Cicadas trumpet de`guello chants in an all-too-familiar, random drumline. The night blooms black in a star-spotted bruise, no clouds in her sky, save for the thin jet-stream just below...
The brightest of August moons beams a glare that shudders the heart, reverberating elastic chills up and down my spine.
The fiercist, fullest one-eyed stare I've ever witnessed peers above the jet-stream cloud like the frozen, glassy-eye of a tarantula, startling me into the shadows of our backyard Oak--the whipping boy of my young adulthood. The trunk of it still bears the scars of my knives in her bark. Those craters, chips and cracks so deep and severe that not even the clear night's sky and the shadows-cast from above by her own leaves and branches could hide the toll of a wreckless and miserable knife-throwing miscreant (as I was for three years) from the one-eyed August Lion's glare.
I light up a cigarette and take in a long draw, expelling ashen wisps of cloud up towards the Oak's upper branches. The monotonous gray curbs quickly to the many pin-pricks of light seeping through the leaves, and swirling shades of two--white in grayish-blue--providing me with but one more barrier between the awesome eye of August and my own pair.
As quickly as the cloud curbs to the touch of light, the swirling shades of ghostly-gray start to dissipate. Descending into the blackish glass of night, void beyond the realm of light, in two breath's time.
I draw again, aiming once more towards the stretching Oak limbs, but I don't watch the cloud. I look down at my feet, flick my cigarette, and draw again, deeply. I listen carefully to the hissing of the paper and tobacco as its fibers sizzle, branch and twist themselves ever-closer to the filter--ever-closer to their death. I hold it in longer this time, and I watch the ashes tinkle down slowly, from falling reddish-orange sparks to gray flakes lost in contrast to the shadows. Then momentarily catching white wisps of light from the great Lion Moon of August. They flicker and shine bright in each flake, one at a time, as they all float slowly to the ground and disappear. I think to myself:
*A Sky-View from a falling Snowflake couldn't be as alarmingly beautiful a view as this!*
*The toll of my weakness; the passing particles of the poison I feed myself--EVEN THIS--is Beautiful in Death!*
*Even this, a flake of ash, can have a muse--For even a flake of ash can catch light in the darkness of death!*
~*~TO BE CONTINUED~*~
