The Moon and the Things it Failed to Expose

Rising slowly, high into the sky, the moon compliments the galaxy and the stars, displaying reflections on the windows of houses and of cars, leaving the daytime to struggle, to try to discredit “misconceptions and lies” about the temperature of the earth, and it’s unwavering rise. But at night, ah, the night, the lack of light tends to put the world to sleep, but not me, counting neither seconds nor sheep. Making not a discernable peep, I abandon this slumber and saunter secretly to the street, where I rely on my feet and their pace to lead me away into this evening’s lasting embrace. Disgracing my home and those who gave me life is far more taxing, considerably less relaxing
than a certain matriarch would claim concise. I don’t claim freedom of guilt or of shame but the blame, pushed by the hilt to my name is a vicious attempt to instill self-contempt.

This day, the sun stays away where it rests, and the moon fills its place like an understudy kept backstage, waiting for this fateful of days when the sun, this show’s star, instead of rising with a blaze remains, sunk beyond the horizon like eyes realizing what happened and what it is that they’ve seen: a scene, no doubt, of tragedy and travesty, death and disdain, the sun saw something, a silhouetted stain, a man in pain with nothing to lose and less to gain. The sun watched the pained man explain to his wife that he loved her ferociously and nothing would change, and the man’s wife believed he that she vowed to stand by, but the tears in his eyes blew a hole in his disguise, proved his words lies. Recognized, his grief would be lovingly received, but now the sun grieved, and the man’s wife lost faith that the man’s life could be saved.

And as I walked with my flashlight on the third straight day of night, pondering the inner workings of life, the rights and the wrongs and the maybes and mights, a sight fell before me, illuminated. Right on the sidewalk, piled up in a bloodied heap, as plain as day (had the sun not hidden to weep), laid a man, or what remained after three days of night, what remained after this man’s drunken struggle with strife, after this man’s skewed perception of life, after this man turned on himself the knife, and their he lay alone, collecting sand and stone eternally, concernedly pressing his arms and his chest straight against the ground, so that sand, stone, and the rest will, as long as he resides there, not be found. Be he moved, the bits of sand and stone fit snugly into indentations pressed into his rotting, elastic skin by the very bits of sand and stone held within, and the stones, like orphans, are torn and taken from their sidewalk home.

The moon, of course, playing the role of the sun shone brightly until dawn when the widow’s weeping was done, and the sun rose again, and the world again arose, and the widow wore black clothes, thanked me for the closure I’d exposed, and before she was gone she sang me this tune: “If I can let my life go on, then surely, so can you."

-a.l. knox