always almost somewhere
:: and you are de chirico 1914 end of summer and there is only what is the shadows cast by strangers by old lovers empty hands reaching out towards the future vast empty stretches of silence feels so good
:: had walls there where the ceiling threatened to crush the furniture, had windows and saw only what i wanted to closed the blinds to keep out the sun turned away from the laughter of ghosts
:: the car out of gas on fire at the edge of the highway the swimmer alone late autumn or early his wife missing or sleeping the children not yet imagined and this car this wasteland this all barren fields and powerlines all empty stretches of interstate mountains in the distance and a man you might have been always swimming towards them
:: and you are pollock 1947 end of summer and have you dreamt your death yet? are you in love with the idea of despair? give it time
:: can’t spend your whole life drowning but laughs tells me i’m a liar trailer out by the railroad tracks railroad tracks down by the river dizzy spin of trees, smell of clover remembers the flood dreams of the desert nothing between the two but the slow painful grind of growing old
:: not here no but still butchered bodies filling some enormous wasteland war always in every season at every door a man who would be emperor in the kingdom of corpses who would laugh inside his palace of bones teeth beautiful and white as he bites out the throats of his lovers
:: all three of us you and i and her beneath the dizzy spin of trees, of minor gods, and none of us believers in belief but all of us believers in faith and all we could do was write the story and all we could do was get the ending wrong every time kept pulling ourselves further apart kept telling ourselves we were in love not doors to keep us apart but windows we could jump from just to land laughing in each other’s’ joyous arms
:: and you are kay sage falling in love with despair and it’s always the wrong season and it’s always the wrong year it’s the wrong edge of a dying continent but here you are the paintbrush and the gun and the future the past? just pull the trigger and let it all out
:: falling apart but not falling apart but falling apart everything and everywhere and always just like we’d agreed
:: almost there almost somewhere almost autumn and the days all filled with the memory of heat trees and the shadows of trees rivers and bridges and the empty spaces in between that we fill with desperate promises the wars the way none of them ever quite end
:: he dreams the walls are filled with dead and dying bees wakes up lost inside the neverending hum of electricity wake up blind but not without sight remembers his children’s names but not their faces not why the shadows they cast always burned more brightly than the sun
:: rain all summer and nowhere to go and no way to get there no dreams but the ones you almost forget upon awaking someone’s child dying quietly in a pale blue room, this one image you can’t quite shake, the sound of your crying, the sunlight which is how you know it’s not real and then the sound of rain eyes suddenly open against the rest of your life
:: and you are dorothea in the season of the ascension or maybe you will be or could have been in some distant previous life maybe the subtle joy of confusion has yet to be experienced an invisible doorway in an imagined wall a lifetime of living in shadows, of being forgotten not war but the aftermath the survivors not yet understanding how much their guilt will weigh
:: and he is dreaming of her 20 years too late and everything in this fading house tastes of regret he is wake she is moving further away is building walls always from the other side and he is looking for the door and she is laughing at the window they are imagining the ocean have spent their whole lives drowning
:: a bowl of soup at the breakfast table and then out into the first frostbit sunlight of autumn time to call the children home but you’ve forgotten their faces and you’ve forgotten their names this is how the end begins
:: Š 2012 john sweet