Pieces Of Resistance

There is this place or space that is stuck in time
Anachronistic reality off the beaten linear path,
An old water cooler hooked up to lead pipes
A septic tank that overflows every now and then,
Lights flicker around the porcelain insulators,
A fire ball shoots out of the hand-crank wall phone
Whenever there is a thunderstorm,
The place breathes with its own spirit
Expanding the crack in the wall in the summer
Closing it in winter,
When the windows fog over with condensation
Watery faces appear where there used to be a clear view
Into the courtyard below,
Dogs lie on the wooden porch stretched out in the sun
A rabbit hops silently behind them,
The apparition that appears from time to time
Speaks in a puffy voice trying to explain its shaven head,
A black cat sleeps in the bathroom sink,
Birds fly into the windows and die
In the English ivy that eats away at the clapboards,
Last night's empty wine bottle
Thinks about making its way to the ravine
To join all that rest in the charnel ground
Where water ravages away time
Washing the dead to the valley below,
A far-off train whistle blows a five note cacophony
The black death wing circles overhead,
A vulture of compassion waiting
To clean up the carrion of resistance,
Morsels of life chewed upon and spat out
Into the fray of hemorrhaging consciousness,
Caressed with the bilious analogy of death,
Kissed with lips of mediocrity,
Sewn together with the thread of decay
That bites into the flesh
Leaving teeth marks of rabid desire,
There is a longing for a return to that which once was
To that subtle humility of quiet repose
That pervades time and transposes lives
Into the inkling existence of metamorphosis,
The contemplative nature of humankind
Has passed this place by
Leaving it in the slipstream of the universe
Lost in the eddy of the backwater of temporal insanity
Adrift in the sea of tranquility
Swirling in the maelstrom of infinity
Until the sun and moon and stars are reset in the sky
And lost time restores the beauty of the world.