The Red

A pack of smoked cigarettes crammed into the corners of the ash tray smolder their last streams of smoke as Matt drunkenly stumbles to the bar for another pitcher. I take a moment to glance at the man alone at the table next to us. His eyes are darting up at the television back to the table (wiping with his hands invisible crumbs or soaking spilled Budweiser into his skin I can not tell) then across to me. I am alarmed - the eyes of this bar buddha dig at me and though I feel new holes in my body I am still compelled, drawn to his mysterious grin. 

He mutters to himself and I feign understanding, fill up my glass and slip under the surface (I am but crumbs on a table now).

Shrouding gaping insecurities, crippled as my phone battery wanes, the guardians of the night must too be drinking, and we’re all in the red with black lungs, twirling hoop earrings on our fingers. We’re the rats clambering through the streets, with gaping mouths in awe of the facile falcon. 

Songs of Morning

The morning song of Philadelphia is punctual, consistently aligned with the Daily (or is it nightly?) Escape. Yes - laying in bed, stomach down, with the right side of my face pressed against the pillow, leaving my left eye to keep watch through the crack in the window.

The chorus never changes (of course within the bounds of the temporal seasonal transfigurations) - mother birds shoot like boomerangs from/back to/from/back to their nests, their makeshift homes nestled in the walls of cheap apartment buildings, built with twigs but reinforced with the fiberglass of broken car windows. 

They return with the morning feast as their blind and flightless offspring mindlessly slurp it down, intermittently squawking their Hallelujah. 

Is it that we secretly (or boldly?) crave this Goddess of a bird to nourish us in this hour of sunrise (the sun god hasn’t fucked it up yet…)?

Or is this half-assed attempt at rest merely a moment to think about the ship/t that awaits at a dock all too seemingly familiar? The sails are made of wax, just so the tease of the voyage melts from memory with the peeking sun.

The eye, relinquished of duty, is no longer the watchman of the street below. Chaos ensues.

I think. I think. I stop thinking.

This is the moment for the birds to decide, whether I am to return to idle slumber or greet the morning shared by so few - just goddess-bird and hungover bus drivers escorting the (blind and flightless) children, who sleep in their seats, faces pressed against the windows, soon-to-be-asleep-continuing on fiberglass desks. 

Worms.

Take me to the mountain and push me on my side so that I roll, accelerating as I descend, with nothing to stop me except the occasional bruise from a jagged rock. I will become disoriented, losing my grasp of what is up and what is down as the sky and ground blur to an amorphous floating space. All that I know of the good on this earth will dissipate and all that I know of evil will evaporate, until my body becomes a bloody avalanche, sensitive to the murmurs of the valley.