Sober...

The slow-motion sound of grinding metal...

Sober is a rough brush along the face, a starkness that comes in and out like labored breathing. It is the absence of hiding places. Shade at ground level with a patch of blue in sight above the highest tree, continuously altered by moving clouds. The passing of memories along the mind.

Memories are like hooks constantly revolving along a laterally moving (yet imperceptibly elliptical) wheel (or an infinite constellation of independently functioning circular wheels) inside the internal machines that scape along the edge - at intermittent times - catching the side. Making contact and completing a circuit. Making demands. That is what I see when I picture memory. Infinite wheels scraping the sides. Sometimes gently, sometimes fatal.

Sober is a glass without ice. Iced tea. The water goes quiet when the splashing stops.

There is more I'd like to say but I won't.

The sun sags. There is a scarecrow watching over the ducks, the infamous "dead man" who has been put up since Halloween 2010. He holds his skull in his hands, aware of his job.

The grass has been cut.

There is a point where life becomes a kind of slow-motion car crash. Sober is the sound of the metal grinding and the forms deforming. The knowledge of falling apart. It is clear and it takes a slow, steady breath. Surveying the entirety of the landscape but without a single thought of breathing life upon the corpses splayed out upon the battlefield.

The devil is always jovial, happy to shake your hand.

A song trails off as I glance out at the dock. An upturned canoe centered in the far background with a patch of cattails that set up shop a few years ago. Once a tree thought it might set up in the mud at the end of the dock. Taking advantage of what seemed a steady low tide. The madness of flood dispossessed him of that notion.

The wind blows the cattails northward. Eastward. Somewhere else. Sending out an SOS.