Monday, November 23, 2015

contrapuntal

There is a drift in the machinery, a part of all this speech that stays unsettled, the unspoken words always winning the day. There is a power in the unsaid to wreck and rile, the license for the disquiet stirring behind the eyes. She sees it all and says little. He talk and talks until the meaning goes away. Love lives within them, awake and alive. It is warm and bright and has their number. Love will not bankroll their hearts' great hopes. The drift will have its say. 

They move past the sweet in the sorrow. They take apart their piecework clock. They each sing such very different songs. His love conquers all, her sad future history. He is right, she is right, and so their path it parts. Tears flow and words fail, and the world keeps moving on. He is standing still and she is pounding her beat. Streets and stars and shared beds. Mementos, and love letters, and the detritus of the all fall down. 


He clings to her skin, he lingers upon her breathing. She skips and sulks, his words never quite syncing up with his fleshly heir. He is thinking bliss and babies, the fundament of the blood. She is thinking burdens and bones, his inheritance of ruin. The music falls in step with heartbeat and footfall. The seance of thought, the graveyard of memory. The calendar finds the slipstream, the machine kicked into gear. There will be words and acts and refutation. He aches for the unlikely resolution. She imagines no outcome, only the ghosts that haunt her heart. The love goes on, with or without them. 

Sunday, November 8, 2015

the vital

There comes a day when the clocks and calendars abruptly stop chasing their tails, when the sunken stones begin speaking as clearly as the summer sun, when the murmuring earth and the whispering trees all sharpen the distant points of long ago stars. All the misfit dreams that haven't starved or broken settle on a shelf full of sheafs of dust and chronicles, their songs left to music box and calliope. The grizzled beard goes gray as the steel and granite empty from your bones. Your foolishness and your wisdom all sound just the same. The days, though ever as seperate and varied, all linger in this foreboding dusk as the long cruel night begins.

You find the break, you mind the cut, you feel the rain fall in the strumming beneath your skin. Heavy hands and rocky hearts, how far that wishing star? Every certainty some fairy story, some lullaby that trails off before sleep is called. The air trembles with motors and musc, the rumble of unkempt engines and the thunder of a untamed bass. The sky is all kinds of blue. You wait for the stars, you're always waiting on a sign only you can signal. The affirmations of change settling in your skin.

You go green with envy, you see red in rage. You see your chances dwindle as you abide the bent and burn of this new and unfriendly world. The stars come out, drizzled in distance and the secrets of creation. The victors bang their drums and thump their chests, unaware that your power is only kept in check by etiquette. The stories toss and tumble, while you draw down hard upon your roots. Let them claim and libel, their tongues the only flags they follow. The blood still boils through you, vital and indomitable with the anthem of your breath. Time is to be told.

Thursday, October 22, 2015

the ruins

It is the story of Icarus, forever some set of wings pressed hard against the hubris, always some sky on fire to abide. We glide above the clouds, the plane the ever-moveable feast confining these guests of heaven. A slow boil of a crowd, these nested destinies and intentions. Fingering bright devices, shifting in our seats. Spilling words and staring at a clock we cannot see. We stumble along, the sky all about us. Every thread awaiting its weave.

This is me, heartbroken on the aisle. This is me, just catching up with her words. Is this really happening, did she truly do it? She broke up with me, tearfully, but at a stride. It all sort of came rollling out. Too crazy, too stuck, too sad. And of course, far far too old. I lean hard on the armrest, skin sweating, breathing shallow. I am buffeted repeatedly by other lives, adrift as they may be.

Another strange extension, another reach into another heart. Alone amidst strangers, my only solace these small sad words. I am thirsty from the circulared air, my lips a constant tongue tested dry. Joints ache and tears swell in barest check, the journey itself suddenly awash with shame and sorrow. I take advantage of the altitude, stringing raw prayers together, seeding the clouds with want and fear. Please, I speak from silent lips. Please don't let her let me go.

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

exasperate

This is the way we wear our endings, dust in our lungs and on our lips. This is the way the tide abides, sputtering exhaust, carbon vapor in proud plumes rising high above the hubris of our names. A way worn, a dull tread of dreams. A body of meat and manners shed, leaving but works and words. The faulty embellishments of this ache imbued and licensed by the fables we take as truth.

She sleeps many miles and tears away, weeping to the horror of how she must wield her heart. Birth and blood and the list of reasons. Babies and birthdays and ages never known. She knows the burden of just the facts while her wishes threaded tapestries, this last hope that she cannot be. She passes salt and clings to shadows, free of the future he would assure.


The stunned report of thumbs to screen, the moment ever as I wear it. The want and sorrow at my core. My heart as I only know it. Dead limbs and the voice of the wind. Love is always the endurance. Love is yet this oblivion.

chiming of the vendors

It is there in the playing out of the song, in the fade of the light, in the knowing sway of the neighbor’s palm tree as it seems to pulse w...