Old Music

I go only so far before I stop and can’t remember what the next thing is to do.  I can get a third of it sometimes finished.  I can sometimes do half.  Mostly a third.  The time runs out.  Particles float in sun streaks stretching from the window to the floor.  Cat yawns and dog stares plaintively.  Now and then the transparency of marked time lays over all of it.  Anniversary and holiday remnants emerge in the strata.  I pour and sort.  Pile and stack.  Bag and transport.  House a canned buzz.  Here are the papers from a day, months ago that feel restless on my fingertips, still awash in their own day.  Socks and stripes from days in the sun and tossed aside to think about later.  It is later now.  The window is open and old music.  The wind that comes in is gentle and small and not quite warm.  The golden light is enough to make me move more today than usual.  About a third down and I sit and break into skittering.  Trying to rally my thinking, gather my thoughts back into the ant hill.  I wish there was something to eat or smoke or drink that would put me right.  Right side up and moving the right speed.  Right and right as rain.  Nothing I ever ingest seems to steady me on the beam.  I place one foot, one foot and another till there’s no thinking, just walking.  That’s the way to keep on the surface, where the edges are straight and the lines lay in predictable directions.  There is no dipping under where storms brew and repeat themselves, where there are churning gray skies and waves sloshing.  There is no diving under where pain is neatly folded, waiting to be put on.  When I move it all out and everything else finds where it belongs, I wonder how I will remember anything.  Mostly scraps moving agitated by the wind like confetti to a frog. Color and white and color.  Mostly if you do it on purpose or if you don’t or even if you try not to, you are always moving.  Forward and forward.  It doesn’t matter where you try to keep your place.  It doesn’t matter because your toe is swept out of it’s hold and soon back through the strata is how you can know for sure where you were.  If you even want to.