In the Dark   I should have smelled it — desire touched with brimstone, incense of the gods and everything I wanted. The song was hushed, like a hymn or a dirge — it drew me in, and the sting would come later. I knew all that, but how was I to make it stop? And anyway, it never stops — never. The gods allow what they allow, no more than that. By day the rules make some kind of sense, but the night is footsteps and forgetting, burning tires and shattered glass, barred owls and morphine, rites of spring enacted in shadows with choirs of demons and tricksters. I had to go — the dark, the drums. Who was I to say no?     © Michael Fleming Dummerston, Vermont November 2021