The Horizon's Just a Circle - Poetry Monthly

With this stretch in the evenings I feel the weight of every year. Walks become longer, further, higher; elastic tightens. From up in the hills I can see for miles. I ignore the sunset, prepare my excuses; allow the torment of fantasy, to gasp at the expanse. Up here, above the parapet, de-shelled, nothing's anchored in the literal. Seasons change and so do I. Everything's suggestion, a horizontal plumb-line infinity of inference. I just want it to be the sun. Setting. Quickly. Through the white fucking clouds.

I’m up here looking for space but the horizon's just a circle back to before. I’m trying to figure in the void, in the fallen leaves, but only find a heart beating in thick mud, all the beauty I cannot feel and a dull cavern ache of missing you. Hating my own company, I'm middleman, grey area, absentee truant on a trapeze. And like everything else, like the pearl in the oyster, like the rain on the rock - I’m impermeable. Raindrops bead on me.

You’re a dog on a beach. I'm a seagull trapped on land. Second after second strips me down to the cunt of my heart, the fame-hungry whore masquerading as cynic. Grass-eyed in the moonlight, spilt milk teardrops fall with the weight of wasted years. Years before you.

I guess, since you, the old doesn't do it for me, doesn’t move me the same way. Sat up here. Desultory. Disparate. Delusory. A mirror-man staring at a spent sun. The horizon's just a circle. Leads me home to you.

Image by Herman Asph. Used with permission. www.the-bad-land.com or www.hermanasph.com