After the Carnival

The carnival of southers unfolds,
bleaters parading between stalls stitched from borrowed scaffold,
like a choreographer lost in a warehouse of mismatched tunes.
A laborer lingers at the corner, hawking spiccato illusions,
his voice threading through fractured refrains,
each note a promise that dissolves in the air.

A nonactor hums a half-rhyme,
praising carbamate cures beneath neon wigwags,
where the glow forges reflections that never keep still.
In the gaps between the fanfare and rust,
a footnote of regret flickers in the script,
a tremor beneath every fractured spotlight.

The crowd surges, an uptick in ephemeral traffic,
spilling ambitions into battered goglets,
brimming with sassafras brews and half-lucid hopes.
The air is thick with transactions of forgetting,
with a hunger that does not know its own feast.

But momentum cannot outlast itself.
The world, impatient, refuses to remain a nonactor.
Shadows reconfigure into pellucid fractals,
shapes cut from longing, rearranged by aurora’s tempered hand.

No longer employed by fear, I walk unshackled,
attuned to the legato thrum of heartbeats forging new echoes.
Even the bleaters grow contemplative, their tainted lines
unraveling into something softer, something nearly true.

At last, the choreographer stirs.
The curtain sways. The stage, now bare,
waits for something real.