Debtor’s Prison Road

I. They let me go at night, minus my timepiece, lighter, personal effects. The air is always shaking the same jars of safety pins: cicadas. Song is my recidivism: always I'm abandoning the road to stand (unwatched, unseconded) in someone's field. The stars (that are not mine) tick fitfully, they always have appointments. Punctual, six-sharp, they are David's; they have lodged in his death tent, have stuck in his mud sleep. Bad luck leaves me a loan: no company, no katy- did or promissory note or night can last. The air loses its nerve, the old saw its eyeteeth and I my words—my alwaysing and my. II. In hush the repossessors reach the edges of the field. They pass for shadows, sheep of ambush, animals of permanence. They turn a black beyond returning and they haunt the sleepless. I don't count, who cannot earn my keep.