Autumnland

Somewhere there’s always October

Remembering how these years one day will add up, as your heart fears for it all

To not make sense, even when those days of heaven become just another memory

Right between that space where daydreams and nightmares meet, in this head so full

Of something weird, always wishing you weren’t an outsider like it’s Carnival of Souls

As the somedays run off into nowhere, still chasing yourself through the eyes of others

Remembering the way it once used to feel, meanwhile the answers never seem to appear

Until everyone’s faces start to blur, before tomorrow’s baptized and none of it matters

Asking questions like you’re somebody’s kid, to be anywhere—everything all the time

In-love with pieces of everyone you remember, a part of you like this’s all important

But somewhere you know it’s always October, someplace where the dreams aren’t lies

In that infiniteness before someone sees you, where maybe everyone else’s got it wrong

Till they say hello and figure you out, so everyday you wish that you were anyone else

Someone besides this tender, bruised, beautiful skin of a thousand or so contradictions

Cause this chapter isn’t done, this particular season hasn’t been particularly good enough

So come back when it’s figured out, when you don’t feel unqualified to run your own life

Like you aren’t always in-love, even alone or with those ghosts carried over your shoulder

Childishly chasing fragments of eternity and calling it Autumnland, after all you’re foolish

So self-aggrandizing, self-importanced, self-decreed that this whole thing’s somehow a story

Building somewhere when you know as well as anyone that there’s no such things as promises

No ledges, ledgers to hold onto but yourself and gravity, in this little planetarium of solipsism

A ballroom of cracked mirrors and the distant echo of whatever you’ve always could have been

Yet somewhere there’s always October, falling leaves, rust branches, wearing your favorite sweater

Voice crackles and breath exfoliates as autumn smoke, because now at least something makes sense

Round the brick and concrete edifice of someone’s upstairs and this sidewalk is playground chalk

Whispers, wisps and vespers as candlelight and suddenly you don’t care if paradise is wherever whatsoever

Because you’re not there but here, imagining the fall as she always was, belonging to a locket she once gave you

Like an autumn song, trying so hard to hide the sweetest complications inside as you still ask yourself why

Did the stars plant them there, as to even say you wish that things were simpler would be calling blue skies heaven

So you wonder if that place in the world called home they told you all about is even a thing

And if it’s quiet enough you can still breath belonging somewhere like it was all San Junipero

Hear the words, smell the spin of everything and in the span of seconds you’re no longer irrelevant

Telling her you’ll remember her, bringing him with you, that snapshot tucked in your back pocket that keeps you up at night

Under the brightest and sunniest of the lord’s days without a clause, cloud or second-guess as you stand against it in iconoclast

With no one but yourself to blame, so you think about that sweetest rose in the middle of the field in Central Park late-September

Driving until the trees bled tangelo and blades of simmering stalk bristled with the antagonistic romance of the Mid-Atlantic

Past Avalon and the memories imbedded into ancestral wedding grounds and white sand of the Algonquin and saw Autumnland

So now you keep it to yourself until the rainstorm comes when these eyes will meet like no one’s daughters

Where we’ll dance and sing before angel cries and swaying grass against tourmaline and obsidian firmament

The scent of our homelands adrift as it’s almost forever Halloween in Twin Peaks amidst the fall called October

Of parks with clocktowers, oh Autumnland how you wish she was here skipping stones across that endless creek

Where time and memory sit just beyond that abandoned overlook of peripheral lake and forests of Maine

To be waiting for you there, in our special place some day we’ll always call our Autumnland

 © 2024, A. M. D’Angelo