spill

Maybe it’s the way the shadows keep stacking up. Maybe it’s the spill of unexpected rain, the hush and hiss of passing traffic, the tell of the back of the cat. I sit between smoke and song listening to the loot and loiter of the storm. Old bones and ancient ways, the dust that gathers, the fire unfrayed. This coffee cup purgatory, the sacrament cool enough for the tongue, the vessel too hot for the lip. This blood buffered atmosphere, this streak of blue blazes invective and bone bound invocation. Staring at the poison portrait, staring at my socks. Stripe for stripe, curse for curse, the transitory of bad to worse. 

I guess it is the rain at the moment, the steady sound of the world at work out among the things that bump and mutter. I guess it’s the beauty down to the bones. You lose and lose, the disappearing begins. Now it’s three light bulbs and the music from the speakers. Now it’s the rain and Phil Collins drums. The mortal turn and all these loose and laden words spilling from my lips. Grumbling bones and a wish for kisses. The abstraction and the entity and the mystery meat. The comedy of errors and the letters left unsent. 

The weather steps, the seasons change, the stars adjust accordingly. There is empty in everything, so much owed to the holes in the argument and a generous serving of negative space. My head is reliquary and wax museum, my heart raven stash and rat midden. All the rest is guts and ghosts, chains rattled and larders looted as I drift between catastrophes, wrong rooms and too soons and felony breaking character. Animal and alibi as clock and calendar deals me wounds and tatters. The lit room and the long night, the shape and the slow dissolve.