sacred

I walk upon my sacrifice 

the body always stealing from the earth, 

being spilling over the lip,

the chalice forever overflowing.

The blood turns brown

the green sock sticking to

the bled through gauze 

gifted with the warning and

the wait, the heavy press,

pain singing along to

this stumbled dance,

this humbled glint of cognition,

the engine turning over in the dirt.

Ants seethe about the roots,

doves squabble upon the crown as

dead leaves cling to their undoing,

each limb a crowded precipice,

every tree a sutra keeping to the law. 

Looking up doves scatter

a John Woo mosaic between

branch and firmament, 

the gospel circles in the soil.

The moment is always burning through 

the Bonanza map made again, this mandala

I bleed into the once was, the day goes away—

the world’s only work is the turning.

toxic

I sit down at last to watch the sunset, but the sun is already long gone, covered by the clouds and smoke that thicken out sky. The sweet pang of the sacred west and my secret star unseen,  my heart swells on the tall grays and deepening blues as it all goes on to black. The day burnt down to this, this motor shook stillness, this bug clotted night. Thirty odd miles away another fire rages, consuming lives and dreams. The heat hasn’t budged and the smell of smoke and the flutter of ash abounds. The heart is how it sounds, one problem to the next. The soul is how it feels, alone in the growl and groan of the night.

I spend too much time alone. I live among people who’s hospitality I long ago used up. Even the ones that love me don’t like me all that much. So I live on in the ruins of my relationships. So I linger on in the ravages of my imagination, full of what ifs and maybe thens and memories played until the memories don’t work. A madman and a jerk I spend hours watching shows and reading screens and hoping that the dreams will one day come around again. The lonely rambling blues mingle with the black dog bitten nights, the colors blending on the sorry palette of my ghost, painting over all promise. My actions taking back all the lovely words. 

The gray sky dives a deepening dark, the porch light pushes shadows out into the yard. I take my place among the refuse, the useless toys and inherited benches that have yet to be thrown away. My joints ache, my back is sore, my foot is bleeding into a gifted sock. Monk and Rollins play on the box beside me as motorcycles roar around the neighborhood. I face her precious direction, the distance a couple dozens of miles and so heart breakingly far it makes my lungs weep, breathing in the breadth of it. A smattering of wings, the scattered words never to fledge again. The staggering gap between intention and the toxic truth. Never quite the one they were looking for once the looking is done. Never being the answer, another page left blank.

miss

There isn’t much I’ll miss—

a few people, the mountains,

most dogs, all babies—

even the ones that can’t stop

crying on planes or at the movies,

the babies you should let me soothe 

but you fear me, never knowing

what makes you fear me is

what makes babies cry,

your dissembling truths and

weaknesses you have mistaken 

for your power. Anyway

it is too late in this poem,

I am gone and only missing 

all that my absence will allow.

There’s the poets and the artists,

writers and players and musicians,

the keepers of lore and the sharers of song.

The bugs and the beasts, 

oceans blue and forests deep.

Gone a little, gone all along 

the question is who is doing

all this missing, sitting in some bowl,

broken upon some rocks, sinking in the sea,

no there there, no me to be

beset by fruits and burdens,

relieved of the beautiful horror of being.

I’ll miss the words that linger,

the words carried down the years,

your voice and art and poems

(though we all know that I can’t)

sorted from the letters of the living

never written in the book of life

or the list of laurels, all this love lost.

I will miss everything. I will miss it all.

heart

This is the long haul, the fullness of the full moon, the unknown arc of the rest of a life. This is the flesh wounds, the slings and arrows, the dirge of dashed hopes. This is the moon pushing through the haze, long into its becoming, framed in your window finding you. It has been a long time since we were lovers, a long time since we were even friends. I was ever a lapse in judgement, the folly of a wild hair, a transgression at my best. You were a blessing and a revelation, a deep desire and a sheer delight, like a wish on a lucky star favoring my keening whims. You were gone before I knew it, an idle rumor I had turned into an act of faith. I clung tight, and you had no talent for ridding yourself of dead weight. I was your foolishness, and I became a fool for you.

It was impulse, it was infatuation. It was a break in the routine. For me it was a rebuilt foundation, the thought I might actually mean something to someone else, that there might be some worth to my shitty life. I didn’t know I was too far gone until you were long gone without a word. Then came letters, kind but lawyerly, words meant to give nothing away. Letters that landed more than wrong, that seemed mocking and cruel to my devastated heart and quickly spinning mind. The contempt I felt from them may be real, and given the reason why you ghosted, well deserved. My constant raging, my lack of much of anything but anger and bitterness would be more than enough to disgust anyone, let alone a soul as sensitive to mood as a seismograph to the temblors deep in the earth. You are through, and yet it seems my heart is just getting started.

I will never know the whole story, but I know I had always hoped for more than you or credulity would allow. I will never hold you again in my arms, but my heart holds you more dearly than you can know. An old man unsuited to be anyone’s suitor, still in love with you despite all sense and propriety. Like the others you have collected in your wake, tumbling like so many dead leaves after your hems and heels. I know I am at most an object of shame and pity, more likely an albatross you’d just as soon forget. But I hold you as most precious for your gifts to the world, your peerless talents, and your steady striving to do good in this battered, vandalized world. Your missteps and your deceptions, to others and yourself, seem small compared to how hard you try every day to give everything away, how determinedly you work to heal the wounds you witness all around. I am in love with you in capital letters and bold type. I am in love with you though it is like loving starlight that’s reach was a remainder of a shine that long since changed directions. Your light still touches my heart, however long ago it stopped shining on me.

evening

 The darkness has set, firm and obdurate in the window. The blind dog snuffles around the room. My mother drags herself in her transport chair down the hallway, bumping and scooting her way into the bathroom. All the lights are off in the room where I sit, squandering my time on heavy thoughts and fantasy. The hour early, and it’s already too late. I am waiting, always waiting, though already left behind.

It slips away before you notice. You realize they’re leaving once they are already gone. The months go by, each day taking a little more, until it’s almost October and it’s only chores and distractions that fill your time. Disease and fascism scour the land, and you sit quietly with your broken brains and your daffy heart, soaking in poor mes. Ignoring your health has caught up at last, pain and malfunction the report of your body and your limbs. Over only grows more awful, once you realize that the horror of it is that you will die in plain sight. They all know, they all notice. This inaction and apathy is all you will get.

The eldest cat has taken the bed, gnawing at his fleas as the dogs run riot. The children next door shout and scream on their shadowed porch. I wait for my mother to finish with her evening routine, to wheel her to bed and settle her in for the night. It’s one of the few things I still do in the world. Attend to pets and family, lock and unlock doors, turn light on and off again. There’s no real need for me to be here. There’s no one that wants it to be me. This is just the way things have settled, one step at a time, one ill thought out concession to the necessary. Shunned and unloved, waiting for sleep to take me. Alone and abandoned to another unwanted waking into this fault of mine alone.

afternoon

It is as it is, this early autumn afternoon. This late day beset with blue skies, dead leaves, and fickle wind. The east is still bright as ever though the sun spills and levels, lighting the neighbor’s driveway and garage, pushing the tree shadows into traffic as they climb and rise. I smoke a cheap cigar, sitting uncomfortably in the place I settled. Sitting as I offer up the smoke that drowns my sunken heart in bitter and in blues. The tree before me stills, then shakes, the misfit wind wild and indecisive. My slack, pallid skin hangs there, some flag furled close to its pole. Some coat left hanging half on the back of a chair. The days brutal, stirring embers. The year too long by decades.

Father and child bike down the sinking street as shiny cars streak past. Light and shadow dapple the westward facing fronts of houses, light caught and slipped by leaf and limb. A song slows, a song ends to somewhat startling applause. The live recording of a moment long buried or burned. The music meeting its end to some pleasured act of hands and mouths. Little to differentiate the day from the others save name and number. Little to explain the steady gain this grieving has made in the sorry soil of my mind, only the steady plodding of bad to worse. A useless fool and a savage beast, I sit quietly as tears spill and the sinking is thick in my chest. The day grows old as I do, not knowing how to face the next inevitable other.

Sunset closes in, I still face the east. The butt of my cigar smolders on the edge of the green glass ashtray as flies flit and pester away. This grim desolation of my day ridden soul is only part of my illness and my self, the two now so interwoven that they are all but indistinguishable. I love deep and I love true, but oh how I seethe and rage, the sadness turning to anger more quickly than you can flick on a light. My sickness, my poison, just flows and flows. The long days turn to longer nights, all windows and walls and the westering moon swelling in your wake. The tall shadows swallow the street as the sun levels its assault as it makes its getaway. I will spend another night locked in the cage of consequences. I will stuff myself with heaps of just desserts. I rail and weep to no distinction. Daybreak to gloaming, I am as I am. The dwindling fire of a dull and dying light. 

cheroot

It is a simple spell—

fire to smoke, smoke to breath

breath to blood, blood to flesh—

so the flame is kept

so the branch is burning.

It is a common thread—

the wrong word is used or

the word is used wrong

it goes on and on so long

the word becomes right.

Comes a time the star is

your compass, your direction 

the sacred oath of sunset.

Comes a time the stone

no longer can bear the press

your blessing carries in your hands,

your fingers so craved and kissed.

A match struck becomes a light,

the light an anchor in

the ocean of all this night.

Washed away by all this water

swept away by wave and sea, 

no skiff, no ship, no lifesaver 

tossed upon the violence of these words

the metaphor always wanting more

everything another thing, the things 

in between, magic and machine

my heart, my lips, the fire

not the name as no thing is

the name save for the saying.

So I dream you like I dream

the cigar I do not have, my wish

another direction, this poem

named near enough, the invocation 

a voice in the dark in black and white.

The body keeps no secrets,

words loosed into the wind at night.

The hurricane becomes the beating of

a butterfly’s wings, the butterfly the poet,

the poet the dream, the dream your name. 

moon prayer

When the moon at last relents, 

pushing through the pines to see

me barefoot in the dark yard

it always takes your side.

I step upon the sharp rocks

my bad blood and misshapen gait

make me dance a little dance as

I ask after you, head aimed high

like pressing heaven to confess

its many crimes. The moon aloof

refuses to give you up, 

it whispers to the winds who

tells the pines to sweep and sway

brushing me off, shooing me

away in my rags and madness 

sending me reeling, casting my lot 

all odds and orbits, the stones 

tending to my wounds

your secrets safe from

my greedy fingers and allotted 

compliment of bleeding scrapes and cuts.

The moon becomes and fades over

the months and days that run

so fast and feel so slow, my life

the shimmer of moths caught

between the porch light and

the bent of the flood of sky, 

your tears and smiles the ten thousand

goodbyes inferred and implied,

still I won’t give you up.

I won’t let go

though you are gone

I won’t let go. 

intermittence

The sun goes down and the moon comes out and the crows all head for home. The streetlights flicker and spill as the smoke curls past the spidered eaves and the browning leaves, fall already and the only difference witnessed is in the alone. I spit and fume, shedding plumes and panache. The shadows grow unsettled and steadily advance as I sit and smoke on the porch. I miss all the little things that missing you had led to, and I miss you still without all the fixings. The love long gone, the lack and loss go on and on.

I fumble with the phone, looking for the deleted app of my most urgent absence. It is gone, like you are gone, despite all my want and reaching. The restless mind, full of maybe ifs and splintered reasons. Loneliness and neediness and all the little look at mes, the nowhere where you found me fondly before you found me out. I take it in my hand, my heart so sure, the answer always wrong. Is it now, is it next? Oh how I roll and roll, tumbling dice, though I know already. I want and want in all my gathered lack. I reach and I reach though you only touch the others. I touch and touch, dirtying the screen. I remain unseen.

The night plods by, time has me by the bones. I am always to myself. I am always so uncomfortably alone. The burden of being me, out of step and full of wroth. Rote answers before the words make it to me, recitation of the rules as again I fool myself, the moon pushing through the pines on every other line. I count the days, I watch the clock. Your letters crisping in the determined silence, all the good now gone. I see your smile in unchecked laughter, now a myth in retrospect while the others fill your heart and arms. Was I witnessed as I was, will I be again anything so great as a sparkle in your eye. A thing to use to pass the time, a flavor to linger like chickadees, a favor until your wings again alight in restless flight. Shedding yet another self, your bright star always rising. I pick up the phone, thumbs tap and slide, forgetting for a moment all my faults. Forgetting I was not forgotten, but healed from. 

embodied

The words meant nothing. Believe me, I wish they didn’t, because words were all I had. At least this has been my thinking, if thinking is what it was. Everybody has a part to play. Everyone is needed in some damn way. At least that’s how the story goes. All I had were stories. The specialness that oddness imbues, the value that makes all the suffering something.  Take the words off of the page, snatch them from my tongue. Put them in a paper bag, shake them up good. Pick them out in one and twos, place them at random. You’ll do as well as I do, and without all the bother and baggage. You’ll likely beat me when it comes to audience and accolades. I’ve never been much good at anything except being shown how little I matter. I’ve never had much of a purpose save getting shown the door. 

I don’t so much suspend disbelief as miss reality all together. I get caught up in some thrill, some notion that is three steps removed from what I have seen or am told, and my imagination runs wild. Even when I don’t believe in the fancy it captures me still, single minded mishap that I am. So I only hear the parts I want to, so I only work with the pieces that fit the plot. Since I was a child I have been hard headed and wrong. My whole life has been as series of misunderstandings due to not listening clearly, especially not listening to the things left unsaid. The time has come to give up my last conceits, to settle into my last days of exploitation and diabetes. No love, no art, no name. Just a juggler working the same old props. Just failure embodied in a fool.

I’m tired of being ignored. I’m tired of squandering my shitty life for people that don’t want me around. Time and time again I end up lost and used up. I am worse off now than I have been in ages, my health, my self, my heart all at an all time low. I quit Twitter to jump off that wheel, one less place to be disparaged and mocked. I get enough of that in the house I am allowed to reside in. I’ll keep posting here for at least a while, but I am only really motivated to write for readers, and I have so few and expect fewer as my writing continues to lack panache or relevance. And really I mostly wrote for one person, who no longer reads me, and who gives so few fucks it’s embarrassing that it still guts me that they don’t. The crazy gets worse, and nothing else is getting any better. So I’ll keep plugging along until I don’t. My worthlessness knows no limits. 

ladder

A few rings and there is

no more up, two by fours and

two by sixes, the cobwebbed rails

the garage door runs on and

smooth concrete below. The climb

comes honestly, the heart run

its rabbity circles out,

the head little more than decorum.

Chase and chase the race is ruined, 

the by and by gone bye-bye,

the baby with the bath. Daylight 

through the desperate shadowed night,

power cord halo, dire

silhouettes and sad circumstance—

all these awful years for nothing.

Heaven or hell right there for the taking,

foot after hand and the rickety rise

done with a kick and a clatter,

the conversation over in

too bads and told you sos,

the intention fixed and finished,

all the words never worth

a goddamn thing.

dirt

Reading the last book

the poet’s work collected late

the garden’s harvest 

green and gold long after

the gardener goes to dirt,

the careful, loving labor from

friends and family tending the wishes for

words and papers left behind,

seeing only growing things

seeds and leaves and love

that living well allots.

Art is only the shared ache of

seeing something you need to show,

the eye of the scrub jay,

the wing of the crow.

The joy of being where you’re wanted

when it’s where you want to be.

The guitars and the galleries,

the journey always ending with

the beauty finding 

the way back home. 

doll parts

 And now to the sad child, the sleepless child, the keening fool who sought your answer. The wretched day come down too quick, the plain hands keeping their own counsel. The slow ruminations of the coated tongue when at last the words have failed. The fast to forgiving, the forgotten discourse, strangers all filling your head. In this unholy moment through filtered daylight, the residue of every lesson. Stand up, dull creature and face your maker. Get up, foul fellow and see what you have sown.

The penny taken, the penny placed. The sound of the radio turned off. The music that plays and play only in your head now; your heart too busy with the beating to listen. Hands in pockets you meet the mirror shabby and unshaven. Too close, too close fierce light! Once was and will be shaking hands in the burnished cauldron of your dull eyes. No one to gather in the assault of your arms. No one to make it a minyan. 

Whirlwinds reaped and devil’s dues make for plaintive mirrors. It doesn’t get said and it doesn’t get seen, just shoulders to carry contrition. Feet unsteady as any fable, legs that drag and fold. Back wrenched and head on wrong. The offhanded discard and the tumultuous clatter as the husk finds out its fate. Limbs mangled and face to the floor, the once favored plaything once playtime’s done. A bespoke hunger for a begotten god in the desert of this consequence, every prayer ringing hollow.

keep

It is a small sound, like a tiny engine running hot. It is a tender taste, like a shy kiss. Up all hours, listing your secrets. Shifting from thought to feckless thought. The fan blows, her voice just around the corner. Your hip aches, her hand once pressed there. Reading lamp haloed in aluminum and dust blurs and blinds depending on where you look. It’s what you keep while you’re keeping. It’s where you go when you’re gone.

The ceiling is buttered with spilled light, glasses cast smeared prism glints, remaindered ghosts of different days. Music plays so softly even the hour is unsure. Laid out like a school uniform flat on the comforter, laid out like a fighter who stepped into the hook. Pain wanders through your bare body like a sound check for every nerve. It either catches up with you, or it leaves you far behind. It depends a lot on what it it is.

Tell me your troubles in the dark and early hours. Stir my cinders with a text when you wake. It is all still here in between night and daylight. It lives in the itching of my skin, it lives it the sharp inside my heart. Finger prints and love’s savored labors. The counting of the cards when the deck is cracked. When you write down the bared teeth of your dreams. When you wonder what might have been. The children stirring in their slumbers. Your love wrapped tight in words and time. All the fine people waiting, waiting so hopefully for a glimpse. The light that follows when you go. 

new moon

 The moth in the moonlight 

loses to the mirror of

water clasped in the laden 

vessel, the sky held

as if in cupped hands,

drowning as its wings stir and

spill the stars the stars it was offered by

the ghost cast upon the innocent skin

carrying that heavy shine.

The face sags, wearying the mirror,

the spotted constellations dusting 

the glass mingling with the flaws and

freckles of the slack skin in

the gatherings of the flooded eyes,

as if to say this is the way

the world will take it, this is

the way of the world, always

falling into the door held open by the light.

The water neither waits nor watches

the seasons or the sky or the smoke,

it holds and is in turn held, kept open

like palms proffered to

the relentless heavens, all wings and 

wonder as the moon wakes unseen 

by the slick silver of lost moths or

the mocking constellations, 

offering only ever a place to land.

some catch flies

 One night the skies clear a little, the breathing gets a bit easier, and the stars flicker in the slippery atmosphere. There’s not much to it, just a rolling of the dice and clipped fluidics, but it feels like a respite all the same. The troubles are loosed and they aren’t through acting up. The bad has just begun, but it’s good to take a breather while you can. So the stars are out and the smoke is on the road. The night is cool and it’s coming through the screen. It’s all the romance that’s allowed.

Sit back and let the light do all the work. Study the geography of shadow and ceiling, let the songs pass through unanswered. Raid the reliquary if you think it will help. Photographs and artifacts and all the shunned offerings left laying around. You can never tell where the power lingers. The static sticks to your fingers. The words wander all over your being. The night never cares if you can sleep.

All the gifts and all the good of it cheapened by fits and starts. The books you lent, the dishes you shared, the pen you rarely write with. The list is endless once you begin to catalogue the absence. The glass is overflowing once you let it pour. A wrong turn by a generous soul sets you to thinking, and the poison gets all over. Left with a set of intangibles and time on the wrong side of it, moving in small sad circles. Rent cloth and offered aspects, acts of contrition in shabby skins, the loud of living all around. Regrets gathered like flies to a wound. The hours abound. 

same song

 The days go by in dirge and dearth. The days go by where you can barely catch your breath. The mystery seems history and the world keeps taking its shots. A trip here, a clout there, a few words that reveal some heavy suspect truth. The pace is leisurely but the gloves are off. All the weepy blue declarations and the grim forecasts aside, the worse is getting worse, and nothing much is coming to the rescue. Such sorrow, such trauma, such doom dished out on the poor and the problematic. Even the small blessing I was granted was a Houdini level punch to the gut. I’m glad for the words and the gracious mouth that spilled them, but they did a number on me. I am an illness in my skin, I am the bad end of the empty set. Unfit and intolerable, I am the hurt by the squirt. 

It is no big deal. Jackbooted thugs and the walking inferno and hurricanes are the sorts of evil that matter these days. And though I am a piece of shit, I am a piece of shit that mostly keeps to myself. Other than my mother and my sister, no one really has much to do with me. I can run these cycles in circles until I finally jump off the ride. Hardly anyone needs to be affected by my rage or depression. No one deserves it, and I suppose when it comes down to it, it’s about all I am anymore. It’s clear that I intellectually have understood that my behavior has negatively impacted my relationships, but I don’t think moment to moment I really got it. I’m just crazy and mean, and though I feel like I spend most of my time trying not to act out or hurt anyone, the key word there is trying. Not nearly hard enough, it seems.

I spent the evening watching a show about grumpy, gossipy astronauts and their space problems. All the characters had human problems, which really adds to the drama, especially the human kind. Dead spouses, troubled relationships with their children, having crazy diseases— the whole gamut of regular people stuff. Astronauts talking to their loved ones. Loved ones talking to astronauts. You get the picture. And it kills me, all this regular people shit I cannot for the life of me get close to right. The odometer on my envy has been to Mars and back several times now. And all I can think of is that I need a better cage. Maybe somewhere on Mars or the moon. If you care about me, I will hurt your feelings. If you care about me I will hurt your heart. 

monstrosity

 The light pools in intimate impacts, hums along with the frequency of the flesh, engaging the clock and the geometry. The unsettled stimulations that even out given enough space and time, the slow stray from the way of nought as the trifles and trappings endure. The candlelight after you light the candle, the attention you offered to the unyielding gaze, the burning always a part of you. The flame still stirs somewhere in between soul and shadow, even though your fire has long since moved on. The flesh is always ready to return you to the dream. The flesh is always ready, spirit willing, to fold into the dust. Living in the abandoned labyrinth, trying to make the Minotaur last.

The song glides below the smoke that lingers in the room, beside the burn wandering the sky outside, within the rising tide of night. Her voice along the smolder, a lilt within the melt, the note by the throat. Her voice a savvy animus, the step along the slide into dreaming, the motive for calling down the moon. The feet in the fire, the husk of earth, the head the sea, the heart filled with wings. The stress upon the wrong strings, the stricture of mistaking chaos and freedom, the altar always awaiting its concessions. The music walks through the walls, it slithers through the floor. Living in the echoes, trying to catch up to the song.

The water washes over the tongue, cools a little sore off the throat. A sip then a swallow, a parch quenched, then a remembrance of salt licked from the lips. The gathered sets of senses and focus of the instrument, the poem and the animal mingling in the mud, the ghost in the bones seeding each tedium. Meat and teeth and gravity, from iffy soup to nutty certainties, the entity pounds out the scales. The mistake the ego makes in weighing the monstrosity, the utility yet to spend ahead. All the prayers and rituals in floor hard and bruise tender, the unseen star, the false apostasy. The world burning all around as we manifest. 

spill life

 All at once the chords change and there’s the melody. The piano trips over itself to explain. The light left on, the lights switched off, the lights no one uses any more. At least as far as the imagining goes, the music falling from your touch. The poetry just slipping off your hips. The hesitation that broke your stride just so. The living visible in your every least move. Of course I still listen. Of course I look. Only I see too much with ancient makeshift eyes, the maypole and the pairings, the crash and the arrival. Seeing the truth in empty rooms and lonesome smoke. The ashtrays of our ancestors. The window open to the street. 

There goes the world, planting seeds and blazing trails. There goes the world, the tumbled remnants in your wake. The faraway star, the cartoon flower and goat, the assembled symbols used to tell the tale. Myths and mysteries, sweat and dust and the medicine on our skin. Starved of matter, starved of spirit, glibly drinking in the amber light. The fantasy that goes unnoticed because you’re living in its midst. The signals that you keep receiving but never get.

Oh, it’s all so sad and shabby and old. Waiting by the stage door with peonies and poems. Standing in the busy intersection as if you’re the only place to look. Time and again there but for the telling. Time and again the terror of the truth. The dogs barking as they charge out the backdoor, the wish every night it was you in the driveway. The wish against all the things that are, and have always been. As if I didn’t make it feel like murder every day. As if luck was the same as destiny.

coffee and crows

Don’t mind me, I’m in the middle of the map I’m making. It’s no bother, it’s all I ever do. I blow some smoke, I look around, I fill in a few blanks. Look out, world, next to nothing coming through. Sure it seems a horror show, but it’s good work for a monster. Distance painted on, black crow calling and coffee spilling steam. Here and there because the algorithm got sloppy, ice cream truck and crow throat, the haze and the hurting. The cursor and the curse, the music that was playing then the music playing now. Smoke clinging to every flesh, smoke hunkering deep in the heart. A few simple words, the tread of flies. 

The music plays, a different song from distant days. The colors have all but gone. Something moves, something glimmers, some cold dead thing comes straight at you out the crypt. The wild, tired dead skies just stare back. The blind dog comes staggering into your shins. I can feel your deft alarm somewhere along the roots and lines. Your birthright bones and your scattered seeds. Your shine in the eyes of blood and death. It is a kind of dreaming, that boyfriend song now, all worm and plow. Now I am the empty night, the burned horizon. The scratching out scraps and habits from the ruins of a lost civilization, the collapse evident in everything.

The story is there was no story, just an old guy smoking on the porch. These gifted regrets that keep on giving. A mistake to match the set, and then another. So much reckless want and baseless fantasy. Witless and word proof, an automaton wound tight and now spinning out the springs, a set of wishes left out in the weather to rust. Hanging hopes in the wake of a wonder, a ghost caught in its own story wanting wildly. So I smoke and listen, the wailing train and the idling traffic, the kick of the neighbors air conditioner, and a faraway crow. Covered in ash and indicators, the wind of old ways blowing through me. 

summer stock

 The resolutions don’t arrive, the explanations never get made, the bills are never settled. We either got it, or it goes on back order. We either make it, or it moves along to another life. The math depends on who you are, privileged or brilliant maybe you make it work, the rest of us just repeat a couple of operations, over and over until it finishes us. We stick to the script, we use what’s in stock, we try to be visible in the impossibly busy world. Some of us fill in when there’s a blank space and no one good is available. Some of us are such poor matches for the world, that we just get scribbled on some before we’re tossed away. You get put back on the shelf enough, you know where you’re staying.

I don’t learn. I assume actions are reproducible, I assume the instruments are sound, but I am not capable of making informed assumptions. I keep on the wrong track even after a few collisions. I just assume crashes are part of the process, and keep jonesing for the process even once it has no use for me. I walk around the empty circle handing out my ducks and geese without a duck to pat or a goose to pursue. The ghosts are starting to ask about me behind my back, getting all their gossip lined up good. I keep up the rituals long after the gods they serve are gone.

By the time I show up either the bodies are buried or the damage is done. By the time I’ve worked my way around the Bay I’ve burned every bridge there is. I speak my piece and everyone else has moved onto a different show and season. And because the words are my sickness and my sentence, I always think that I’ll find the right ones. Because they find me by my words, I mistake how much they matter. So I go speaking out of turn, break down the church door during service, only to leave my sorry wrong room and baleful stares and whispered curses. Always so wrong and so far off script that there’s no back to go to. There’s no words anyone wants from me, and here I am handing them out by the bushel. Nothing to say, and I’ve already said it again.

dead bang

 A crow calls, another crow replies, the afternoon continues unabated. The ordinary continues in order, minus a little smoke and ash. Yesterday’s orange skies are once again poor air quality hazy instead of doomsday movie changed. I circled through my usual suspects as flecks of ash covered everything, hobbling through the daily maze of dog and cat, checking my typical list. I’m spectacularly sad, ordinarily sore, and soup to nuts a bore. There’s nothing much to me outside the context clues, wrong place, wrong time and all these unpaid dues. Taking up too much time, talking only to myself.

There’s an urgency that is only extant inside me. All the real world markers and measures have all gone quiet, everyone else has moved swimmingly and seamlessly along, even the myths I harbor in my stupid selfish heart have dwindled into just more dumb stuff I carry. All these dead conversations, words that may as well be dialogue from the Rockford Files for how much it means to anyone other than me, running around my head and running down my heart. The ache has been especially pervasive lately, knowing that when the inferno comes our way we are likely fuel, knowing that any enmity aimed my way has got the drop on me. Dead bang.

It’s all old habits. I don’t know that there’s any new I could do. The momentum of spiraling constantly downward, walking in the shoes of some once was ghost, the joy crushed out of my mortal husk has more than done for me. The weight of all this suicidal ideation and guilt over my worthlessness has gotten me in deep. No news, but being nothing but shit and trouble to everyone you interact with wears you the fuck out. Now I feel like writing a letter that is both unwelcome and way too late. Another habit I need to let go— the belief that exposition will help. That writing it out does anything besides jacking a round into the chamber. That anything is left for me but to swing.

misperceptions

 The daylight hasn’t made it yet, what with the end days lighting and the apocalyptic atmospherics, the sky like looking a toothache in the eye. Grazed with gasps of doom and lashes of grace, the stranger takes a seat, the table cluttered with cup and ash. This story oh these millions of miles away, our shared sky California, the fire speaking clearly with a breeze cracking wise. Buried in these doomsday hues and stark harkenings, the scintillant senses filled with the mundanity of cataclysm, this fraught constancy of dire reckonings and calls for returned normalcies weighs heavily in our soot tinged souls. The harbor and the hearth, the ruthless waters and the sacred roots, the deep drink before the pause to come. The drummer rat a tats between the clatter of engines and the raving of the winds. 

The heart still hurts in the hole where it’s buried. The beating hasn’t let up despite its cruel dispatch, the song so sore and squandered, the art of it spread so thin. The casual dismay of every lost day, the constant march into oblivion cut up all bite sized and manageable, one mistake exchanged for the next as it all sprawls out. The leaving and the loss meted out in deft script and pretty painted plates. The onerous unjustified ends come due on an eerie doomsday morning, along with all the righteous ones lined up already. A whole day of hooks and dismay.

It’s true that I haven’t been the same since I was run off the road, but I’ve still been consistently shitty all the same. My heart is always clotted by the frustrations of not quite managing to convey what it means, head lit with imagined conversations and sorting out misperceptions and wrong turns. So the world ends with me in tatters, so I was mistaken in my loves and loyalties, so all I managed in my too long life was to make headaches for others. The wrong I’ve done won’t be undone, and there’s nothing I am worth defending. I don’t have the words, and more importantly, the words won’t have me. I’ll take whatever bitterness that leaves a little kindness behind.

golden

 Tell me again when you like what the moon gets up to. Tell me again when the dreams get in your eye. From sight to sight, from see to see, your heart made too much of me. The morning would have it one way, the day another. Pretending to be in a world where there are still words between us. Standing at the foot of the stairway in the dark. Something happens, or you say more things. It’s not much, but it’s how we advance the plot.

Sometimes I toss a few more upon the turns. Sometimes I switch on the light. There’s no telling what I’m up to. The ceiling lit and the stories going, the screen to flicker and feed between dreams, shadows outside and looking in. Sometimes there’re songs to play along with, sometimes there’s a book for a breather. I wake up all angst and appetites, wondering where my next tomorrow will come from. The bass line drags by at 5:15 on a hot garbage day morning. The day stirs a little on its own.

I always have more conversation once the conversation is gone. My words get old, the grass is greener, things move on. The sky thinks it over a little. The silence is a slab. Nothing getting going just the gone all along, the breathing broken up into its parts, the longing then the knots that drag it all to ground. The clutch and grip of lung and heart wresting the sky off its hinges. The blood stirs and toils, the animal and the entity holding hands as the cross the roads, the motor in the corridor a low dark growl. The hours before a bloody sun down to a few golden moments. The embers on the altar, the mouthing of the words. 

reserve

It all burned down, the cities that we’d visit, the little truths we’d work. Through the heat and the haze we met the maze and the Minotaur, scattered to separate trusts and secret paths, the blood and the no take backs. The stories were pared the memories clipped the dreams left to starve in the night. The matchstick broke the wish in a stroke, now all that gossips is death and smoke, the sky smudged and the earth aloud. Soot and ember falling all around, your wishes nowhere close. The loss all mine.

The silty light from the burnt gods, the ache of the earth adrift in the crowded atmosphere, the pity of the sun merciless too. Flesh sings and the bones all rattle, the place and time rolling through the deep rivers and shifting faults, being another blue bias. You breathe and drown in the sea of it, you breathe and you’re working the bellows. You sink within the blood of the day, you rise in the light you inscribe. All that live out the stilted witness, all that trail off as the words take flight, all in until we out at last. The sky, the sea, the reach of the trail through the trees. You a taste of the most that’s made.

I smoke in the leftover light. I smoke at the bottom of the sky, the burned down day and dream adrift. Here where neither mind nor meat matter, in the low tones and high dudgeons, the voice aloud that turns out to be mine. I spin my wheels and spit some words that not even the dogs will hear. The steeping gone past stagnant, all I impart wreck and rot. The dread lessons loosed all around, I stare at the ceiling and soak the sheets and miss every morsel of you. The memory and the meltdown, the reserve and the refuse. The distance that’s incurred.  

replicate

The softest of shadows dream and drowse, the day on bright and the television loud. The cool uncoils against the skin, the summer restless in the flesh, the window stirs and shines. From one faith to the next, hill after hill towards the sliding sky, the hypnosis of the road moving beneath the still gathered around your spine. The map is always catching up to your breath. The words spent in the lull between the stones and the stars. The things meant for silent, the things meant to said. The moments where they replicate.

The air is bent to effect, the bass line and the elaborate rattle, white noise and baffled atmosphere against the ubiquity of heat. The jostled air blots the drenched from the flesh, thick with drizzled sweat and the accumulated swelter, still with whatever effort is left. So goes the radiating day, pelting the entity from all sides with immanent energy, the air ablaze and rapt with the spell of busy atoms. So goes the hot slice of window and the magnetized rousing of the woodwinds, witness to gradual magic and switches left on, the ghost of your splendor echoing in every surface and mirror.  I can only imagine and remember, and leave the words untouched.

The words emerge well below their boiling points, the sieve of flesh glistening with sweat and punctuation, the ghosts always wrecking the galleys. Black coffee with shining constellations of vestigial cream sparkling in the mood of the room, dust and caution, heavy volumes and unused light. Once I was say the shelves and mementos, now I am say the curser and the cursing, I shall be says the urgency from form to form. Despite the guest lecturers and the sigils they scratch, despite the backmasked faith and the well shared jest, the engine still turns over. Not blade or bell or slicing vine, not needle or curse or cheap platitude will stop this old knot from the bind. The words follow the lines and their tangles, they are the intentions pressed into the stone, the map that makes itself. All the asking left us, naked and dripping in this heat. 

ossify

 The light was late in leaving, the ash was thick and expansive, the drum machine ran off a beat in record time. Here there was smoke, here there was water, a sip and a swallow and a host of flies. The sheen of sweat the weight of sky the burning of the syllabus, here we are the stranger for the duration, the visitor all aflame. Slow the breath and hold the day in place. Speed the sky beneath the thrall of earth and atmosphere, turn the page and make your mark, swallow the concoction as your blood sings along. Time comes when the count will go on without, the lonely at long last alone.

The daylight left. The gaze of the sky stuck in the minds eye, the sound of geese, the sound of crows. The gray eyes of the sky as it slips into its finery. The colors all collaborate as the night eases in close, the heat and the first kiss of cooling, the structures of the revealed. The world continues its creeps and crawls, the day all souvenirs and antecedents, the night the further aims of the arthropods. The night drags it out in brights and slows, the shadows sway in the passing headlights, the firmament held by sirens and little lights that dwindle away. History only real as it falls out of memory. The things that sing the softest after they turn to stone. 

These are the small concessions, the brutal editing and the sloppy pastes, the heat a halo of insects and irritations. This is where the lean and dash of the water becomes the river, the brimming bandwidth the shapes and skins. The night lays it down and somehow we are found. The strata of amped atmospheres, the layers of seeings and sayings, the code of the glimpse once caught then long gone. These words by the eyeful, words in your hands, the amplitudes unspoken. These pledges bent from these whisperings of escaping wind. These pledges that wait for the words to take shape. A flash and its gone. A flash and all is stone. 

calibrate

 The smoke curls, the leaf burns and flecks, the flies pace out their measures. Chitinous limbs and gossamer wings, flit and still, flit and still. They abide in swarms and tides, each fly a plot and a mission, a future foretold and a plague to come. They imbue the machine then mock it for parts. They let the sentience settle, let it soften as it foments small motions, little cinders brief sparks. The number will occur, after the ends are tabulated, after the telling at last ensues. The numbers another byproduct, the dust knocked loose by the mind making space, more names and aims and implied engines. Witness the coming conflagration, calibrate the instrument if there’s any instrument left, then see what words are left. Abide the plagues, and then let’s see.

Spitting wet tobacco leaf and the last dread embers, trod on and scraped off by the dwindling day, heavily beneath the lean of the urgent dusk. Shed within the welling shadow, the coming night, the broken off breath where the breathing took a knee. Fastened bolt tight to the framework by the spill of simple physics and the particulars of a vestigial faith. Somewhere the drum, somewhere the galley, somewhere the stars to set it right. The smoke uncoils, climbing to the pine needle middens of the eaves, working out the offering and the dependings. The magic left to speak to the missing magic.

The dusk and all at once the night is at it. Ruffling all the pretty feathers, rattling every relevant gate. Every root sooth in rumors, every marrow whispering like the wind. The nevers all come home to roost, to the shards of the heart, the claimant and the stranger mingling silhouettes in the dreaming. The machine slows, feeling the shifting of the senses, the turning in the tongue and its tenses. Twilight presses its pretty petals between the strata in the sky. The brittle of the mystery there but for the speaking. The shared breath and the ramparts, and the iron burning bright. The ambling of the language, the tumbling of stones beneath the tide.

the names we know

 The clock started before anyone showed up, the flag was waved before the racers knew to race. The sky goes by, the songs get shuffled, we watch and we mitigate. Perched behind the circumstances, caught by the read of the room, the rhythm right on top before we knew what hit. The day smudged by the read of the ritual, smoke towards the portents, flies to the flesh. The mind weighs in against the insistent press of becoming, the scribbling in the margins, the writing in the smoke. The spin of the wheel, the graven bones, the long walk home. The streets we follow, the names we know. 

The breeze has its moments, the coffee dark and hot to the swallow, the liberties taken by invertebrates. Every feeling comes a tumble, every thought caught in the heat of the scrap, the incense in the air wings on high. Every term always last legging it, every word a terminal case, the gravity of the next story, the levity of the telling. Shadows slowly fleshed out, dreams breathed into the cypher, the mood wielded by a tempered breath. The next magic and the next and the next. The broken and the brittle, kindling cracked and fire crackled, the becoming held tight by the moon. You have to say the name out loud. You have to spill as atmosphere awaits. 

The bandwidth is running thick, the frequencies are waking up, barely a blinking and it’s already more than we can match. The languages and rectories, the magic and the magnetic, the voice and a smidgeon of vision. The stricture of structure, the places and the instruments, the way the spoken carries. We speak out of turn, our words always at a rush, the mettle and the cadence. We speak out our ghosts and our galleys, running down the hallway opening all the doors. We speak after the last was spoken, and are turned at once to salt, the spilling of the smoke. Say it loud, speak it plainly. The sun is on its way down, the moon has yet to show.

the stages of the static

 It’s the music that they make out of you, though I’m one to speak, I do the same thing too. The feel that permeates, the stories made out of your space. The way sometimes you’re the all that shines in any golden moment, the gold where all else is gray hinting silver, bathing brightly in the mind. I only say to be mindful of all the singing when I deign to say it. There’s nothing to be done, with more nothing yet to do. The Holy Ghost or the Hot Skillet Mama, another point of no return, another gaffing of the wheel. Still that song that makes you want to sing along. 

The day is held like smoke, the sky only a migration, sore in the shoulders from the breath you held. The light beating bright across the silvered heavens, eyes spent in the long ago, heart a droll constriction. The fence split in rails of green light, the overwhelming urge is always to stare, always to look your absence in the eye. Another breeze blows by, another kiss or touch. The old wail cuts across the road, the horn blown inside out. The moon as the host, the wolf in the fold. 

Once you look away, you never see it again. Something in the angle of the eye, something in the luck of the landing. Out along the furthest dispatch, the gravity playing out. The stages of the static, the signal once it wanes. A skinful of soot, a skinful of sleep, the unreasoned reaches of the imponderable deep. The call of the moon, the clutter and the calm and the mind all but gone. The lean of the light, the sky steep upon its withering gaze. I stare and stare, the way eyes can fill, the way night can shine. 

sing heigh-ho

 There’s a science to it, though it’s never the science they seek. There’s a path even when there isn’t a plan. Hands together and the candles lit, the words pronounced, the geometry observed. Warily we wake in daylight to chase the moon with mad abandon. Heavily we hear our hearts drop then we sing unto the green holly. The misery we were made from, the hosannas on our heads. Skip to the frivolous rhythm, dance to the wind fraught sparks. Our lives lived in merry circles, our lives witnessed silhouettes from the depths of some secret world away. Leave the cave to find the way buried forever in the depths. Our projections just voices thrown, the ventriloquism of our expectations spilling down the road. Our direction another coin toss at the crossroads. Heads or tails all the destiny you need. 

I can’t make my way, can’t wash it down, can’t drink it in. I never get past the bylaws, I never make it by the over correction. Spot and cinders and the rain of ash. Calendars and letters and pages left blank. I limp and drag and take my consolations. I step and stagger and wait while the sky comes down. The fleeting and the folly, like the players are wont to sing. Most of it that way by design, the rest end up that way in time. The usual bindings and black coffee. The structure stretched around the lonely corners of the mind. I give it up the minute I get it. I swallow the ink and wait for the gravid moon.

There’s a magic in it, though it’s never the magic they miss. There’s a way there even when it’s a workaround. Hands empty and the daylight yet, the spell simmers, the winds rise. Trash for tumbleweeds, guitar for coronet. Lightly land the flies that test us. Wearily we rest our eyes from all this witness. The language travels amid the skins and voices, it writes on the bones, and draws in the dark. The lonely knowing of the stars and planets, the naming of the flocks and swarms. The days a dearth of diversions and a feast of woe, our words scattered to the dust. To know with bitter certainty the love that is missing. To know without a doubt that, yet again, the moon will rise.