Autophagy: Streetlights Are All I'll Ever Know

A final ebb and the sun trickles

over the horizon with Copernican

contempt. Light’s leash tightens

on its wayward pups, who cast

maniacal shadows behind their mother’s back;

the prodigal beasts

trail after her,

culled by necessity. A mongrel pitch

crawls from the east,

hounding street

to car

to sidewalk;

it lays its claim. The moon,

in its turn,

enlists shattered glass and

silver bike frames to fortify its glimmer.

It is to no avail. Pitch gains. The street lights

heed their cue. The monolith Cereus

vibrates havoc and unfurls

the dogs of bloom. Sepia tones sink

through the ether and

settle, molasses on the curb.

In anesthetic din I

hear the echo of a yelp

quelled in the half-step

between glimmer and illumination.

The iamb completed,

I set myself in burlap browns

and half-hearted grays of a front porch.

I flick flick flick ignite. It drags slow and

the fire stretches towards my lips,

taking well proportioned

crackle steps in quarter time.

Cars waft by,

headless specters that shear

the muted din with their

halogen staffs. They bathe me

in white incoherence. I reign

in the smoldering

of my cigarette.

These lights. These damn lights.

These humming muzzles

of progress. They hold the hounds. But my

monolith flickers,

at once the devils come. They

gnash and vomit acid and then they are gone,

before I even feel their swelter.

I know they

pace ‘round these holy spheres at night. They stay

alert, to harrow me from their hell.

I rustle my poise, shirk the dust. Flick my

smoke into the street; it shatters. Retreat. I dare

not look too hard. Think too long. Because

it studies me too. It knows where to tear

the nails from. I foxhole deep into hallow.

I close my eyes and mouth pacts,

thick silent woolly whispers that levee fortresses.

“May the sun retain us, though we’ve lost her sight.

May heaven be our roof, and the dirt floor our rock. And

may the dark clanging paths reck the rod of pied beauty.”