Caitlin Johnstone

Come Dusk

Come dusk a frumpy woman
well past the age of societal worth
emerges from wherever we’d been hiding her
to watch the fire imps frolic on the telephone wires.

She sits unassumingly
(the only way she knows how),
and listens to the screech bats awakening.

“We are always dancing on the grave of the past,”
she says to no one in particular,
in a voice long since punished into hoarseness.

“They pull you into this world
and teach you all their best guesses,
and it’s like one of those awkward social situations
where you’re not quite sure what to do with your hands,
except it lasts a lot longer,
and instead of your hands,
it’s everything.

You get a porridge of words made up by dead men
and a jumble of dead ideas,
and they toss them into a pink Barbie doll lunch box
and say Here, pretend to be a person.

Then maybe one day,
if you are lucky,
after they’ve squeezed you for all the sex and children you’re worth,
maybe,
you catch a breath.
And you learn to feel your feet on the floor,
and to listen to the screech bats,
and to smile and nod as the mind tells its stories
without believing a word of it.
Time becomes a fairy tale you indulge
like a child telling you about Santa,
and ideas become like tools you can pick up when needed
and set down when you’re through.
Life happens like the growing of the weeds
and the silent explosions of the stars,
and you are launched by each dying moment
into each new dying moment
as naked and stupid as the day you were born.”

She kicks off her shoes and puts up her feet
and lights the biggest cigar you’ve ever seen.

“Yes,” she says.
“We are all dancing on the grave of the past.”

A bright white disk silently appears over the trees
and shines a blue cone of light upon her.

“Well it’s about fucking time,” she mumbles,
cigar smoke wafting from her mouth.

__________________________

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