[Newspoetry] The remains of another day lie about me.

[DL Emerick]

The remains of another day lie about me.

They lie, as in an untruth that I've told,
Or even as ones that I have not told yet.

They lie in pieces, unassembled or broken,
But which it is I couldn't quite tell you.

Outside my window, blinded as it is,
A uniformity of snowfall covers all,
In something like a blanket of truth,
A blankness being so much like truth
We confuse the one for some other.

The parts are not a whole of anything;
They're just there; theirs is not "there is".

Against this slate-grey day rises up gorge,
a fleeting memory shadows my world views,
and I think a line of Herbert's words,
softly falling, of my words and where I go,
of where I want to go, them leading me.

He's gone beyond words now; still, he speaks.

He says, perhaps only apocryptically,
Of how we might play a word game,
Saying a saying until it breaks up,
Saying it, in chant, enchant, inch an ant,
As the sounds of the saying go away,
And the rhythm of a dialogue forms,
Sucking the sounds into the vacuum
Where your mind ceases and wonders.

This call is a one-person telephone game.

Softening, such breaks as these make,
A rest break, a brake on the rest,
A fast break down a path, memory lane,
Where baskets bounce back up, unscoring
The scoring that so marked word games -
And breakfast is hurled, breaking up,
"They say 'Breaking up is hard to do'"
>From popular song singing years ago,
As 'When we should be making up."

Break rules as if made for no-brakes rule:
"This is my lonely body broken for you --
And this, my holy blood, drunken for you."

Day breaks, said Friedrich, a Dawn -
And days break down as cars on autobahn,
When its traffic is too intense for words
To speak us, cogently, so gently, go gently,
Into that good night that follows this day,
That had no date to it, none with you,
None with you in it; "no" words become you,
Yet is you, wandering into my life and me,
and "that's just the breaks," I say sadly,
making something of a lucky break-in me.

Was that Herbert's game, saying a saying,
Soothing the pain of words, scotch skipping,
Sipping scotch from bottleneck's 100 proofs:
Break, break, break, break, break, break,
Break, break, break, break, break, break,
Break, break, break, break, break, break,
Break, break, break, break, break, break,
Break, break, break, break, break, break,
Break, break, break, break, break, break,
Break, break, break, break, break, break,
Break, break, break, break, break, break,
Break, break, break, break, break, break,
Break, break, break, break, break, break,
Break, break, break, break, break, break,
Break, break, break, break, break, break,
Break, break, break, break, break, break,
Break, break, break, break, break, break,
Break, break, break, break, break, break,
Break, break, break, break, break, break,
Break, break, break, break and bury me,
Bury my brokenness, my broken heart, break.

Someplace, if you followed this, in chant,
A frog is croaking of having been a price,
Of needing a kiss and, yes, something more,
Before drains this day takes its own remains.