A Muffled Pillow Speaks To Him

He awoke, though he could not tell if it was the middle of a long night or the middle of his life. The years before were sodden with autumnal leaves and so he remembered much. The mechanics had laid down their tools. Social engineers played harmonic slogans to the tone deaf. A burdensome truth has been put down, and few dared to pick it up again. Then there are the girls; they have waited so long for his kisses, and he now so aware and no longer sleep-walking cannot undress them with those velvet infatuations he had saved just for this moment. He recalls meadow larks and strong apple cider, walks paused in the glow of painted lips. Dark movie theaters, hands on white thighs. Mountains and the ways around them, the freedom of real choices. A muffled pillow speaks to him of what was once and what could have been. Again he feels in the middle of both watching time and circumstance pull themselves apart. He thought: How old do you have to be to be in the middle? Even now when the evening is closing virgins easily birth new mornings, he feels the wetness of their coming and going. He was a rough lad, and he did what roughness can do, now the melting has left him gentle and in love with ghosts. He must move without moving drift soundless to where a world is suspended in a timeless amber, an irreducible middle. The new world order is off-kilter bare-faced and inclined to decline, its jellyfish arms glom onto the frail and unwitting. He will not leap forward with it, he will abide now where the past and future dream his dreams, stay there at that halcyon center where the air in his lungs is still sweet.