The Haze
by: Rev. Jack Godsey

It's gotten hazy,
like the day you stopped riding the bus to school.
And as the discarded curls
of gray smoke
ride out the window of a gray car
in a town named Gray
under a blood gray sky,
the gray boy colors inside the lines
of blind devotion and belief in dramatics.

A movie he watched once made him feel something,
a simple piano riff
complex in execution, overlayed
with words he'd heard before.
Deja vu jolts of phrases ring true.
In this kind of dead city,
keeping the recording intact. A life
etched out in gray plastic,
like a poorly-made blank tape
imprinted with the sorry strains of an old record,
songs
which come through droning and slow. They're understood
only by engineers of sadness
and the carnival-sideshow magicians of meloncholia.

But back to quotations and emotions
he can't choose to forget.
Filled in circles, his SAT test scores lay
on a shelf somewhere, reminding
of potential unrealized. And repeating,
and repeating,
and plagiarizing himself. "Where
are we FUCKIN goin??"

If you want to see what they feel like, paint it
in terms of nonsense inside jokes,
a lot of fossilized moments. Once he felt pure,
driving her home, and realizing that
despite her guitar-playing boyfriend
she would have kissed him.
Call it purity because
morality copied from the ledgers of marijuana
or anemia
wouldn't let him do it.

You create memory
with connection, and now his music collection
is a scrapbook of days, each CD
opening to:
a night in the car, on the way to see her.
Sitting on piles of dirty clothes, and
"it's OK that it's dark, right?"

Open to:
the thin metallic edginess of LSD
conjuring drama at 4 a.m. The soundtrack.

Open to:
This or that night, this or that girl, this or that
feeling. It IS all artifice and it DOESN'T matter.
And it IS all a waste of time again. And
you can write the script even before it happens.
Feel each event distinct hovering in the future.
Faces and technicalities change, morph, melt,
merge in new patterns but
a die only has six sides. Cast your fate enough
and you see the patterns emerge.

Close a chapter, feel the thirteen.
Wake with your face buried in a pillow
that still smells like her
and will remind you of her for weeks because
you don't even have the motivation
to do laundry.

Everyone knows
they hold this close, in purple fingernails
or under shirts with blue stars,
the knowledge that everything about the past was,
if not beautiful,
at least real. The first impressions
of an unscarred mind;
now he can't conceive of living without diversion.

We call it our medicine, which is the holy sacrament,
the tool of the trade, the consolation
at the end of days, filled with
a job you hate or thoughts that make you shudder.

And have you changed so much,
added lines to your face and let your wardrobe drift
into the land of lazy bohemia?
Or,
as is more likely,
are the pathologies set early on, and now
new carnival masks only make you look uglier.

Day by day it looks more like
shadowy dealings, murder, insanity rising?
But no, nothing like that,
nothing that would go down on film.
Just mediocrity surrounding like the haze
which hides the Appalachian mountains,
obscuring the beauty you remember from
a childhood golden.