Category: Daily Fifty-Two

Computer glow, lights low. Hi-fi in the summer night. Clap along, sing the song. Knowing everything’ll be alright. Eyes are shut, groove and strut. Bounce and bop and shake that ass. Snap snap freeze, bend your knees. Take me to church, take me to mass. Music lifts, funky rifts – give me more.

It’s midday humid and muted bright. Clouds are on the way. Birds squawk and chirp. Some sing. A mail truck snails its way down the street. Where has this thickness come from, this petrified trunk of an afternoon? Where are the party hats and horns hidden? Are they in that late-day bloom?

Because I’m listening, I hear the low and constant roar and rumble from the highway north and east of town. An incessant type of white noise. An engine static that, once heard, is almost deafening. This is the machine shop buzz at dawn, the mechanical whir and whine of our busy world.  

Distant cars race in the night, muffler loud and gear-shift crying. Eyes close. Time passes. Different cars rev and ride. Eyes close heavy. Time passes. Quiet. Eyes fade. A made-up song plays in my head. I talk with two homeless men running, dancing, fidgety near an empty lot. Wake to different cars.

August night, skeeters bite. It’s grown dark, no fading light. The neighbor talks to me from the other side of the chain link fence. He wants to know my dog’s name. He knows a woman who volunteers at the shelter. I say I miss him, and I’m tempted to rescue him again.

In this Sunday morning sun, I sit. The coffee steams in the cool air. I read, but my mind wanders – returns things to the hardware store, loads the car, drops off bags at Goodwill. I’m everywhere but here. The poet writes, “so what if it doesn’t come / to a hill of beans—”

In the late-day sun atop a scraggly pine, a charm of Goldfinches nestles among the cones. A slow sax strolls through the screen door to the deck and the table and the glass of wine. The temperatures fall with the setting sun. The Grackles all fly north. Slow down, it’s a science.

Last light fades. Doubts settle in with dusk. This path, the path, a path isn’t discernible. The air smells of wood smoke. We trust our fires to burn reasonably and secretly desire uncontrollable consumption. Uncertainty waits in distant hotels as we count ourselves among the victims. This world – glorious and wholly unfair.

The nectarine in the blue bowl is firm, ripe, and unbruised. I imagine the discipline it would take to watch a piece of fruit decay – not a time-lapse, but to do little or nothing else other than watch (for days) as the orange, yellow, and red skin turns sickly brown and softens.

Pale light, slightly yellow. The six am plane flies west. The morning waits like a sleepy bell hop at the end of his shift. The morning wakes like a blue DeSoto in the wide sun of an empty parking lot. The morning crawls like a slow gecko on dew-kissed twig. The morning.

His eyes go funny and the music is boomin’ every time we pass groups of people on the street. Sometimes he waves his hang loose hand out the window. We take the turns too quickly and he sends his impulse through the air. We’re firing through the night and this isn’t Topeka.

A paper-thin arc of a moon hangs in the sky falling and falling backwards towards the earth. Soon it will vanish in the bright wash of dawn.  A line of clouds advances from the west – gray but not forebodingly so. This could be an ocean. These clouds could be the darkened swells.