I woke with a rich hunger.  I want to believe in new beginnings, in shedding old skins for new, in changing C sharp thoughts to D minor.  I want to feel connected to the red fire light and still touch water.  I want to feel a rush in my marrow, lightening in my imagination, and still touch ground without turning to cinder.  I want to ignite paper lies and blow them off, weightless, into space where their heat is extinguished instantly in the great big open nothing.  I want to feel the cold of winter slow my heart and thicken my blood.  I want to decorate the skeletons of trees with glossy black wings and a red iridescent hungry throat like an ornament of forgotten Gods.

What’s left of light blows ragged against the sharp corners of the lines we’ve drawn between nature and monument.  What’s left of it is sucked in like the arrogant promise of tobacco and we settle superficially into a weak stasis where death comes off easy like cheap foil wrapping on bad candy, ripping away from unwilling flesh with the smallest noise of anguish.  There are no live birds here, just cut wings and a mouthful of dry feathers.  Cut yourself from the branch and you cut yourself from the xylem and phloem, you lose the running of the sap and are fossilized in your own resistance.

But this,

this is the dusk of everything.