The Gray Road

A Saturday morning
full of spent cigarettes
lying next to cracks
in the pavement.
That grand microcosm
of illusory hopes and
the grandeur of dreams.
Baby, where were you
last night, what did you drink,
who did you fuck?
It sure wasn't me.
You gasp in the most
pathetic lament.
You had the right,
I'm not much of a man,
Just an erasable sketch,
two dimensions of fractured memories.
This quiet dawn of October
mist that clings to cars
in the final moments of birds
making their morning calls before they
fade into the southern horizon.
Dawn is the realm of echoes,
like ripples, like haze, mind
empty and insane,
eyes bleary like tears,
like autumn leaves,
beautiful and about to fall
and tumble down a familiar avenue
that you traversed on the way to
school, to church, flirting, fucking,
stumbling behind the specter
of life's delicate futility.
It's been a long time, man
and it ain't close to
ending but it is viciously short
and disconcerting in an infinite universe.
These mortals, you see, with their
agonies and ecstasies,
their magnamity and their cruelty,
great highs and stinking hangovers of
sad vomit and filthy bile.
Those brief interludes of transcendence,
This cool, austere, October morning.