Slow Burn

Fate ripped my dreams into bits of paper and I, the fool, dance among the scraps as they flutter about. Every measly attempt to catch a piece, and salvage the remnants of hope, misses. By the time the whirlwind dies it’s just me, lingering in a vacuum. Rolling a full Moon between my fingers like a white bead, I have the night in the palm of my hand. It’s cold and bitter. A damp blanket protects me from chilling gusts of wind as I watch firemen fight a wild blaze with flamethrowers. Figures fly out of the inferno and circle above me in a ritual of affliction and divine mockery. “Hold me,” I whisper to the rag, an inanimate object composed of more grime than cloth, and press against the grating assurance even tighter. I wrap my arms around myself to pretend, if only for a second, that they belong to someone who cares, someone who isn’t lost. Why pray for a myth, an ancient deity to hide behind? Our audacious god is drunk off his own glory, floating in the blood rivers of history, headphones on, listening to Mozart’s forty-first. It comes back in flashes, memories of a distant past, a whole other life, another me. A believer in miracles, a follower of dreams, oh those dreams, those good old dreams. A toddler sits in a sandbox, Tonka truck in one hand, miniature shovel in the other. The child is stuck in an exclusive world with no sense of time. Layers of sand transform into mountains, ravines and valleys. The toy bulldozer is colossal, burrowing a trail through virgin terrain. And the child, utterly poised, is behind the wheel, shifting gears, leaving behind a pair of deep treaded tracks. The edge of the sandbox is a horizon, a beachfront facing the ocean of life, the blinding wisdom concealed in the sun’s corona.