When the Clock Finally Clears Its Throat

When the Clock Finally Clears Its Throat

BR Wilson Guitars & Cigars, The Bipartisan Patriot

A man does not truly begin living

until Death pulls up a chair beside him

lights a cigarette with cold fingers

then says nothing for a long, uncomfortable while.

That silence changes people.

At twenty

you believe mornings are infinite.

You spend years like pocket change.

Throw whole summers into the gutter chasing noise.

Cheap applause.

Bad whiskey.

Women who smelled like gasoline and wintergreen gum.

Dreams stacked so high they blocked the stars themselves.

Youth is a beautiful idiot.

Then one day

the doctor pauses half a second too long.

Your knee sounds like an old staircase in a condemned church.

You start reading obituaries

searching unconsciously for your own last name.

Funny thing though.

The shadow does not shrink life.

It sharpens it.

Coffee tastes deeper afterward.

Rain means something again.

A song from 1978 can crack your ribs open wider than theology.

You stop worshipping clocks.

Stop arguing with strangers in neckties who were born spiritually dead in some air-conditioned office park outside Hartford.

You begin noticing things.

The way your dog waits at the door like forgiveness itself.

The sacred glow of a porchlight at 2 AM.

A wife asleep under a blanket while the television flickers blue across the walls like distant Atlantic lightning.

The smell of cigars mixed with cut grass and October.

Christ...

Mortality turns ordinary life holy.

Whitman knew it.

The old bastard sang about death the way sailors speak of weather.

Not fearfully.

Not dramatically.

Just honestly.

Because the grave is not merely an ending.

It is the final editor.

Suddenly you understand why old men sit quietly sometimes.

Why veterans stare at flags differently.

Why survivors laugh harder than everyone else at funerals.

We know the meter is running.

That knowledge is gasoline.

It tells you to kiss slower.

Drive nowhere sometimes.

Forgive your brother before one of you ends up in a box under damp Massachusetts dirt.

Play the guitar louder.

Tell the truth even if your voice shakes like a rusted screen door in January wind.

Most people sleepwalk through existence.

Death taps us awake.

That is the cosmic joke.

The skull beneath the skin

the ticking beneath the ribs

the slow unavoidable march toward the long dirt nap...

those things are not curses.

They are invitations.

To live now.

Fully.

Messily.

Without permission.

I swear some nights

when the moon hangs low over the porch

when the cigar smoke curls upward like old cathedral incense

when the house is finally quiet...

you can almost hear Whitman himself laughing somewhere beyond the dark.

Not cruel laughter either.

Warm laughter.

The laughter of a man who finally understood

that life becomes precious precisely because it does not stay.