When Falling Through a Door Becomes a Dictate

Some people don’t have to flex more than an inch to turn you.

Have you noticed that the same incident keeps happening?

There must be something

flexible

in the air.

We were together at the peak of that farthest one.

Across the valley you could just make out the forms of the poor at work.

Some words don’t have to fluctuate beyond the moment you read them.

A bomber restored from an old war flew close above us.

It looked like it could have had some words on it once.

You could see the crew dancing without their parachutes.

Then it got late.

We had items we knew

not

to trust to guide us down safely.

Forget the hymnals and the self-dissolving sutures.

The dark was bare and without mercy.

Then she called it story time and we all had to say how we felt.

Now would be a good time to reveal the secret.

But what if we should survive?

Hear them?

Hear them with that song again?

It must be a happy poor family or a game

villagers

are playing to celebrate the death of their forefather.

A pale light crept across the cliff face and caught her in her prayers.

It was the following morning and we were near ground level.

The part we had taken for a valley proved to have been a lake.

No one spoke for the rest of that week.

We knew we had met the dark and it had played its favorite tune for us.

For a long time we pretended it had never happened.

Until we read the story about the earthling who came here in search of water.

It had never occurred to us that we had not been here all along.

Most of the sounds were

familiar

but the lyrics seemed too learned.

Now I only do high work.

Sometimes I’ll take the volatile compounds unprotected.

Everything is different once you’ve been the play not in it.

I think of how timid we were in those first few hours.

I scan the sky for something I recognize.

I take piano and don’t care how much I earn.

The misstep that could have cost a life.

These were just parts and the ways we played them meant little.

Little of the house is left but I still go back to see how small it all was.

Like a difference that went too far beneath the skin.

I keep a hand in the ongoing search but only in an advisory capacity.

Losing myself is the next big voice I expect not to

hear

till the families come back to reclaim me.

One second of some important thing.

Enough to keep sealed who you were about to be.

Overhead a hum like one engine cutting out.

Fades with no sound of impact.