Like drunken raccoons and alley cats, gusty winds tipped the trash can in the night. The day is bright. The clouds have been ushered out of the theater. In the dream about my former boss, everyone was microdosing. Up early, today will be that kind of day: tipsy, disjointed, tired, and stumbling.

The rain is steady and soaking. The streets are the color of sharks flashing through ocean deep. A squirrel crouches under a tree with her bushy tail fanned out above her head like an newspaper. Branches bob in the wind. A mourning dove coos a lonely song soft like the morning light.

I stare, trying to grasp phrases as they fly by like the hawk that’s landed on top of a telephone pole. A few minutes ago, it was the elegantly curved of arm of a watering can – outstretched like a Greek statuette. The hawk has flown away. I guess I’ll water the plants.

Empty shoes line up where the day ends – by the sofa near a lamp and a stack of books. This is where, sometimes, a second life begins. An evening life. A life without shoes or sidewalks or gas pedals and gravel roads.  A life where there’s nowhere left to go, until tomorrow.

Silver sky, silver sky, man sits under and wonders why. Wonders why, wonders why, his eyes can see his heart can sigh.  Heart can sigh, heart can sigh, he greets the day, decides to try. Decides to try, decides to try, to catch the wind and ride it high. Ride it high.

Stripes and solids. Colors gleam, roll smooth on green felt. A pool ball feels perfect in size and shape and heft. The evening is full of angles and banks and side pocket magic. One shot hits three rails before kissing the eight. Roy’s place has a wood burning stove, an eight-foot table.

Dumb cane stalks bend and crane like scoliosis spines angling towards the light. Is this clay pot too small? Are the roots tangled and knotted through soil and perlite? Are they coiled around the base like a dormant snake? And what about us, did we think to check our roots? Change pots?

I half-expect a shotgun blast to startle the dozens of blackbirds perched in the tall, barren tree – or maybe the first volley from a twenty-one gun salute. In a firing squad, one of the rifles has a blank round. Plausible deniability. Nothing startles the birds. They leave of their own accord.  

The lunchtime coffee is bitter and stale. It tastes like the color of the cement sky. Cinders tumble in the ocean of my stomach. The cars on the thoroughfare hurry through the rain, spraying misty puddles in their wake. The backyard neighbor feeds his chickens and steals their eggs while they’re distracted.