Darkening

Days burn to their nubs.
I run along the charred edge,
stumbling like morning.

August 27

Too slow.  The air moves
faster.  Your hand is a fish
in my hand: morning.

4/20/2017

What scares me is how human we are.  Blinkered, biased, bound to the forces that shaped our evolution millennia ago.  We hamstring ourselves, yet imagine we run free.

Almost Easter

Fat bees drift toward
overgrown honeysuckle,
twice my height and yours.

In the damp, a bird
hurls itself into the heart
of the new window,

beats its wings to right
itself, slaloms past the glass.
We grow old watching.

Daylight

There's a monstrosity to Daylight Saving Time.  It's Victor Frankenstein, lopping an hour from the sweetest part of the day and stitching it sloppily onto dusk.  You go from bounding out of bed bathed in light to hauling your limbs, one by one, into darkness.  Forcing down breakfast in darkness.  Slipping out for the paper in darkness. 

The missing daylight boomerangs back, of course, but it comes too late, slapping you across the face like true love after a couple of weddings and three kids.  Light unneeded and unwanted, but impossible to ignore.

I recognize my irritation is out of proportion, my prose too purple, my rage too raw.  I have bigger problems, and you do, too.

But there's a satisfaction in resisting the inevitable.  It's what we do for most of our lives, up to end, down to the dregs. 

Do not go gently into this new time zone.  Rage, rage against the mauling of the light. 

Dry

Every part of me feels dry.  My hands are chapped; my lips are peeling; the skin beneath my nose is raw.  The inside of my throat, usually moist, scrapes against the back of my tongue.  It's winter and five degrees outside.  The heat is on full-blast.

Despite this (because of this?) I'm feeling almost chipper.  I enjoy January in spite of itself.  It's a knuckling and bucking down time, a span in which the ordinary business of eating and exercising and keeping head and home and heart together feels missional.

There is so much wrong with the world.  Yet despite that (because of it?) we keep on making promises to ourselves and to one another.  The breakage comes later.  In February, perhaps, with its tropical lilt.

New Year

I cannot believe how long I've been keeping this blog.  And how short a span it's seemed.  All those quotidian observations about time.