Etiolated

Your voice echoes through the ages — as if from the depths of dry amphora.

Pushcarts and tumbrils are full of the dregs of the failed american experiment.

A skim of cream and a puff of smoke are equal in the Inquisitor’s dream —

Spastic as a cobwebbed spindle and dry as a sheaf of faggots left in the sun during deepening drought.

We move away from each other singed by wind driven wildfires that ring ever closer.

Each minute hotter and dryer, each second etiolating the sun —

The shining city on a hill was an ill-fated Fata Morgana —

This moment desiccated like the cicada’s abandoned husk.

“I don’t know what else to do, so I write. It’s my way of seeing the world.”

— Jim Harrison