Lullaby

he finds his way home after a night lost in the city the sound of the highway murmurs softly and he shakes while lying in his bed his body rumbles as he sits up to take off his shoes he takes them off one by one and then removes each sock and looks at his feet. his callouses have softened he no longer runs barefoot through the night his feet are covered by sharp patent leather and he remembers the naked homes of barefoot days as he puts the new dark stiff homes into his closet. he is uncomfortable in his bedroom, in his house, in the homes he has placed gently into his closet, so he walks outside barefoot. And he walks, with the clocks in all the homes singing the time, a steady reminder of the illimitable past he walks with the stars singing their anthem of holy fire to the infinite audience of space he relishes the stars, forever naked and shining even as the moon sleeps and he howls at the constellations, who simply shine back at him, telling their stories from days gone by when the sky was not clouded with city smoke and black shoes and empty bottles but was unhindered and sought to for the answers that nobody knew they had the questions for the questions that he wished he had asked years before, and had lived according to the answers the stars would have given him. But instead he bought the black shoes, and has been walking away from the stars and their secrets with his feet safely hidden safely silenced from the stories the stars whispered to him years before the years have passed by and the stars are screaming from the sky as he runs through the midnight streets and late night avenues, kicking bottle after bottle as if he were the only quarterback on the planet, blowing the veil of city smoke out of his face as he runs faster, and faster, and faster until he throws the city off his shoulders and down into the cloud of dust behind him and breathes real air, feels it rush into his throat and fill up his body and he laughs he laughs a real laugh, the type of laugh that you always remember creating but never why and the stars laugh and he and the stars laugh together as the sky pours itself into his fingertips and he and the stars cry big fat beautiful tears at being together once again and his hands are exploding from the art that has been poured into him but he contains it and he contains himself and he sits. He sits with his naked feet stretched out before him and his newly naked heart, pumping fresh new red life and he listens as the stars tell him those bedtime stories that everyone wants to hear but no one ever knows how to tell and he listens, and he sleeps, as the clocks in all the homes wind down slower and slower and eventually stop. he, sleeping softly with sound of the stars singing their lullabies the stars now sleeping soundly, knowing that one of their children has come back home.