fleeting daze

By now, the treacle-drenched summer has already 

succumbed to the bitter memories of autumn, and

the vines have sought comfort in tangled arms. 

There is something to be said about how the hills 

resist the urge to tread into the water and dissolve.

There is something to be said about nostalgia. How

it comes in waves. How, today, I’m drowning. 

                I wait for the bus on streets strewn with foliage, eyes

              heavy with dimmed dreams, and I realize I am still

              waiting for the rest of me. Maybe dying will be the

              very proof I once lived. Maybe tomorrow runs cold,

              but the sky always has something to say. I crane my

              neck to peer at parcels of cloudy air. Drifting 

              through ivory ethers plagued with memory, seeing

              everything, knowing nothing. Do they savor how I

              ached to sleep in unkempt flowerbeds? How I 

              yearned to fit the groove of my body in mossy tree

              hollows, their sapwood cavities bared to the 

              yellowing grass? 

                            August hangs from my soul like the gardens of 

                           Babylon—no bark, all bite. And, like the tongue 

                           that erodes my shoreline little by little by little, all 

                           my life I have broken things just for the sake of 

                           mending them. 

​

In another life, let me be an ampersand.