guilted into yet another
late evening dog-walk
after too long spent
indoors and weighed down
by endless introversion
trudging an unlit path
free of the imposition
of street lamp
     and headlight
with nothing except
those familiar constellations
and a degree of
     lunular exposure
to guide our path
despite the cold and
that lingering feeling
of obstinate lethargy
we firmly planted
our mud-caked boots
upon the saturated ground
unstable and clogged
as it may have been
in order to marvel
at that moment
of unexpected perfection
perhaps it was simply
a case of fortuitousness
or sheer coincidence
but to us it seems
the universe is offering
more wishes than we could
ever have hoped for

i lied there on the pavement, eyes fixed on the big dipper, waiting for the stars to fall apart all at once, or for a car to run over me, whichever came first. and there i was, staring at the space and the emptiness looked back at me, and for a second, it felt like looking at my own chest; the stars, my bones, slowly coming undone. i wondered if someone felt that way too. i wondered if someone else gazed at the constellations and thought, maybe the stars are disillusioned with the galaxy and so that’s why they fell during meteor showers. or maybe they were lost causes dressed as angels jumping off bridges in heaven, ever the cynic. maybe it wasn’t something poetic. maybe it was watching celestial bodies

i lied there on the pavement, under flickering lamp posts that looked bigger than the stars. the poems always said that stargazing is romantic it wasn’t. ironically tonight, i lost count of the falling stars while wondering why they’d gone too soon. wondering if they’d survived the fall. wondering if they knew that their descent was burying me in the sound of my breath. maybe in an hour, the black space in my chest would consume me and then i too, would be a shooting star lost in peripheral views.

and i hope i would survive the fall. and i kind of hope i wouldn’t.