Hello, Death

What is this solemnity?

This is me winding down, with a congruent desert backdrop. Bones and buzzards and busted things.

“Do you believe me now?” 

“I always believed you.”

You were with me until I stumbled, a comment on your loyalty and my klutziness. Yet I’m not even bitter, barely even sad. It’s the way of the sun in its arc and our orbit around its nuclear heart. 

This is it for me. I think I’m okay with that. 

I keep recalling moments like polaroids of the mind, skipping stones on a pebble beach, climbing to some high headland and gasping at the island jewelry strung in the inlet below. 

What bound it together was love. Love was always the tether. 

In the end, we all walk alone before a backdrop of surf and quiet in a shimmer of mist. And we climb a great pile of rocks. Sit in thought before a pond, the light another world entire, insects a maniac alien fleet, no one watching, no one there. Except, well, someone took the photograph. 

It’s all we have. It’s all we have.

Remember the ferry across the inlet? How the cormorants wove their mornings into ours? I know you felt these things as I did. I know they scrawled and daubed themselves upon the canvas spread behind your eyes and ears.

It’s alien, and so familiar. Shanties and favelas strewn like dirty salt across a landspit, arrayed like the cheapest of trinkets in some dusky bay. The world’s forgotten people. More numerous by far than the ones we remember. What inverted, capsized shit is that?

I think I’m leaving. I think you’re almost done. Dream I upended the downturned hull rightside up, set out in the bay with the brightest of suns and a precious muted tailwind. All things breathless and grainy.

Dream me, oh please, and I give you my word, I’ll try to dream you back.