I saw the great blue heron twice. The city beneath and beside the city peopled with broken dreamers. Stamped FAULTY and flushed away with dead fish and miscarried fetuses, they bring forth their dreams and sweet wine to keep warm against early winter kisses carried in on the wind with whitecaps and choppy waves.
Pain. Sometimes the way in is pain.
When I was young I lived under a blessed illusion painted by my parents that pain is temporary. This too, though, is culture prop-up job. One of those old cowboy movie set props dust downs that only looks real through a tight camera angle.
Sometimes in the morning after a night on the wharf my hip sings, some harmonizing echo like last night when the cooler weather rolled in bringing tree whipping wind and whitecaps. The lines wrapped from the capstan to the timberhead are stretched like an erhu. The cold fingers in the wind play. The fleet dances on the whitecaps like middle-aged hipsters when their favorite song plays over the supermarket speaker. This song is a refrain of pain, kicked up in a current and echoing up into the city with it’s apathetic ears and high falutin’ notions of upward mobility. The song sings to the clouds, to whatever heaven waits. This pain sings forever. These bones are just one more instrument being tuned.
Lord, hear our prayers –
afraid of the dark and sometimes brandishing a knife she begs the night lights for cigarettes and something cool to drink she primps as she scurries away, pulling out clumps of hair she will search for later to put up in a bun she’s having a rough night she’s crying for help but no one sees our demons but us and she chooses to speak to hers and when the homeless man on a bicycle stops to inquire all he can do is yell WHAT ARE YOU RUNNING FROM and the cops can’t take her to the hospital involuntarily and even if they did the ER would kick her in 3 or 4 hours not quite sunrise and she would have to contend with the darkness again begging night lights for salvation and a smoke and maybe a cup of water
