Your Untimely Demise

Light sweaters and crackling air; autumn leaves and warm blankets. Winter is already whistling its sorry tune, but after a too-sticky summer, we're almost humming along.

Fall means fresh notebooks and fresh starts, clean trapper keepers and neatly labeled folders. A matching outfit laid neatly on the bedspread. There was always so much hope surrounding that ritual; it was a new year and anything could happen.

As an adult, that feeling has become a stranger: we just wake up and we are. But in those first crisp days of fall, with a warm mug of cider and palms pressed against, I can almost feel it again.

My housemate says that fall is a time of hoarding, a sort of anxious desperation. I feel that, too. These days of flip flops and tank tops and back porch barbecues, they're numbered and we're counting each one, quietly, quietly. Cold nights and heavy boots, they're peering in our windows and waiting in the cobwebs, and we're lighting every candle to shoo them out, to welcome them in.

===

I have the day off today and I'm sleepy-eyed and cat-napping, waking up to fingerspell sonnets on white keys. But a sonnet never comes; just this.



you're starting fires you can't put out
and the air is getting thin
and when your last bridge has been burned down
well that's when you've gotta swim


I'm happy with this thing in front of me, I'll tell you that.


photo credit photographer padawan