defined

Some days we find ourselves between obsessions. Some days imagination strains. Gaze towards the hill line, bathed in the settled sun. Listen to the work of limb and feather. A song glides upon an updraft. The thoughts just drift or drown.

The lost continent arises from the glibly familiar, the world ignored while chasing ghosts and writing reasons. The scent of heat, the cast of dust. The world as it tumbles around its bonded star, the whirring reoccurrence of day and night into the broad perpetuity. The impotence of description in witness of the thing itself.

I would say I wandered true. I would say I found a path for walking. The day had little interest in any ebb or flow, no course to cry for when it knew I was in the wrong. Sweat and sunburn and the direction of dogs. Whatever words I shed will wear down and ring untrue. The things we claim supplanted by the things we do, history always writing itself obsolete. Whatever tracks I leave will lose their place and wear out any welcome.

let's get lost

Somehow the heat slips in between me and sleep, and I am barefoot pacing the dusty yard. Somehow midnight whiles past, and I am watching moths wave good-bye. It's always something the mind opines. It's always so close, fingers brushing flesh. The hours drawls as if wisdom awaits.

I seek confusion. So sure that my plodding certainty is the wrong straw clenched, I try to find what I do not identify. Kiss me quick and tamp my brow. The night is a fever caught in my eyes. The night is a blur and a lie. The only road defies detection.

When I wrote this, I had almost forgotten. When I wrote this, all I could do was repeat. The same gray shade, the same brief glimmer. The glamour of some woman without a name. That weight of saying asleep beneath my tongue, that name held gentle. I said it then, as if it was new. I will say it again and again.

broad autumnal

The world doesn't divulge the depths of its feel, the breadth of the draw, the grasp of the limits of light. It only slows beneath these strokes of shadows. It only sleeps in the sense that it dreams without end. The shrieks of the girls in the soccer field echoing through the steel gleam and the painted fall. An owl somewhere nearer to heaven, calling down sign.

The day clings to the beaches, it slows near the rivers. It gives each and every, and then it is gone. We scarcely note the replacement. We are callus and we are fickle, devouring all these lined up lovelies. We are apt and we are hungry. Confession never catches us clear.

I sweat through my shirt as if it was in contest. I fail every test and blame it on the wind. Pine needle and crow feather. Evidence just flings itself at my feet. I will feel this summer for my life and then forget it. I will feel this autumn caught in the constellations peeping through the fence. The world broods on, and I follow my laundry. The word says nothing, and all the words fall down.

blunt color blue

I favor my swords already freed of stones, quick the better portion of sharp. I favor shedding my shields too soon. The played out poems and the days that bloom like wounds, the dry dust and the dirty water. All these notes of remission left scratching at the window. All these ideas about tomorrow driven over the edge. The fresh blade readied to part the sky, falling through this blunt color blue.

I guess there is a surrender left, overwhelmed by my own bitter nature. The epitaph written beneath this squandered skin. The gravitas of the deep descent. Just old enough to know what is left inside. Somehow still green, catching up with the rest of the class. Somehow broken beneath these impermeable layers of iron and earth. Always ready for the wrong war, the infighting left despite this enduring siege.

I have given up before, and I will give up again. I don't have the grit left for this sort of fight. The sullen battle of attrition, time running out as the ammo is the only thing saved. The flesh abdicates, leaving nothing to pace the floors and watch the walls. Grace only something you used to say before supper. Redemption only another flawed reboot. The sword stuck casting shadows, the sky painted windows blazing as the lights go down.

the slow dissolve

The truth just trickles down your chin, all these stars and sighs and watermarks. Glib sparks that light and heat your smile. The machinations gone up in smoke, the soul gone down in flames. The tale followed into the woods, the crushed mutters of dead leaf and broken wing. Something in that air that bends the air toward ghosts. Something in the dust and humus, the open grave of the slow dissolve.

The crossroads wait in warning, these stories of travelers and mistakes in the dark. The humble dusk, the finger prints of smudged grease and soot. The first words ever spelled out in that dust. A marker by the trail, that sudden stack of stones. These ancient sayings salting our bitter fields. These oldest voices weighing on our bones.

The night arrives. I miss your light. The press of your hip, the heat of your flesh. Those blissful fumblings from the borders of some wished for world. The simple facts that arrive as poetry. The creak and yawn of the dark against the windows. The strangeness of every bed without you.

golden rule

There is a voice far below the sirens, the scratching of roots, the whispered shifting of stone and soil. There is a call stitched to every shadow, a beacon bound to every star. The night, the day, the flow and stagger. The fairy winged mosquitos. The night birds with their wings of ghosts. She speaks to skin and soul.

It isn't enough that my name eludes me? Isn't enough that every word has dried up and blown away? The moon presses down with every breath. With each breath the appetites increase. The last hurrah and the blue abandon. That first kiss wonder always hiding just over the rise. The way the eye always slides towards that bright horizon.

I am not so much lost as drawn more subtle. I am not so much burnt out as learning to abide these flames. The hush is heavy without the levity of distant voices. This season but the tide run low. You may search or pry, you might hunt and stalk. Your sights might find me greased with moonlight and a pause in the wind. The rule is never simple get or get got. Law must always find the water level. That same call behind every fickle shine. If you see me, I can see you.

no photo

The day grinds on, all gasp and hush, all spill and greed. The sky is staggered sun and clouds, blue and white and all manner of yellow muddling through heaven. The light still knows the feel of your skin. The night still cups its hands to gather your tears. This I know, though I can not prove it. This I know by way of bone and blood and clumsy memory, the truth so seldom held until it has been abandoned.

You took the pictures, you kept the proof. Together, then apart. Forever, then never again. There were letters, there were witnesses. Not one thing, no one soul to trust. We all inherit our failings along with our virtues. Eventually there is no way to distinguish one from the other. The villain proves the victim, the saint proves only another beast. All our history reverse engineered from how it ends. Even gone all these decades you paint the scenery with your improvident absence. Even without you here, you drown the day.

I have been cursed and reviled, attacked and endured and finally forgotten. Everybody gets to be Ozymandias over time. My effigy burned in ashtray and photographic ash, the very idea of me a fury in your heart. I could never have replied in kind. You are tattooed on the inside of my eyes, you are stitched into the shadows beneath my skin. There is no photo to remind that I can not forget. There is no switch to flip that can turn off this light.

verisimilitude

The sun goes down and everybody has dropped the ball. I don't know the color of the sky, or the way the landscape shone and faded as the light dispersed. I don't know a thing about the forecast storm or the rumblings to the west. For someone that traveled no farther than thirty yards today, I am all over the map. For someone without any information, I sure seem to have a lot to say.

There are shadows on the ceiling. There are books stacked upon the floor. I am still like a stone, washed in electric light. I am quiet like a corpse, laid out on clean sheets. I smell of sweat and dog and smoke. Indolent flesh and an unsettled mind. Idle words spoken to no-one at all.

Another day has slipped through my grasp. The wheel has turned again without note. No pen or picture, no grace or regret. Hours shed like smoke, every memento a kind of fire. I am the levity of meat, the weight of rumor. Maybe tomorrow the words will match the deeds. Maybe tomorrow I will tell you something true.

storm warning

This is how my breath escapes me. This is how the night unfolds. Clouds clot, heat lingers, so much taken as settled when it is only the conflict that plods. The world swept in peals of light and shadow, turning for the ten thousand reasons that do not include you or me. We refract and genuflect, the long yawning continuity of life scurrying against the edge of the razor. These gasps and inspirations as common as carbon, as ordinary as the calling tide and the climbing moon.

Some places boil, some places bake. Some towns drown and some go bone dry. Every course and happenstance without words to call or prophesize. We differ in tongue and prayer, vary in calm and cataclysm. So much confusion between luck and fate, between advantage and dominion. Call down the sky, defile the earth that owns you. Pretend that your stories will ever come close to the truth. Believe what you will, the earth will still tremble and the rain will still fall.

The moment comes and all reason is in remission. The fevers and demons that curdle thought and affect break and dissolve in the wake of each mistake. Awake in another broken body, come to in another nightmare. Passions play havoc, and all the alarms are spent. You can watch the enduring stars. You can try to sleep at night. Foolhardy or as wise as all time, it is your mind committing these crimes of need and fury. It isn't who you are. It isn't what you do. It is the turmoil of every wager being settled at once. It is the prison of our common error, mistaking our wishes for the world.

the moth in the pine

Another love letter, and I am nowhere to be seen. Even the moon arrives before me. Always the shuffling in the dust, forever that mistaken constellation. You are the measure between the limits of the mirror and that relentless escape of light. You are the crossroads of this wishing and all lingering proof. You are my thoughts caught in slow nightfall. I sit still, another inscription written in ice, awash in the moth light moon.

There is no secret to me. These words I trail like breadcrumbs, like the endless entangling of summer growth or winter beards. I cast them intending your steady breath, cast like the salt of your lips. The whole portion plated, that compliance of sensation and belief blowing smoke and shedding spark. Love another name we give to reckless limit. The dreamer lost in that power of the dreamings end.

The tongue always trails the plodding of time. All these stories buried in the slow frames of waterway and mountaintop. These words that heel after the numbered of the hunt. If there was a heaven, it endures in your gaze. If there is tomorrow it is clasped in the smoldering of your blood. That travelers' wisdom to know that there are many strangers fated to your road. You are the path of correlation and all my longing, the breath of the moon upon bare flesh. That whisper of the moth in the pine.

nausea

The earth shifts, the air you just inhaled seems to slip away. Something sour blooms, something unclean at your very core. The bile choked back whispering acid up your throat, teeth clenched to hold back the inevitable. The sickness holds sway over the senses. The sickness rises from the depths of the void.

Unwell, the hours clot, teary eyes dousing any semblance of a spark. Count the spiders on the ceiling like they were the stars in the sky. Count the minutes between motions, aloft in the engine of these sorry tides. Too hot, too cold, sweating out sickly chills, gooseflesh and dreams sunk to the depths of the ocean's graves. This moment marked by the ending of the last. The perpetuity of vile superstition as the flesh mingles with its ending.

The soul clots, the clabber of matter aware of its bent. The world grinds out its spells and symbols, the hash marks of each struggle lost to the next. Our time treasured or squandered, passes away just the same. Adrift on the skin of this existence, guts knotted and mind on fire. This life sticking to each tooth and nail, everything crash and tremble. Everything so hard to swallow.

abject permanence

The time runs down, all our days a mingling of mistakes of action and mistakes of thought. Tomorrow ends up our only orphan, all the lights left on and the fan blowing soft. The ants on the high branches, the sweat trickling down my shoulders and chest. The mythology of the moment forgiveness and the fleeting glimpse of object permanence. The facts of the matter lost too long ago to measure.

Leave me to the open air, let me lay beneath the stars at night. There is no better use to bind me. The blue moods, the red rages, the black expanse between immodesty and remorse-- the machine can be counted on to replicate each failure perfectly. There are impulses and motives to color the scene, aims to each point and shoot simplification, remnants of archived purpose rooted in meat and bone. The sky can say grace while the earth shifts and swallows. The night will play me out.

The calendar fills up with poison, random number provide all the reason ever caught. Crowds gather and crowd dissolve, ant hill sermons from mountain prophets, heaven just the glitter of broken glass on the curb. The wind takes its portion in dust and droplets, the rain leaves its calling card in deluge and flood. Tell me all your tired secrets. Sell me all your imaginary friends. I will go where-ever the words wash up once they have served their purpose. I will follow whatever star still burns.

confess

I am only fit to speak to my imagination, the world having long ago exceeded my grasp. The fleeting glimpse, the mournful distance, the depths to which all truths have fled. I slide across the shadow, that flicker of tooth all bite and smile. The absolute manifest in the contrasts. The definition complete only with its opposite intact. The blinders of language always painting me into corners, trapped by all I would confess.

I arrive at only distance dreamt having lived so still and so soft. The brush against dark branch the wheeling constellations, the smell of water clasped close to the sod. The whole night so certain and fluent, a chill against the skin, a breath slowly kissed. The languid complicity of the imagination, crippling more the nimble. The alacrity of numb limitation, the slow unraveling of insistent perception.

So this is why I dream so hard and poorly. This is why I am absent in the day and empty in the night. The side effect of a life lived loosely and beyond all means. The symptomatic loss gained through deep thinking around the edges of thought. Not the picture but the notion. Not the details but the gist. You as the least I could hope for. You as the limits of all I want.