Running Out of Moonlight

The race

Remember when you were raging and running against moonlight a full-on race trying to keep up with the wind and you were heading due north as well as making a westward turn yet somewhere in the east your thoughts started to burn cold but the ashes still spread across the ground in all four corners of your lonely little town

I saw your watch in a full spin as you tried to sew time into a patchwork quilt that once covered your color coated eyes and you’d use it to dry secretive tears and plummet into your lonely desert when you thought the makers were too busy tending to other droughts to notice your little dry cracked face

Most days you end up feeling like you’re in need in need of something in need of a cover-up for when you don’t feel human and you’re looking around your apartment drowning in a sea of salty things to decorate the alien feelings that linger in the lost memories

And now you're out of hope and hours of time because did it all even exist? — all while trying to moisturize your prickly alien skin with the latest lotions and scented soaps to look the part to fit in — as your bony buttons dry and fizzle out and now you’re a naked peach — not quite moldy but not quite ripe and planting kisses on the last bus ticket that leads out to the frozen ferry that only runs on misty days

You’re running out of time running out of money running out of ideas and now it’s time to set with the sun so you can see it’s time to release what keeps you in a frantic orbit because you can’t be still when you keep looking for past lovers’ forlorn shadows lusciously lurking among the frayed moonbeams while you’re trying to lap up the past like it’s in a cup of water that never runs over — always wanting to be chosen always wanting to be the one but it was never your turn anymore and you are your own making

Don’t forget the gentle familiarity of the stranger that lives part-time on one side of the moon — forever watching and longingly waiting and will soon eclipse into many selves of the one — as fall turns bright orange pumpkins and faded corn husks into muted dusty time circles of nothing lost and nothing gained

You are guided — even as you walk blindly with your deadly blackened stick while the crows line up one by one clutching the wire breathing their own lore becoming history in every single crumbling tower monument ever constructed in the name of something that could be felt but never said

You still shout your dying conditions of love past the fortress walls to the people who used to know you while watching them eat lunch and shop in malls laughing over water and lime but they don’t hear you anymore and know you even less no more than you confess to know yourself from all the days your mind was under a bittersweet bleeding heart duress

You never needed it all anyway not even the clothes that leave solemn sweat stains on your cautious cooling back — remember the stone silence and remember the woven words that mute the things that matter and when it’s all said and done you’ll finally see the edges of the empty stage — then you can leave your thoughts behind without barely making a clatter