Chasing the Gray

Suddenly over the sudden years I have felt an encumbrance; I sense an albatross - the weight of sundry uncharted days. Times I chronicle today as if I were a wax cylinder or a broken spool in a cassette tape. A gray goose wing flight is my personal sky. I must write 'personal sky’ ten times a day so that the abated will not be forgotten, yet how to keep a dull sky fresh when the days are so metallically shiny and blue? How to recall those monochrome stories we once told our fully colored-in children, for they have grown far beyond such unchanging horizons. I have so little time, yet must set down the legend of little boy gray, his story has almost passed away, now eyes have no corners to see around, I knew him well, alas the roads to that tale are backhoed by cartoon rainbows. The bygone calls me out into the dinge and drizzle where a lineage of dog turds leads the nose to a yesteryear. a knuckle end of time it was, free from the wow and weight of newness. We lived under our own cloud cover, Poetic meadowlarks meant something once, but now look at them, they strut like gawdy roosters over our gray-worn journals. Times past cannot be cured, they are far gone, all is hump-backed like a speed bump. Wordsworth and his damn sunny daffodils - as if we did not know already. A long moment ago history ran through open fingers as ungainly as any grayling gosling. A flint faced sky was abuzz with love, war and a brawny heraldic Kevlar, It was understood that the compassion of the ordinary is to drain away any hint of an uncertain tint or hue. I unshoulder now this burden of tawdry things, shed this molting, wingless, emblematic Auk, and for one last page of time record all the trappings of the then and thereupon, dumping them most irreverently into a vividly golden ash can.