toxicity

Shine all you want sun, you still won’t touch me. Pray all you want, the blessings won’t bend the will of the world. The wind rises, the ache expounds upon its thesis, pain the way flesh navigates the music of the spheres. I don’t say, and no ones asking. Just the clock and the calendar playing telephone pole as the train pulls away. Flipping through the pages so the figures seem to move. Progress another way to record the rate of decay, this heart counted out in the time of there will be no other. Even the muses know I was never worth the words.

There is nothing here but the vagaries of leaf and wind. Nothing but the relentless passage and the portal to hell. Just distraction and mitigation, and not a thing to say. Stretch the words across the wounds, fill the blank pages with inklings and itches scratched, just a fuse without a match. Just a wheel with nowhere to turn. The nights are a grind, the days are spent. Ten thousand ways I miss the mark, the darkness and the lost spark, the constant of the world working the wounds and all my time apart or alone. Come home to be whittled away by the burdensome blood and the wrongs I can’t get around. Come home to play out some role they needed filled so they could keep running amok and going astray. 

I don’t pretend that it isn’t all my own doing. I can’t say I don’t deserve every lick and clout. The chemistry and the cage, the ruckus and the rage, there is no one to blame but me. I have nothing to offer, but that doesn’t stop them from asking. I have nothing to say, but I cannot shut up about it. I am only tolerated, I am only suffered, an object lesson to drape in pity and contempt. The water always wins, but only after whole generations of waves are broken upon the stubborn rocks. Obdurate and intolerable, I hold any line I stand upon. A calamity sitting and smoking, waiting for this sickness to at long last end. The beautiful blue flecked with green and gold, I grow ugly and old, waiting for the end I asked for. Tired of being poison to the ones that claim to love. Tired of being pummeled and hearing about how I broke their bones. 

burning down

The day goes on and on, like it’s cornered you at a party. The day just keeps at you, like some guy you’re going to deck. It makes the hard pitch, it has the patter and the pressure, but it doesn’t make the sale. The sun slips away, well past the point when it’s almost gone, it has tipped out leaving the sky aflame as dusk shows its hand. You sit and you smoke, a joke only you never laugh at. You sit and you smoke, watching the world burning down. 

The trees sway and tremble, the last mottled light dappling their leaves long past the point of transubstantiation, the sugar shaker shutting down for the growing night. The long shadow reaches over rooftops and past their crowns, as traffic spreads the flesh around, ghosts and glimmers dancing on street and steel. The sky yet to meet its impasse as the soft blue sky follows the moon’s latest revelations around. Negative space shimmers between the tattered shroud of leaves as the breeze tries to make up its mind. The smoke rises, the mystery and the altar, the offering between minds.

The wreck washes up the way it’s supposed to, revealing shards and ribs, the structure only architecture as the hull is humbled on the reef. Crows rise sideways across the incoming moon, the roost left to conjecture, twilight seething through every skin. Too early for the wishing stars and ancient wanderers, to late for love letters and lucky kisses. The work of the ordinary always being torn down and assaulted, Sheela-Na-Gig and electric guitars a fuzzy fete into the gloaming. The weight of want, the lessons of lack, smoke soaked skin and tobacco flecks on your tongue. Ever the once and future while declaiming time is a construct, the dumb proclamations of humankind digging its own idiot grave. The hubris a feature, the monkey climbing to show its tail, while you rant and rail, the inevitable right up on you. 

looking for the moon

I went outside to look for the moon, to see the moon and think of you besides. The sky all stars and silhouettes, the scrub pines and hedge cypress against the light washed night. But the moon was missing, and you were too, though I didn’t expect to see you. Even the moon avoids me, even the stars take a pass. The night too far gone into the morning, the next day too near to count. I check the calendar, I check the clock. Another set of maybe sos and guesses not. Satellites and wanderers, the winking goodbye of a passing plane. 

Sleep won’t come easy, and there’s nowhere left for dreams to go. A feeling slow in passing, a pillow tossed and wadded through the dawn. Daylight lingering in the window, the television busy being on. Letters to be written no longer, presents only left in the past. Nothing but the leaned on alma mater, nothing but the photos in the roll. The songs that stick to once shared spaces, the litter always playing in the wind. The afternoon with the moon overstepping. The night so thick so fast so long.

Now the wind is tripping through the treetops. The moon is up there waxing in the pines. The day left late in a few hard strokes, a totaled motorcycle and a kid busted up in the debris of a redwood fence. Another dent in my old jitney, the broken mirror sheered clean once and for all. The neighbors gathered to parlay and gossip, the cops on the driveway in scads and swarms. More unwanted gifts, more chores moving up the list. Another story with no one to talk to. The sky given over to the night. 

heart problems

In the age of flagrancy there is little that is revelatory, the moon from the blue, the books in the red. The buried bloom, the bared root. The teeth that have never shown for smiles, the heart that wants for some other tautology. Office holders openly advocate murdering their constituents while others in the government sit shiva as accessories, stealing, and sucking the nation dry. The attacked and the neglected conveniently at each other’s throats, while the world is parsed and pitted for Monopoly tokens and fairytales. The heart dies slow, but who doesn’t in this pandemic. 

Every day the trouble grows greater, every day I matter less. Another worldly inconvenience, another ghost dragging a corpse that just won’t drop. The sky full of flies and fireworks, the moon sneering with contempt, nowhere to be and nowhere to go. The slow rot of obsolescence, the dismal creep of senescence, the heartache and the burdened breath. The stars keep time while we sputter and burn, bursting all at once, fizzling out on the wasteland landscape. A touch that turns it all to trash, the words only for the last episode’s rehash. 

There is a sort of crime under cover of authority that only calls for death. You wield a gun or gavel, you hold a title for some term, your corruption is only truly answered with your vicious, violent death. You want to play cops and robbers, you don’t get to be both for free. You move your funny money in the dark to take food and shelter from real people, you need to be put to the fire. Too foolish to allow people to live their lives free and unmolested, you don’t need to exist. I am through abiding by the laws of the unaccountable, who rely on goons and liars to enforce their will. I am dying, but I will not go alone. 

the hammer sounds

The beat down gets busy once it knows where you sleep. It falls on you in the softened darkness of the room where you scratch at sleep, it hits you in your dreams and days, it strikes out of your eyes in the mirror. This pain begins the slow estrangement, the false duality of body and mind, the brain there to cool your blood as it charges towards its next fated engagement. You wake and the hammer sounds, uncertain of skull or heart or the set alarm. Just you rushing fast towards the place where you await the self, the bone and sinew, the sigil strung through your guts and marrow. The place where you just miss the moment every time. 

There was a moment half a moon ago. There was the morning star alight at dawn. The tire sound and the wounded man too blind to give direction leaning into the turn, street signs hard to read with your half life eyes. A handshake in the driveway after you picked him and held him steady, all in the dawn’s early light. The weight of the world heavier in half by the diffuse photons stippling the day with their charge. There between the general and the special, there on a scale where some thoughts are inevitable, though seldom helpful, came another story you’ll never tell. 

The body emerges from the shower, warm and slick and still not right. The towel sloughs away at the glistening skin, the sore joints and loosened bones click and clatter, sharp reports on several fronts as the pain reminds the mind of its primacy. The words come later, maybe beneath the sheets as the sleep won’t work, maybe in the heat and steam of coffee coming cup after cup. The words come and disperse their quanta, colliding at surprising velocities, the momentum of that famous formula spilling out your mouth. The impact of lack and mass getting a move on, the nail that stands out seldom outstanding, cudgeled and clouted about. The day never needs to spell it out, the words never needing much rope. The poet misses the point as again the hammer comes down.

transmetropolitan

This is the light that comes to pass, this is the blinding sun through the windshield. This is the light loosed at last, the arrival of the fiery horizon. The doves stalled upon the fence, the sparrows busy in the yard. This is the city never known, the crowded crosswalks and the fitful traffic. No heady sense of purpose ringing from the bones, no draw to the yawning direction. No skin of brick and barter, bathed in sound and shadow. Driven, not like a car or a blazing heart, but like a spike pounded down into the ground. It is this, the breadth of sky, the depths of dirt, and the business of being in between.

The mind is full of what it is missing. It is filled by whatever it happens upon, bluestone and sarsen, limestone and gypsum. Wooden joists and steel girders, plaster glass and concrete. The miles of steel and iron and tarmac that wander to and fro. Money is magic, it is the death of the imagination, stacked symbols and errant decimals. Tough talking dandies and their murderous mentors that visit no considerations past their glut and greed. The great envisioned cities of tomorrow now only fronts for continued thievery. Bullets to the breadbasket and the clatter of brass. Blunt force trauma the going rate for doing business.

The day hits hard, the dreams come loose, mythical beast wander wild in the streets. The ferocious assault upon the gods of life and the law of plenty have called down furies of heaven and earth unleashed. The shining of the city on a hill the glow of the inferno up on its hind legs, the graven gods of the watch and wallet slapped down by the blood and bones of the waking world. The parched throat, the burning sky, the answer of the very air abounds. The fields turn to dust, the peoples wander, the avaricious thieves keep stealing with all the hands they have. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow never more. We awaken all at once, too late so long ago.

dem bones

There’s always tomorrow I say, only having ever known today and the vast, vanishing past. I crawl out of bed before I’m finished sleeping, I don’t get started until I’m through. Time is always talking trash behind my back, laughing like god at the plans I never bother making. All dread and drama and misplaced commas. All supply and demand and mapped out last stands.  I lose a little, I gain some pain, the sun it comes and goes. Sometimes I make out the constellations as I miss your kiss. I trip over something in the dark like I was made for this.

Everything’s connected she says as it all falls apart. Nothing has changed she says as nothing is ever the same again. Them’s the breaks, them’s the rules, the crumbling cookie, the tumbling dice. I never had the jump, I only had the reflexes. I never had the answers, I only had the words. The shadows stretch, the night unfurls, I leave the porch light on. The gate is locked, the doors are shut, the dogs work their way around every corner. The music plays and I sing along, even though there’s no words to the song. Yesterday is always playing tomorrow never comes. 

Look, I know I’m nothing special: a scratchy track on a garage sale album. An unsigned handprint in the cracked cement. Bills to pay and miles to go, the stillness of a hidden lake, the ravages of a rough road. A sight to see, a box to check, a letter never read again. I collect scabs and scars and bone deep aches, an awkward limp, a pain in the neck. A quote that they misremember as they lift my style like sifted strata, like a crime scene pealed off finger print. A plate excavated in pieces. A song only remembered by a line or two, the singing long gone still lingering, somewhere all those tomorrows ago.

towards dust

The words still dance though no one is looking. The trees still sway with wind and crows. The lonely rooms are just as empty, the windows stare out unblinking. There’s kids and cars and the lilt of laughter, the yard strewn with weeds and bones. The days move swiftly, the nights are brutal. The heart beats on, unloved and alone. Looking back is like looking forward, nothing left to fuel this dwindling fire.

I can’t speak, I can’t wander. I can’t hold a candle to the lowest low. There’s nothing but the play by play, the disinterest and the hatred blow by blow. I weep and wail, I bleat and bluster. The stories left me long ago. 

Inch by inch the desperate measures mark every skin and stone. The flesh melts like the goodbye moon, the mind sinks deeper into senescence, the beat up brain long since buried in a shallow grave. We all fade, everyone leaves, nothing much remains the same. Only loss will last forever, only pain will stay as the season blend and the darkness gathers. This constant companion as the world grows cold and the night looms large. This life wasted without merit, this body only cast towards dust. 

wings

Gone are the days of hunger artists, the hunger workers having cornered the market, cardboard signs and societal declines correlating quite nicely on the charts. Hit records that don’t quite hit so hard, and dancers loosed without a card. The bygone skies of lucid hues now all bare bones blue, the confessions of derelictions now all not mes it’s yous. Despite the local flyboys and the multitudes of flocks and swarms taken by the wind, the only flights left us down in the dirt are those of fancy. The words have long since turned, all the wings long since flown away. 

Dogs bark, children scream, the sun does the Metropolitan Glide from the dismal east to the longed after west, the world largely working like it seems. The metaphor slips its leash and tosses all the cards. The grim entreaties and clockwork golems grind away at the grist of tricks and treats while the habitual madness of the species unfurls flags and throws straw men into any fire they can find. The long lonesome beating on the bones of the predestined alone while the galleries fill with high toned people lamenting their curried favors and crowded lives. Only the devastation will make certain everyone gets a turn.

There are no better angels, no psychopomps drawn on palimpsests to escort our inklings unto the after party. Salesmen wander door to door, taking rejection on the chin, thieves and middleman swollen fat as ticks upon our labors. Still it is all fairytales instead of fact checks, spells and prayers and the occasional poem tucked under the tongue, slowly belaboring the blood like castoff plastic in the belly of the whale. Lamenting lost love and saying doom with the best of them, I don’t make the cut. Out in the tall weeds with the rest of the rejects, I fill the empty with useless words and endless repetitions, waiting for the fire to die. Waiting for the ghost to go. 

‘round midnight

The hours of exposition pass, and the hours of introspection are put on hold, swallowing every dying tide. Cobwebs and spotted mirrors, the sounds of fans and trains. Tequila burning in the belly, branches scratching at the window, the overcast sky full of ominous light. The most recent wounds won’t stop mouthing off, and the shower seems a million miles away. The moon took to the street once too often, and it has been disappeared from the heavens, no one left to post its bail. The starving spider in the corner scribbles away in web and wonder, waiting for succor and respite. Write me off, count me out, the bottle offers all the council I will keep. Like the moon, like a bad penny, I come back again and again.

The music wanders bar to bar, clipped and stretched along the bones of the rhythm, sliding out of sight and into memory as it dances through warm blood. The wind’s let loose, lapping at the rooftops, shaking all the trees. The clouds part long enough to feature the glimmers of Jupiter and Mars. We work and shirk and lift our masks to reveal the bitter in every breath. Fiction has long since overtook the facts, like the Secret only writ large and even dumber. All the bad guys haves badges or a judge in their pockets. Real people are piñatas and purses to pluck while the gods and devils run amok. Every kiss is ruined before the lips are split and the teeth scattered around the gutters. 

I don’t drink deep enough anymore to match all my weeping. I don’t cry enough anymore to catch a glimpse and shake it off. I carry a couple of torches, I tender resignations and peerless flames. The gods play the long game and the devils know their business. Bruised from the latest fall, fresh hells met daily as I lose another step. The words forget their affiliations and every oath goes wrong. From cold reads to slapsticks, the punchlines land wrong, and the crowd work never goes my way. Forget the footwork, the fates have spoken. Everyday shall go astray, each mistake will visit as the bell sounds through the night, Marley’s ghost dragging its dirty chains through the heart’s haunted halls. The longhouse raided by Grendel’s mad hunger and naked rage as the world gone mad kills the heroes we would have believed ourselves to be. Ashes and dust, dusk to dusk. Every dawn again done in by waking, every hour uphill all the way. 

architecture

Another set of fragments, another string of sentences, another day in exile and isolation. Cages  made of meat and bone shuffling back and forth, all insults and injury and one more for the team. Nothing but damnation phrasing and the curt confessions of the manipulators, nothing but dark rooms and dim windows and additional dysfunctions. Built wrong, too broken and too strong. Problems with the wiring, trouble with the architecture, waiting and wanting though I know better. Wishing for a world that never was, saving up to end the one I am. 

Me and my heart that handles like a freighter. Me and my mistaken mind. Half a year with all the hints and leanings strung out before me, and still my thoughts go wrong. I never meant a thing, I never made a ripple. Doomsdays come and doomsdays go, but it looks like you were the one that ended me. As dispassionate as a bored cat lingering in the kill you finished me, without joy or malice. A mangled rat left to the ants and flies, eviscerated with maggots for eyes. Ghost me out then gaslight me with charms and letters. Burn down my nothing little life and continue on with your show. I miss someone that isn’t you, another person I never knew.

All the mistakes were mine, the way you strolled right over the lies you were caught in, the tells you have that always showed. You offered nothing, you made no promises. The abandonment was hard, but no one should waste their time bothering with fools that mean nothing to them. You are a collector and a tourist, someone always seeking status and acclaim. Mostly I was embarrassed by asymmetry of our contact. You were the one whose words I waited for, the one person that could make my day, while you’d travel around the world to speak to someone you hated before you would talk to me. I never even made your top forty, and you were never even a friend. It’s the truth that I can’t take, this further waste of my wasted, worthless life. 

you are not needed now

The day is as empty as the sky, the wind runs wild with grace. Dust swirls in detail devils across the dirty porch. The eaves are laden with webs and wasps, rotting in slow neglect. The rats have gnawed through everything, through wire and through wood. The angels have murdered the greater good, every flag a tatters, every soul a shambles. I am the long gone ghost, the fly speck punctuation. All the songs exclude me, all the blessings bent against my name. I speak and no one listens. That’s about right for a late American life.

Fill your mouth with your favorite prayers, empty your head with efficacious meditations, no one’s asking for your say. The heavens have gone enigmatic, running silent or scared off by the burdensome truth. The ones that want only want some other, the ones you love have left you with letters meant to hurt. There is no law but fill your hands, your money or your life. My heart objects as organs do, too much too little too late. I say your name as if it matters, spitting only to water the weeds.

I will no longer work the ephemera of my longing. I will no longer spill my words in the temple of lost causes and bad habits, no silly rabbits to reframe my empty as if it’s art. The wounds of all the years of low living and high lonesomes will remain in this uncared for cage, these pages where no one looks. This shameful accounting of these uncooked books, the ache that eludes just like the ones who left avoid, my skin all sin and giving up. Need and want and the trinkets left in guilt and contempt. The song I hum along to while I wait for the last bitter line, my voice another memory forgotten overnight. 

only dreaming

Time doesn’t listen to your demands. Time isn’t in it for prayers and praise, no paper god to weep and mutter at, no checklist to pause and consider. It speaks, cogs and gears spilling from its mouth, and your bones are winnowed and you go gray. It speaks and your parents are buried. It speaks and everything you loved or knew is dead and gone. Wheels within wheels, thoughts composed of countless thieves ideas and half baked salvations grind out your daily grift. High flung ideas that endure, empty for centuries of anything save that it’d be pretty cool if they were true. Our heavens full of sweetness and grace, the dearly departed and lone gone dogs all saving you a place at the table. Thrones filled with mercy, instead of villainous treachery like all the ones you’ve known. Like clockwork, they turn and they turn.

Dreamt of the dead, dreamt of the lost, dreamt of the heart’s apostates in fits and starts. Winding roads and staring houses,  forests and mountains that do not exist, unknown room after unknown room full of faces and names that blur and meld. The hard cost of all this being and breathing, the ledger full of figures all in red, the residue of want and fear and experience. The doors held open now slammed shut, conversations that only occur while sleeping. The mind a sieve, the heart a labyrinth, the soul a bedtime story. We’re always on the clock, the count never ending in our favor. The night’s soft tread and the day’s bled blue visage. The empty always rushing in.

The pestilence consumes the flesh, the madness fills the discourse. Tick tock says the clock, the dissolution of the swirling words and the stunning derelictions become the law of the land, dreams only grist for the grinding. The crow checks the sewer grate as the baseline thumps along the gutter, children squawk and squeal out their whole deal while time is still almost endless. The untouched and reviled sleep to feel the love that eludes, the failed and rejected to relive all that they lost. I dream along the same, sad lines, hiding from my heart and my head. Asleep or awake, comes this oblivion, watching the last ones die, talking with the ones already gone. No more revelations down the line, no more comforts of portents of things to be or paradise to come. Driven from home by being there, torn from truth by the foresworn honest, comfort kept close to the bones. All the work left to this world only dreaming.

stone

I could make way for your better angels. I could clear off a place on the shelf. I could cheer the stars as they slip into the sky unnoticed, watching as their sparkle tries to usurp the moon as it takes its time in the tomb. We never know how hard it’s going to hit. We never know what’s on its way. All stones and sticks and Ignatz bricks, the words turn hard and the wishes go broke, letters sent to win some bet and the love left behind just goodbyes and alibis. All the story holes and set pieces taking meaning with them as they go. 

The shadows reach east as the sun skips town, the breeze and the heat doing their old routine, doves strutting in the dirt. Flies land and light. Tension holds the blue in the sky and the sun to the leaf. The stippled jewels shimmer in the swaying tree shadows and in spaces swept by limbs in the wind. The spent shells of daylight clattering in the gutter as the day gets its money’s worth, the old songs rising up beside me, resurrecting past loves and old ghosts. Sad smiles and small reminders that it’s all on me. I mistook you for someone else. My heart is that kind of foolish, hard to win but easy to hurt. Just another stone done with skipping. Another poem that no one gets.

You’re there most nights and every day. In the shade of the forest and the bright of the bloom. You meet my mind in the mission of the moon and the spark of every movie kiss, your scent on my pillow, your flavor on my lips. Time moves through me, unimpressed with the stillness I am steeped in, beating down bone and flesh like the ocean beats the shore. An old man getting older, I pick and choose through old moments and foolish mistakes, the dashed hopes and haunted places making sorry bouquets I clutch and cling to long after the flowers are dead. The latest and likely last, you’d ring out even if you weren’t you. But you are you, while I’m only ever  me. You always the wings of crows and the moon above, me a stone sinking in the sea. 

triage

Gone are all the words of comfort, tomorrow’s endless horizon waiting for the day. Gone are all the ones who held you, left for dead, at least to you. The night’s long shadow a fete of blindness before the autumn’s last carnival arrives to deal its devils and thieve the bright from the eyes of children. The fresh wounds open, the scent of blood on summer lawns, stitches popped by further violence. The open book, the shuffled deck, this sad prophecy beneath the apathetic, unseen stars. The only pleasures taken done so in dreams, the only law coming out the barrel of a gun. Not your flag, not your faith, in this the year of fallen monuments and buried dreams.

The corner has gone quiet, not a shill or tout in sight. Cars race down the streets like its a Bruce Springsteen song, rattling the windows, setting off alarms. Summer does its thing even on a cool and windy night. The heart ambles, the heart aches. All your lovers now apostates, all your pleasures only figures of speech. The world is all festival and riot while you wait and wait for the one who will never come. Count the ways, catch your breath, go on with your story. You were never meant for the future, never meant to go to glory. There too long, then gone all at once. The babble unabated, the words all astir. 

I fear my fate is beyond the fixing. I fear my drear has turned dire, beardless in these gray haired years. The static like a station from the 70s, childhood a tide of truck driving songs and the Bakersfield sound, cocaine signatures and solos without end. The American Dream dying off with disco, bedtime for Bonzo and all that jazz. Paper tigers and wicker men, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, the Susquehanna Hat Company the last anthem of this looted, ruined republic. All the rats racing away from the sinking ship of an empire’s setting sun. A useless son of a long dead planet, truth and justice never the way in America. A bystander in this last desperate triage as truth dies slowly on the slab. All the natural appetites all but abandoned save the thirst for love. I leave the rebuilding to my betters. I am the last bridge I have to burn.

singalong

The glory days were long ago, the halcyon and hallowed days when things seemed possible and real. We follow the dots we are offered, bread crumbs from tycoons and their cronies and stooges to lead us into the wilderness. We buy the lies that make us feel better, the ludicrous sports fan attachment to flags and false hierarchy that drives us towards the foolish and grotesque, divide and conquer their undisguised poison we readily lap up. Their goons and killers run riot, controlling those brave enough to resist through intimidation and murder, all the while bleating their crybaby anthem of how hard they got it. These cowardly gunhands haven’t got it bad yet, but believe you me, real consequences are closing in fast. 

These distasteful displays of fragility are always the loudest voices, projecting all their fear and lack of self out into the world, vomiting up this hateful bile all over the discourse. It is an human impulse older than the species itself, fear of the unknown, distrust and aggression towards the other now weaponized by the greedy scum that are always ready to turn fools towards evil and destruction for a couple of bucks and a few steps up the ladder. You never have to steal a soul from someone who is willing to throw it away to feel a little better about themselves. The we’re number one chanters, the flag wavers, the I might be x, but at least I’m not group yers— all being gamed with their weaknesses and the human need to belong. 

I never fit. I wasn’t one of the group that gathered around the campfire for the ghost stories and singalongs. I was slow, I was strange, I rubbed people wrong. You get disinvited enough, you spurn the invitations. You get gulled into enough pranks and jibes, you take every advance with a grain of salt. Nothing much has changed. Anytime that everyone starts mouthing off about whatever the latest dumb shit is at the moment, I start looking for the catch. The urge towards conformity is overwhelming, especially in language. We want to know what’s going on, we need to understand so we get to be ingroup and not among the dull and mocked. So they praise and guile and cajole you to do what they say. They call you to the campfire and let you feel the warmth of belonging. And though I do envy the gathered, their friends and affiliations— a luxury I have learned late in life I will not enjoy, I cannot help but look for the catch. Before I join a singalong, I pay attention to the song. 

knock knock

Weeping gets you nowhere, sitting on the back porch as the day procrastinates. The old wounds won’t close and the sun is in your eyes. The even sos and the at leasts don’t work, no sugar masks the medicine, the grind of this long decline beating bruises into your bones. High crimes of dull impunity are the law of the land, and the worst is coming up fast. Nothing to change that you can change, nowhere to go by nature and station and fiat. Nothing but the words on the page that isn’t there. Nothing but spinning in circles as the stars fall down.

With the evening coming cool at last in this hot summer the motions are attended. With the wind whipping by the trees wave goodbye as the sun stripes the yard. Dirty lenses and cloudy eyes, a keening leaning hard on the facets of the heart. Beaten down to next to nothing, with more beatings guaranteed to get the job done, this is what’s left of the song. Nerves aflame and the shadows stretching, the long night and the aimlessness left of the animal. A cage constantly being rattled and nowhere left to turn.

Who’s there? A monkey’s paw wish of a person. Who’s there? Something between a beast and a joke. Just the cards in the spokes, the kite caught on the wire. A factotum, a clown, a monster to chase out of town. Nothing inside this numb skull to revive the engines. Nothing to look forward to but windows and walls and piss and shit and the sounds of the world falling down all around. Some thing to laugh at while Rome burns. Some thing to poke with sticks until it bangs its head against the bars. Knock knock, here it comes. The punchline to your prayers.

recognize

So it goes from sky to sky, from all those stars to just the one, from bright and blue to the depths of black. Your eyes always lit from without and within, seeing by the skins, shining from the flame. Tears flow freely from the fierce and the meek, a script of salt and sheen. Each mythos a microcosm of the possibilities of words and fear. Every trip over the hill and through the woods finding grandma gone, her house another structure full of strangers. All roads lead to roam. 

Nighttime, and the dark has set. The ceiling is the work of time and spiders, the walls are full of holes. The panic again, lungs clenched and the hounds chasing your heart through the hedgerows, all the wrong upon you again. The doors you slammed closed, tight and clever, your belly empty save for enmity. Don’t look out the window— the signs will only frighten. Don’t look in the mirror— the stranger’s there already. All the poems and art and letters, a pillar of smoke rising from the city. All your love and lust and loss— a path in the forest you’ve yet to profane.

The music plays, the knuckles smile and shine. Desperate measures, twice to one cut. Threadbare clowns and furtive playthings stumble through your thoughts. The next to the next to the next one, until it’s all used up. The words you share with countless peers, friends, and confidants jangle around in all the rooms you crowd. The things you think you say aloud. A barn owl circles, Jupiter blinks in the wind. Ask the cards, ask your heart. Ask the beggar at the minimart. You would know it if you looked it in the eyes. The thing in the mirror, the lurker right outside the window. You are what they recognize.

absentee

Turn the earth to sew the curse, the salt from the ocean, the stones from the grave. Seed the sun and watch the wither. Catch the wind and reap the plague, the restless dead and the ceaseless tide. Run your routes and dream your dreams, done in by blood and Ponzi schemes. Write your dear Johns and your poison pills, you are the illness of your will, your mythologized mistakes and your tin eared prophecies. The sickness that you send, the evil of your ancestors loosed upon your children. Push button priestess shitting out both ends. You arrived just in time for the age of the deceiver. Double faced trickster with a mouthful of flowers and a belly full of sewage. Murder me last, make me watch.

The day is lost, the night now hunts by headlights and the fitful stars. The prayers were called, the gods were buried, the dirt tramped down from dancing. The old letters call, boxed up and thick with dust. Leonard Cohen’s talking about some girl from beyond his grave, nice work and so on. Loose lips do that voodoo they done so well, full steam on the make believe, a pretty hand with gorgeous flourishes. Never where I am, hardly ever where I’m not. The poison wasn’t named, but you kept pouring. Now all the damage lives inside me. It is as bad as it ever has been, and it’s only getting worse.

The empty and the ache. Ought and nought, and every goddamn night the wind’s wages. The world is busting, piñata style. The imagined whaling away at life and limb while haughty parasites suck the wealth clean out of the coffers, devils and gun hands and the gibbering apes of sheer escapism around every corner. You call down curse after curse, worming your work through the once was, taking me out by root and reflection. I squawk and weep, but I don’t put up much of a fight. I never noticed the changes until it was everything but the locks, and I was already mostly done before you gave me the heave-ho. It’s only unfathomable to me, hangdog with a head full of hyperbole, and never a real man after all. I rant and rave, fool steam and fairy fire. Foul fury aimed at the hollow heart and mottled skull where I live. Murderous words ended with love. 

tedium

It don’t go well with me when the heat repeats, the days all sweat and sugar. I don’t do well without imploring the smoke to erase. I build the symbol in effigy, counting out the ashtray, burning down the day. The wind sits still but for a breeze for afterthought, sweat beading despite the sitting and the shade. Wasps are climbing in the wind chimes, bees are landing on my brow. Done is done, but here I am somehow. The words done with me, the blank empty even when we fill it. The song in smoke and angles. 

I should be able to count the days, I should be able to measure it in moons. Now just a conundrum I can’t shake, a story that was only a story in my head. The avenues bursting into fireworks, the days laden with grease and heat, even the real people ill at ease. Fiddling around with the settings while every road burns at once. Scribbling in the margins while waiting around to die.

It is always this bitter, it is always this bad, a rash from gravel and bruises from household physics. Add the gnashing and general unpleasantness, I get the separations and the scorched earth proclamations. I tire even of being tiring, I can only imagine how bad it is if there’re options. Just the staticky signal and the sloppy hand, line by line, tear soaked and trapped in stupidity. The volume turned up and the knob broke off. This archetype of tedium, as sure the return to dust. 

yonder

It’s one of those everyday feels, neither head nor heart in it, the old one two and the back catalogue. The ritual and the checklist, the points and the spread, the bump and grind of empty order. How easily we automate, how often it is only leaf and wind, a bag askance in that Katy Perry song. The skin scuffed and sunken, the husk moving through the aspects of the motions, thoughts another faraway. From day to day and door to door, we are parted from the start. The earthbound heart and the head that yonder star. 

It is a puzzle, it is a pattern. The bump and grind and the squeaky wheel, the place where the world departs, stripped and pinned declaims the skin as dreams and art unite. The body only placeholder as the fire burns in tides, words turn the tongue like worms turn this graceless clay.  The lover, the family, the elusive daily deity crowding out your table. The thoughts you’re thinking on while the motions move through. The ones you were wishing were wishing on you. 

There’s a hitch for most any wagon. There’s a rhythm there for stepping in, a number for your feet. Somehow there’s a deal to seal, somehow there’s a ribbon to cut. The rumble of the motorcycle, the roar of the down bound jet. Out away from all the bother, permanently unburdened of the fuss. The blind dog licking at your shins, your back to the setting sun. Dusk arrives and somehow is someone.

fortissimo

What would we be but bones and feathers were we the wings beating? Where would we end up but the ash heap with all the world gone to burning? It all wears down, the color of your hair, the stitching in the seams. The cooked and rotted world heavy with heat and thick with fickle flies, in it for the thrill, in it for a taste. We go from grease to gristle, from fetished flesh to worm turned earth so quick we barely notice the going of the ghost. From strength to staggered in the stance. The wings wild against the window, the curtains billowing against the breeze.

The sun beats down on all this striving, the sermons and the lessons burning just the same. Dry lips attended by a thirsty tongue, the pavement rippled with mirages, eyes blind from the light. Old bones carry the imprints of past injuries, sing the songs of storm and stone, the dust they were the dust they will be. Sometimes it takes years and years, sometimes it all happens at once. The body breaks, despite its dreams and directions. The body breaks, despite its stamina and its tears. In the delicacy of aging, even the softballs are brutal. 

There are the things the papers claim, the privilege that words are afforded if you add more words. There are the things attached to our names, strings of flags and patches, litanies of faith and affiliation that gather around the lucky and the well behaved. The eyes fail and the hearing goes, the kid across the counter and the voice on the phone, our voices rising to fill the absent context. Our worlds shriveling in, our bodies gossamer and lard, we speak our orders to all that is already looking away. Songs so old and out of fashion we can only play them loud. 

lovelorn

The heat always stays its own story, the sheen of salt and sweat, the weary and the wear of it. It clings skintight to clothes and stories, seeping through every telling, making itself known. It whispers to you oh so it’s the summer, or oh, they’re in the south of France. It adds that inferential portent, the dripping before all the squeeze and slide shows up. All the air around it given greater weight as it permeates even the abstractions of flesh. Only the heart has more authority on the edit and the drift. The heart keeps talking whether you’ve already heard them all. The heat keeps at it, but the heart just goes.

Old letters in dusty boxes. The delicacies of ardent love gone to artifact and silverfish, one thing always turning into another if you give it a while. All the aches that remain of acquisition, the wounds that you age into, once the perspective sets in. This chasm of want and wonder, this empty left of you. The thought caught on some misunderstood moment or compelling retelling, the story you talk yourself into. Lovelorn for some scattered beads. Lovelorn for the way her shape stuck in her empty jacket. Something gone, something forgotten, something made up on the fly. Some brief context, some withheld evidence. Someone ever there at all, and not some imagined intersection.

There’s always room in the margins. There’s always somewhere to scribble something down. Maybe a different set of endearments, maybe a better hand. Learn where to aim the engine, stare at the right shape on the wall. Leave something besides these awful fits of focus. Write something besides the wrong thing down. Instead of this knowing while you watch, this hitting hard long after. The letters, the litany, the leaving light. Heart enough left to hurt. 

contretemps

I’m a stranger here myself, however long I loiter. Here when the earthquake came like the beating of urgent wings against the windowpane, here when the earthquake was ripples bucking through the rocks, the bridge collapse and the baseball game. Somewhere waving with the trees, somewhere weeping in the dusk. I move in drags and starts, slow motion and jump cut, ache and negation and the burdens of the beast. I never knew, or at least never know better. I sit alone for eons and wonder at your front door. Some scuff or tiff, and all at once it’s eons more. 

I’m not indifferent to the machine. I try to take a path that is at least not immediately made up mostly of other people’s toes. I read the room and say my goodbyes, if I say anything at all. I’m better at conflict, the bump and grind of heads and hips, the ground and pound and the contretemps. It’s easier to play the heel, hamming it up before their champions, working the hurt. It’s easier to run off the rails than to jump off the rampaging train. The tack taken from the top.

It’s early here, though the sun at last feels a little long in the tooth, and the sky needs to shade its eyes to see. It’s strings of words and flecks of ash, the sore in your shoulders, the stiff in your breath. It’s the stretch of blue shadows and the breeze through the beard. Long ago the spell was cast, the fire on the mountaintop, the storm within your flesh. Brush strokes of gold and green, the slide between shade and shine. One more leaning deep towards the intention, one more altar littered with cinders. 

egress

Another warm and windy day beneath a blue bias sky, the frame of sameness seeding the myth of continuity, the place dissolving into stubborn names and entropy. An eye for envy and trouble with the plot. The long cons weight the sway of the lie, that described horizon where you going to long at last, the quick patch of the syllables torn clean from cognitions. We are largely plug and play, all feelings and appetites trapped to a framework bound to deceive. Moved by weightless words, we can be anyone’s anything. Nothing but a change in the meaning of meaning. Only a mark on a map.

The words are always shifting, always slippery, the collapse of a sand dune a question answered. We anchor a lot onto them, considering. There as they derelict we keep throwing more words in the wake. Only the words win. We either spin ourselves compellingly or plummet to the earth, every claim the Coyote walking off the cliff. So I spin a little and fall. The egress mostly paintings on solid stone. The rest the ghosts that won’t leave you alone.

The world goes ahead and shuffles the deck, the weight of blue sky and crow shadow, the turns taken and passes played. Doves pivot and trees sway, a trembling between dance and prayer, a passing truck’s cruel window glare. Soft eyes and the kiss of chrome, one side of a conversation caught in the wind, the swarms of the air and the legions of the earth. Moving from ache to ache, from hollowed ritual to hollowed ritual, living in the empty words that abandoned all meaning. The power of memory another slow burial. The tomb of this meter of life and limb scribbled and denied. Sooner or later, the mountain tracks you down. 

after hours

The day grazes on the easy blessings, the bright of sky, the bent of branch. The work of root and wing, the crush of sun and the glib turn of the winds. The aches and woes soaked in the daily breading, kept to the back of the workings of a busy mind. The distractions and compulsions that map it out and keep it moving. Then at once, the night is coming. The sky breaks in the canopy and heaven’s remainders. It’s after hours where the teeth come out, the night there all at once.

The smoke crawls the dusty, ill lit walls. The steam clings to the steel of the coffee cup. The reading lamp haloed in brushed steel and bent aluminum, the light cupped in concentric circles. The black, bitter coffee already cools, a pool of ink and dreaming upon a languid tongue. It’s late and things still aren’t wrapped up. It’s early if you think of it, but no one else will think this way. The crawl of the rhythm, the bursts of writhing horns. The fan rattles incessant. Endless oscillations slapping the air around. For a moment the flesh cools. For a moment the clock counts. 

There is the plaintive painting squinting into the sun you saw there. There are the stations of grace and appetite empty in the shine of the bare bulb, the once and never more. The piano music playing prays to some unmet direction, the plea always in place, the calling all there is of us. The bones turn over slow, rethreading the spool as the flesh melts and blood boils. The organism ever one place or another. Places you had seen and touched, the light the gift of you looking. Your eyes the writing of the sign.

the chain

We don’t always wake to the world around us. Sometimes there’s a returning to the flesh, an exchange of essences and understandings before the real begins to ink itself in, the names and numbers and the miles to go. Poet or butterfly by the by, we wake with claims and answers, our forms trading, our intentions amok. From the known derivations to the concessions to the lexicon in hand, we turn and we imbue this terrible engine of carnal imperative. The briefest inkling to breakfast sandwich, we gather slow and act fast. We extrude meaning from the wake of our rampages, we craft the language we get you with. Amid the seas of chain, these links. 

It’s the sort of there that isn’t there. The offering to this imagined location, all the heart and mind and soul, my Mecca or the moon somehow only the formal. The chastisement of the stays and annulments, the long odds and my pitiable condition, this wish to exist again that will not be fulfilled. The longing still there, a world where the words were allowed to work, a hand to hold and a play to back. Simple unsettled desires to nettle at as the duty overwhelms. Someone singing softly, a hand brushing back long hair. The door moved on to other, less hollow lives. 

This is the letter I write each day, the lumps of sluggish dull ego, the drift of the wind through my long dead bones. Singed out and sung loud and smeared with ash. The wearying treatise of self’s sad journey. This is the chain written out of some surly burdensome impulse, the writ of ritual and the power of the spoken. Better read than dead, though this doesn’t always track. I sit as the winds come running to my lap, the sunset like it’s waiting for an encore. Bound to the bonds of ache and oath, I return again to the hungry fold of tongue and teeth, tasting the bent of your name. I breathe in again. 

kept

The sundown bursts through the porch slats and the rings of the ladder, hanging atop the back fence as the fireworks sizzle and report, the field a series of percussive echoes thumping across the distance. I squint a little, leaning forward to below where the sun seemed to go. One less blinding fire, one less gracious star to abide. The walls tremble, the window glass reverberates, the very air assaults. The sky still a stretch of storyboard blue. Rockets all racket, no red glare.

The hours stretch, the dusk excuses itself on principle, the explosions are all that’s left. The pit bull is in a panic, trying to claw through my back and smash through my skull. Every year becomes worse, with the malignant pyromaniacs setting off more and more ordinance, and Waldo now an absolute menace outside my immediate influences.  Between his descent into pure nerves, the nonstop barrage of intermittent explosions, and the crazy old bat factor these last months haven’t offered up much in the way of peace. You live long enough and wrong enough, soon the only way things get is worse.

Things still shimmer, things still shine, people follow their animal sides and are good and noble once in awhile. The smoke clears from the smoldering corners and crosswalks, the sparks retreat down the fleeting fount of fire. The bursts and booming will eventually play out. I remain my only aid. My only counsel when things start to matter, my only backup when the deal goes sideways. I kept to the madness and myself, rat tails of written words twisted tight for the match. Stupid sparks and bitter bombs and the thankless on and on. I keep living, on and on in other people’s worlds. 

deadpan

Wash down your wishes with whatever poison you prefer these days, there’s no sense in waiting for a civilized hour. It’s always something sometime goes the toast, the glass paused the hat tips the minimum conditions met, the muddle that binds the ritual to the words and the words to the bones that burden on and on. Take to the tasks you follow, speak to the ones you speak to. Heaven’s always further every day. Bear only the burdens you must.

It’s always waiting in the in box. It’s always ready to barge right in. Even in the washed out and wound down, it makes its marks and keeps appearances. You learn to take it by the grain. You learn to let it wear itself out. The treasure maps and stubborn stories. The way these dreams take the wheel. Always riding out something, always another twist for the sake of the turn. Look to the mirror, look to the window. Play the averages.

The answer gets out, either the dogs at the door, or the train as it wails. The shadows weep through the long light, soaking up the bones of the blue, attending to the slow brine of night. The numbers dribble down the chin. Little but the lean of the mood, the moon coming on. Little but the deadpan kept on in case the hurt is lurking, the hard that is hitting. Try on the appetite, wear out the hunger. The nights are growing longer. 

owed

Hour after hour drags the day to a halt, the going from known to known, the abrupt, expected changes. Weeds grow, dust gathers, the smoke comes and goes. The graces are given what they’re owed. The shadows spill from the substance, light building up to the side, another steady shove from the sun. Worn and ragged, propped up like a Halloween scarecrow upon bones worn to wisps and aches, the gracious radiance from pain to pain. The winds take whatever they can, the altar takes what gets left. The deft irrelevance of the build.

The neighborhood is mostly neutral, with significant build ups of good and evil down the days. Troubles are the native tongue upside the heads of gently settled and the hard living alike, how they scale and how they’re solved the whole lexicon. Beat the drum, walk your beat, work the clock. Nurture your lawn or invoke repercussions, the weeded desolations signaling a dangerous lack of decorum, as if the neighbors ever know. The song reverberates down the street, bouncing between houses, bending with the wind. Something always carries, something always stays.

The winds rise and the skin cools, a little shiver across the shaven scalp, a gripe here and there mixed with cuts and nicks usually along the knuckles and knees. All this animal appetite, all this coded schema, the poem always somehow a precipice long buried. The words retort again and again, the steps and the railing, the sticking to the grid. The engine always assembling, the purpose always at a turn, praying making scripture on the go. It takes more than is there, exchanges currencies and passions, roots to the stars. You take a breath and add to the aura.

repartee

Then just like that it turns a corner, another month of mystery seasons, the sky a flood of late day blues with the moon already afloat. Inhale an avalanche of smoke, cough a trail of constellations on the screen, watch the words as the occur. The strange symbols somehow always speaking, a voice that is ever ready behind your mind. The sizzle of your swift inference running lines through all the rigmarole, the windows opened the doors closed, tooth and tongue and the taste of your breath. The things all swaying from the way you say it. The words all running downhill.

Your whole life you’re on the hook, dragged by your stubborn bones through this tide of time and flesh, fighting the line ever after. All ache and struggle and songs and fires in the night. The repartee of sea and sky, the shimmer of being in everything you see.  Maybe you fight the good fight, maybe you just fight good, you fight even after you’re all fought out. It’s yours and it’s universal, a drop in the bucket, a drop in the unreckoned depths. Your story running adventure to adventure, the telling living check to check. All we have are short term solutions.

The jostling of the wind, the persuasion of the smoke, the gaze of the striptease moon. The trees speak the skies recitations, the long rush of the great falling, the spilling down through the atmosphere in boasts and spells. The moment takes shape and unbecomes, the known never staying long. This place where the marrow boils over, this place of salt and rust and glistening skins. This name all eyes and hands, the words always on the clock. Close your eyes as the breeze visits. Breathe in whatever you witness, breathe out another stitch in the sky.