Fair Warning.

It was a fair-warning glow
near the end of certain death.
The bell handicapping a collared predator.
She was waiting, empty-armed for once,
under the shelter that hides the stars
but lays the blue-light paths bare.
And I felt sure that she was watching
from behind a veil of smoke
and the burn of that ember.

And I could feel her scrutiny
And my own surprise
at the lack of pressure.

But then her questions found me in the dark
like so much smoke trickling under door jams...
Hesitant, infirm –
And her eyes were just as big as ever,
But they’d been blinded by good faith,
And were this time a little less certain
of what she’d always claimed.

And if I’d forgotten about the pedestal,
The height swam up to meet me in that moment.

And I smiled in the dark,
Because I never meant for any of it to happen,
But I feel certain that this is one of those nights to remember.
This was one of those wild nights.

I am a rock. Leave it be.

It is life like leaded eyelids,
Smiled, smattered, smeared into place
some kind of art, I’m sure.
And superficial settings shining somehow,
Lakes just throwing the sun’s gifts
Back at me,
shameless.
Thankless.
Blameless.
It makes something about orange magnificence
And artificial pinks just throw me into a rage,
these days.

No. Not recently.
Always.

It is constant like the earth’s spinning,
Twirling me dizzier than that medication
was s u p p o s e d to.
And don’t they know that stability is my livelihood?

Don’t they know, I’m supposed to be stoic?
They suppose it, you know. It’s not just
an expression.

Stoically standing, statistically speaking,
is so startlingly strange –
Sporadic.
A singularity
Which must, which
Will wreak revenge, running
its course through imagined veins.
Vehemently venting in vain.
No, don’t imagine
you know
what it is to be supposed
a rock.