skrimshander/for the safe passage of another night

At night in this room nightflowers grow from the floors and a canopy of leaves shields from the rain and the crickets repeat pedantic their unerring secret in the vastly reverbified robust sonambulatic wind. We dream each three to our own worlds and do we dream the same or rather as polite dreamneighbors in film-lot primordial thatch huts, our latent thoughts alight as fireflies in the wistful forestsearching eyes of those who came before.

At night in this room: simplicity that gave us the dread slip in the toobright toofrenetic middling day, time and breath and togetherlives and forest not around but animistic through, within our hearts (or if this too goes too-stock then within our souls, or criminy, settle for our beings).

You, little one, when you laterlook at our lives then will you know the dreams we hold each in our hearts now, will the transmitted record seek through to your awakened heart intact as something more than the palest least echo of fire.

You, love, when you look at our lives then will you know how this corpulent muckraking daze held said dreams, how they were known like nothing known the selfsame and however fearful blinking held were held true the same.

You, searchers, see this togetherness parceled safe through the grim malaise of Jerseyed forest, a patch of dying trees huddled together in a newmint waste of parking lot, pray see this love intact and moved unerring to its future point, to be checked in your ancestral ghosts' collective list of return on past investment.

vision

I got home late from work and everyone was out late too, so I took a walk to unwind. To the center of town. It was hot and the streets were pretty empty. A woman walking a dog, a kid on a bike, not much else.

I thought about buying some cigarettes and headed in the general direction of Wawa, but that felt like too momentous of a decision (buying smokes in Paris is one thing, buying them in Jersey would be a level of commitment I'm not ready for).

So I cut the circuit short, turning back toward our street. Pines and crooked concrete, vaguely functional street lighting. A cicada fell to a dark patch of sidewalk, skittering in frustration to bury itself in the concrete like a piece of a sound wave falling out of the sky and I had this vision for the rest of my walk of all the creatures on earth stricken sudden with that death dance, every living creature fallen to the ground and twitching its last.

When I got home I felt better.