I’m looking for inspiration. Sat, now, rooted at the curb of the moment—a moment expanding the night on its surface and waning as if to make light elastic as it stretches downstream to Jericho.
Rain wraps in the meantime, like sheets of gauze around a fist of trees. Streetlight spills on wet concrete in washed-out yellows, flushing detail out and into gutters which swallow the spit of the season. Glossed mouths are blowing out long ghosts, and I could chase them and their histories back to Marlboro boxes.
I stand now, my back against the wall of a sidewalk shaped like an island of finishing cigarettes, thinking that in my limited experience, to love is to regress.
If only my voice could hold the glow of an ember on its fading breath, and whisper light into the naked breeze like a secret, I’d use it to tell you that when I left letters at a cursor as dark as your doorstep, it was a slip of the tongue. I’m turning off the lights in every room where there’s a mirror; where I was made to grieve my moving picture.
It’s three degrees. A familiar backbeat pours out of some neighbourhood house party. Through a window, my gaze sets on a mob of balaclava boys slugged back in a dim pub with match-lit lagers.
Tucking the midnight hour in my arms and closing my eyes so I can focus and feel the interference of life happening all around me, I notice I’ve been leeching off something sacred, off the very gel of love. This is an infinite regress. Sisyphus rolls his boulder. Metre by metre, the act measures the life of a writer.
My mud-laced hands relax on the belief that I could paint a haze with these smudged fingers, even if tonight proves I’ve made enough impressions.
When I wake up, I’ll see summer polished on dry reeds and budded stalks; birds flapping over wine fields, shedding their shadows like autumn leaves. I’ll wonder if, like yesterday, fear will find me falling again. Will it throw the world at my open jaw so that everything mutely throbs; cracks like the sound of winter thawing between the sinews of that fist of trees and dripping down like blood on the shore of spring?
Whether or not, I’ll be looking for inspiration. Heels dock at the tar coast of this ocean, which now lends its magnitude to others, others, others….