our confidence
though it is only ourselves we need to surmount.

Thin Walls

The paper has fallen from the walls.
The paste that held it in place laid to waste
by the passing of time;
as memories before it,
tenants before that,
dreams yet earlier.

It recoils away from its purpose
in sensual curves
that languish treacherously
aching for the floor beneath;
the filth and refuse of
accumulated events.

Between the patterns and the plaster
life propagates
milky pustules undulating
performative movements
anxious for a future in flight.

The sun sets against the windowsill.
The portal closing
on a perspective lost
to the procession of stars;
the persistence of planets
the carelessness of time.