For the first time today, I wasn't afraid of dying.

I looked up at the evening sky, tinged pale purple, like a clouding bruise. Someday, I would be gone - my essence scattering into the wind like the atoms of the whirling eddies of smoke. The sweet-sickening smell of decay, rising from the smug pot of incense in the peanut seller's basket. Strangely enough, it didn't bother me as it would have done, once.

For the first time, I felt the need to rest - to sleep a dreamless sleep.
Controlled clean cut.
Like the guillotine cutter neatly slicing the head of a cigar.

Birth is scented with death
Death with birth..

Omega Bend
by Derick Burleson

Here's where the world comes to an end.
Floods all spring and the snagged roots
of what was once a yellow pine growing
too close to the river. Only now
the river has gone back to its banks,
now the river has gone back to its banks
and sun wants you to believe it's July.
If the river snatched the silver star
I've worn for years now, snatched the star
when my body fell back into clear water
thawed from Bitterroot snow, whose sin was that?
I hope a boulder wears it now, that star,
or that it washes up on the beach of fine
sand glittering alive with flecks of mica.
The children still wet from the river
rolled themselves in hot sand that afternoon
as in powdered sugar or powdered gold
and flung it into the sun all afternoon
in bright streamers of joy: the river sand,
the sun wanted to eat us all with joy
that day where rattlesnakes slither through star-
thistle, where red-tailed hawks snatch those
diamondbacks and teach them to fly, where ospreys
snatch rainbow trout and teach them to fly,
where every morning wind blows upstream
and evening blows down, where that afternoon
truly loved the gold of wheat fields, the gold
pastures of cheat grass and sweet grass growing
through the pumice of an ancient volcano where
the sharpest possible sliver of the new moon
sliced over the deck of this house built safe
far above the Clearwater River on a cliff
and the wind in my face felt like sea wind
as on the deck of a ship on which
someday we will sail down this river
all the way to the Pacific to watch
the stars at the end of the world go out.

Perhaps.

With the stale airs of forced breath
And deserted teacups and poisoned arrowheads,
With the rising ginger of wrinkled love
And lipstick coated smiles and teeth,
Perhaps it's time.

Through a powdered life and butchers' knives
And hands full of burning fireflies,
With funerals for dying machines,
Perhaps it's time to set you free.

And with scented candles and paper ducks
And hair that falls in bits and tufts,
With cats run over by speeding cars,
It's time to walk away towards
Another life, another lie,
Another stab at a perfect love story
For my love for you
Is a Russian winter
And I am just your morning glory.

Perhaps.

And how much more attention will I need?
Too little of it keeps me gasping, and too much of it bores me.

Tergiversating, indeed.