Suspended in mid-air on summer heat, I watch the children laugh and skip in the streets. Pink sunlight babbles through Venetian slants; I am drawn to the window, out the door, lighting a cigarette with each halting step. Two, to savor the evanescence. Three, because the sun wears me down.
I am drawn to a bicycle and where it sits in rusted silence, this backyard of omniscient weeds and misplaced gold. When I was younger, I was drawn to the passing dusk too, but these things pass and somehow the light always fades. Caught in a sober moment, I begin to beat the cobwebs.
Each stroke breaks a thread. Like this sulking contraption, I have sat for months, encumbered by malaise and a damning project out in Utah. They jet me home on a never-ending sunset for a half-hearted recovery, a little out of touch, a few pounds emaciated. Only the bottle greets me.
The weekends come and go. I drink… smoke… often alone, too wasted to make the drive to half-hearted friends. Over 4th of July holidays and in my dreams, I continue to run server migration scenarios. I wake up in an airport just as the sun peers above the mountain peaks.
There is never enough sleep. Funny how the word echoes two-dimensional as you become a caricature. In the quiet afternoon of debilitating heat, I lean back with the radio on, a paperback Bukowski propped against the pillow, watching dust settle in each empty corner. Pink light pasted all around.
My laundry takes root on the floor, scattered and in between the cracks, not so wild like crabgrass or prodigious wheat, but just enough to leave a presence. My hand moves to prod the weeds but stop. They say a clean room is a sign of a clean mind. I say an empty room is an empty heart.