Sacrifice Leaves a Bitter Taste

Broken plastic cups roll across empty streets, I cannot see the city any other way, what is wrong with me. Sunlight on the walls of the library. Briefly homeless or not so briefly, one can never say, the late eighties and early nineties are blurred and shadowed, mostly lost. You call it love but you could call it anything and it wouldn't change.

Nobody likes a drunk post-structuralist.

Forgetting a birthday, being that lost in prayer, thus waking up to the actual problem. I see her still on the top stair, wind blowing her hair into her eyes, laughing at me asking her not to move so I could memorize the scene forever, which I more or less did. Call it what it is, or try to, this too is a spiritual practice.

Brittle maple leaf skitting over gray ice, no other sign of the wind.

We work together to obey a mute god? In the bedroom I come face to face with my desire to conquer, overcome, denigrate, defy.

This sacrifice leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

The moon blurred by snow clouds rising over the far hills quicker than you'd expect. Talking about trout fishing a sense of fatigue overwhelms me, i.e., this again. She leaned into me and nothing happened I thought would happen so I drove home and began again. Shaking a little on waking, wondering if this is the day my life will collapse around me.

A photograph is wrong, in all ways wrong, I see this now, I accept this. The hemlocks are amused at how I write about them, deifying cardinals resting on the high branches, gently they remind me they are not looking for a savior or an ally but a friend.

I cannot explain my heart, cannot explain these wounds. It's like how capital flows away from us leaving nothing but a ruins, it's like saying "what else is new" when you know nothing else is new nor ever will be again.