Evening Faces

by John Pursch

What color is the flame that partially sears my clifftop year? Next-door neighbors flirt with method acting, scratching at couches, sewing calm textures into coherent sand. Morphing into sleepwalkers, vistas speak of vaulting cats, prescribing half a car crash to totaled strangers, wrapped in telephone lines. Wanderers use copious cereal mills to down anterior problems, withheld from ailing foes by tearful severity’s dreadnought tune. Powdered tea restores minutiae to angled imitations, feeding capricious smiles to scuppered news, sweetly plying the clear, frenetic reasoners with sound. How the tethered shoes peel sworn pavement from the browned and burgeoning olive steam, heaving tackle and topsoil at momentous notes, troubling a corps of salesmen for haughty rows of dinners out. Solitary mendicants flip rabid piles of winking sages, handling score sheets with a plenitude of fleece, whispering tactful raspings in the evening air. Pressing into the early morning flicker of embossed neon, oozing along the turnpike, the flow continues with effortless grace, shining a miner’s lamp into the curtained crevasse. Who can fit a fiery life’s journey into such a timid ambit of proud erosion, hamming it up for soulful waiters on a listing gangplank? Reports of saintly virtues tumble through the microbial dusk, flaunting belief as only so much unclaimed baggage. Turnovers pop into halftime omissions, wearing split-screen eternities, chiding an anchor’s rusty chain. Hearings go unrequited, offering empty beer mugs for a facial tic, steering last call heroines to cheaply made flophouse stew. Headline overtures meander into pressed letter jackets, jockeying for dated prepositions, syllogistic in their oven-baked ruminations. Imperial duties elude overbearing paramours, anticipating the crunch of tired gravel. Turning on the projector, newly minced sentinels clear the clavicle’s rooted fable of its pondering, milky hum, freeing a newfound fighter to plead with altered phases of the moon. Carts await laughter’s tempered gaze, lining lonely Styrofoam nuggets with grins and month-to-month regurgitation. Hulks of punch card pogroms iterate on urges in windswept balky waves, shifting and sloshing at sequential darts. Clocking in to set a tabular fragrance, lewd tomorrows ease the cylinder through paternal axes, crawling on a million shackled feet, training each other to obey. Congealed drops slowly smile at the tapping, scrawling hand, eating whole cities for the price of a nape, stellar and behaved. Proudly irked by westerly playwrights, aspirations of youth invigorate the slackened rays of dawn’s overcast streets, hailing cabled essentials for a bodiless night watchman. Capstones creak at the lingering drift of freshly quaking tarts, wobbly in their rundown heels, edging from backroom busts to coffee shop filtration, searching blandly for a friendly face.