Nightfall
At dark we rest in the humid silence. A small plane meanders through distant stars. This porch facing the quiet road is a sanctuary after-hours, when the congregants have all gone home. I can afford these hours in a life of nowhere to be. By now the well-worn cliches are embers grown cold in the search for originality. Remembering the words of my father: Do something, even if it’s wrong. What if something means refilling my wine glass? Or inhaling a chest-full of night air until the ends of my fingers tingle? I’ve done plenty of wrong, but no one lives there anymore. Nothing but empty houses, weeds creeping through windows, the faint echo of a barking dog. Impermanence crumbling and creating distance. Was anything what it seemed?
Where it Ends
Cold metal in my mouth, waiting for a decision, Motel room in a badly-aged part of Saginaw, where the future passed without a second glance and now I must hear the couple in the next room make love like animals wrestling with sharp teeth and then sighs. The years calculated produce nothing but the sum of all mis-steps and the lingering truth. It was always headed in this direction, like the time I tried to overdose on acid while the full moon blazed outside my bedroom window. I woke with the morning sun, with a sharp awareness that registered neither disappointment nor relief for a future that might be better if only. If only what? Stoned dreams of an empty hallway, the silence holier than the murmur of a thousand congregations. Silence like an empty sanctuary at midnight. Finger on the trigger, cold metal my final meal as the wind stirs up dust in a near-empty parking lot while I fall deeply into a swirling abyss that could set the night on fire.
Bruce Gunther is a retired journalist and poet who lives in Michigan. He’s a graduate of Central Michigan University. His poems have appeared in The Comstock Review, Modern Haiku, Arc Magazine, The Loch Raven Review, and The Dunes Review, among other publications.
The Pine Cone Review 