Charade Seized by a Man by JKD

After “Down to the Line” by Jonathan Wonham

Glance over to roadside stopgap, cement gardens thumbing transport, I, paralysed, wince interiorly, a child squeezed between doing time and placing blame for his never flawed, happenstance, thawing in knee-high thickets lime-green shade swallowed at snowdusk. Waited, or a grating. Should a well brought up girl mystify? Holder of myself, quiet, frayed, too barbarian, each star questioned too wordily for the supplied key-carded, coded vocabularies. Eye following a line, a cue, resting its elbows on unseen bars sometime between a tourniquet and the rabid shoals. That briny scent’s the seashell of a girl's strong handbone, a handout muffling a rag, the taste of his eyes, her ear. Shouts of a high capacity for captivity. This narrative’s opaque down to the fine print, signals waving to a blur of brushed-past truckers, smell of sweat, grease, strawberries. Sequined aftermessages didn’t fit her tiara, or into his hip flask, but that was ok—they’d keep playing at any cost, until the highway closed or a forest came overcrowding them there in that low-throated howl a dark furry mass.