PSL

lou bullock

Last night I found myself tip-toeing along this big bowls brim serenaded by the not-so-distant bellows of the train passing by down in the valley. I got caught flat footed in the reverbs, hints of sound, more feeling than anything, so faint in its persistence we first thought it a plane, but I bent my knees and hedged my bets on spaceship. My money’s still down there, wrapped safe in the smell of the wet earth beneath years and years of downed leaves. 

I want to be perpetually wet like that, like deep dark soil, a moisture the ocean could never write home about. The introduction of salt to silt hinges on an axis of seagulls’ calls and a single palliated woodpeckers work but 

Oh little baby bird, patchy and pink and downright awful in your infancy, don’t rub the brevity of your fragility in my face. Soon enough you’ll have flown away, and the tiny cuts on the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet will make a choice at last. They’ll either pry themselves apart silent and obscene or fade out of me stupid slow and with a ruckus beyond any necessary means, the anti Irish goodbye of healing. 

leaves are falling but nothing's quiet crunching underfoot. I felt a breeze that wasn’t welcome today and almost cried because I don’t want the cold to match inside. The itch to kiss someone on the mouth is sneaking around again but will not scratch. Instead I will french the inky remains of free choice with passion and a vow to treat her well.