A flinch of eyes
a gust of rain
this picture painted
so dutifully dumb with love
hanged crooked and touched
gently with drowses of dust,
intimate pledges of flesh and
bardo, sage and bobby-pins bound
tight in rubber bands, light
drowned in blunt weather
the incandescent halos
secreted away, tenders
slipped in between
beloved pages,
dear traveler,
fixed star.
I look up not knowing
what to expect of the sky or
where the moon would show,
not to say expecting nothing—
that’s just not how the world goes,
my fingers cold and houses throwing
bright Christmas colors across
the blinking distraction of
my periphery, headlights sweeping
the old eyeballs briefly blind,
words working to find
focus, while the mind gazes
power mad in its pick and choose
solving the mystery by starting
at the end and writing backwards,
first quarter becoming moon
Jupiter to one side, the atmosphere
gaining ghosts as the clouds
barely hesitate before
the facts blur, obscured
by inevitable weather
and shiny things that glint and
glimmer as sight glides on
the skin of memories,
the seasons of how we thought
we were saying who we
are in these nested givens.
Our lives as bright as ice
as our winters bite down
into our glistening bones.
I can’t speak much for where I am, it’s only where I seem to be. Willing spirit and wanting flesh, left outside the fold for a few common apostasies until it is the mark of the mechanism, this penchant for ritual and automation. There is a fog in the prescience, a blur between motive and causality, the road followed for the writing. There’s a glamour of holiday lights, a slamming of the doors of cars and houses, the push and pull of headlights straining down the way. I’m sharing scant breath with a small troublesome cigar, bright ember and heaven headed smoke astir in the eaves. Saying it like it makes it so when it only makes it said. The spark, the bolts of incandescence happens somewhere else. The words there, the work another stanza hewn in available stone.
The hours plod and malinger, speaking in dust and remorse, eyes emptied of agency staring at prefabricated dreams. The drift of agency, the smudge of witness, this burned down world still riddled with nights too cold. Three in the morning, curling plumes of smoke by the back porch light, the scooped out moon oblivious to such obdurate prostrations. The animals figure something’s up and have launched hectic patrols in ones and twos in pursuit of this obvious truth. I leave them to their investigations, sitting still outside as the freeze sets in search something even more ephemeral than my motives. Reaching for reasons that aren’t there as if summoned by the winter in the wind.
The years go on and the husk it hollows. Somehow the chemical exchange rates are adjusted and our ams change to wases, something perturbed in the mix as things begin to lag system wide. No longer serving whatever god or purpose or words there were, knowing the ring won’t come around again. The day’s gray slopes gathering west, the dogs rooting around the yard, the street strewn with dead leaves and offerings. I write it down as smoke and breath dance a reel with this dizzy witless blood, low obdurate will stirring through the consequences, to want and linger useless as a prayer. The ritual itself turning over and over, this interminable engine of ink and symbol, the spell of ought and naught. The words this want of magic, the waves moving on.
There may be smoke, but the fewer mirrors the better. Only so far to go on looking glasses as the road trends rough, some fleeting missive, some bars of broken old code. All the places blur, the faces a jumble on the time line, the stories only changing hats and swapping spit. Suddenly the conductor is calling out, cities turned to stops, counting aloud the end of the line. It’s the stories trading elbows, jostled onto the wrong stop, the names they were given become the names they earned. Brick by brick our self deceptions grow to devour the possible, to engulf whole civilizations as Babel again tumbles down, the same old tricks sold as the holy and the new. Every corner crowded with coming new ages.
Lights go on, lights go off, traffic bristles by. The day in remission at last and the mercury taking a dive, a stippling of stars and wanderers, satellites and aircraft glimmerings of uncertain hues as the pass between obscure branches out of view. Remainders left despite the distribution and the math, worn through lenses left to their own devices as the witness winds down. A map of attrition and confusion left to the reckoning of dubious machines. A face that changes with the weather and a name that never took. One for the highlight reel, one for the books.
It could be the story of starlight, it could be the story of wishing upon a star. Details sorted by category, facts presented pleasingly, the art arrived from afar. Description spent upon the shape of the topiary and the shade of the foliage, words spent calling a feeling inward from the atmosphere, consciousness largely autonomic and ambient. The estrangement elongated with every year, and the years swift and nondescript, all the slow time used up on last loves and rainy days, not so much forgotten as remembered all too well. Those nicknames to save time catching up at last, another name that no one means, empty honorifics and beat down crowns. A name bestowed to avoid entanglement, a love letter thrown straight into the trash.
My steps do falter though not in fear, my hands do tremble but not in awe, the ride having grown rougher and rougher in the vehicle of birth over the latest years of discouragement. The vessel struggles and staggers through the day to day, peals of pain and the quickening deterioration, dread set into the algorithm and the old OS. The plummet into isolation and the scales that don’t wait, a hole burning through my belly, and a soul that can’t be found. Security lights blink on as traffic passes, Christmas lights shimmering, and a moon too true to look at without it hurting. It’s a little lovely, and a little sad, but I’d rather not all the same.
So it’s pretty little rings around the moon, a dance of daisy chains holding hands with the reaching rain, a whisper of the crisp Pacific drawn along the storm. Some song towards the continuity as the collateral does more than its part, that hallowed and gravid moon a tug on the tangle knotted with witness, a trick of smoke mirror and magic in the impact of this gush of night. The rain strings beads through the bare limbed silhouette sprawled above the yard, this rooted reach toward another day, life can take or leave me. The needle passing through the flesh, the burden all mortal stakes and worded purpose.
The deal is you never quite get it right. The deal is you circle something close and quick, your eye all kinds of prized. The days go by, rubbed wrong raw by the obdurate scour of aimless repetition. The words rise to the surface as we breathe deep and dive down, some bitter linger between heart and tongue, breath not the last thing held. Neither the tumbled tricks of thinking quick, fetish and effigy chasing what purchase the pull of the moon shares with these waves of rain. Brick and board, and the cold settles into the story of meat and bone. Name lost to speech, this terminal spill of the time and its telling, aware at the end of the confession I believed neither in intercessors or sin. Adding to the distraction with the alphabet, the structure left of the conflagration, a smolder or a spark.
It’s been like this for such a passage, it’s been like this since the bleed at least, this other aim named aloud. The dusk doing most of the work, so when the night arrives all the stakes are already driven down. Hard to tell the lean of being from the falling stars you trail, cartoon sparkles and chirping birds when the hammer smites. Thoughts jostling with physics and fisticuffs, you hear train wail or dog bark or the savage laughter of imminent children. Flattened fair and square you catch the constellation by its dead give away, the reveal echoing through the realization, on your back below the belt. It’s all how the seasons hit, the settling of the senses. The sutra of hanging the frame.
There’s already a lot I left out; there’s so much more leaving out left to do. You can’t escape the associations. Nothing escapes unscathed, this faith of words surviving outside speech and flesh, a brevity trailing murdered darlings and bottle baby bastards. Pounding the pulpit or folded into a trust fall from the pedestal, every way laden and fated at once, from the improbable to the likely it arrives. I belly up and belt it out and stagger back to the Stygian depths from whence I started counting. The hours as evidenced by the heavens, the firmament emblazoned by the winter hexagon, the hunter whose specifics come and go.
It’s a story though there’s nothing to it. It’s a story because it got told that way. I went outside and watched while the dark caught up the clock. I looked up and thought hey there’s Orion, a muddle of dogs, belts, and cudgel. A smear of plots and archetypes, a becoming that happens again and again, breath and flame and the songs life sings. An experience so true and worn it feels quaint, an afghan strewn across the arms of a rocking chair, a saying worn down to words. I thought of you in ways that were about me, and some that were about you too. The easy depths at once too much, the letters scribbled with ache and panicked appetite, this animal too abrupt and abstract. It’s what I lose when I leave it there, written down as if it happened.
The clock slipped the count and so I stepped to a little late, the day time sky already set to goodbye, my life left sitting staring down the dusk. It’s the collateral of the calendar, all these days left to boxes, the stars barely stirring as the world turns and turns. All I seem to do is stumble from scene to scene, off script and stranded spitting bars that miss the beat, doing stunts and improvising speeches. The dusk goes dark and the days grow grayer, the old bones telling secrets, the quaint conceits of September Song playing in the well past tense.
So time marches on, so the franchise makes concessions, trailing parts and pieces. The path is all process and it only goes so far until it’s a thousand other parts, a thousand other journeys through the flesh, the shuffle and the deal unending. All that’s left of the me I favor is empty pockets and percussive words, but there are a lot of mouths and feasts still going strong in the host I heave and haul. The husk bearing progeny and pestilence, partisans without flags all carrying the clock, atop this wave breaking in all directions. Life always falling under spells and curses, and waking up flush in new names and stories. I dance this mess to pieces, I dance until I drop, but the party never stops.
Still I scribble on the signal, still I write my manifesto on the back of receipts. I am a point in passing, a distribution of debris. I am the engine struggling to turn over, the genes left on read spinning circles in the mud. A story between stories, the probable fall of the words, a vague miming of looking at where a watch would be on my wrist if I wore one. The words keep coming in clouds and torrents as the pan boils dry, as if insistence was all the was to persistence. Waking into this want, the sun long gone, the light left on just in case there’s someone left to welcome. Colorblind, I paint by numbers, the night swallowing sight whole.
We wake to the world still turning, the business below the proscenium, the sky projected on the scrim. The routine written on the windshields, the secrets scrawled across our faces. The story carries over, some vaguely unsatisfying reminder from an equation we never quite figure out. Ancestors tales skewed hard to modern attention spans, most of identity the operant of intermittent reinforcement. It was once so that it might be again, it wasn’t so it may be yet, and the numbers fall and fall. Somehow the light got left on. The flickering between the frames, the candle always burning.
So you sleep with the windows open. You drowse in your skin while the moon looks in. So you scroll down screens or sort through messages, living in this memory that’s never at rest. Awake to witness shapes full of intention, transgressors made of trousers and trunks, this restless grasping at the strings. The moment always vividly missed, extinguished in the tangle of sense and cognition, the monkey thinking it’s a joke teasing such sharp swift teeth. Dashed against this continuity, the discovery at the borders of being, this name full of dreadful wonder.
It’s there like the weather, the patina on the bronze Buddha in the garden, the rust gathering at the hinges on the gate. These slow fires and sudden conflagrations, the spark before the blaze. Synapses busy ticking away at the plot and the fabric, bellyfuls of hard hungers and happenstance. Here and now again and again, the dull report of the drum machine, the metronome of the missing moment. This light the blazing into atmosphere, every measure a rate of oxidation. Each of us a fire started by a want in the world.
It’s like waking from a strange dream
in a strange place, wearing nothing
you ever wore before— how you know
there’s a story whether the world
worked it out, this built in
repetition backwards to ignition,
the mirror therefore it’s me.
No phone, no ID, this sense
that the three-second delay stalls
the signal to the senses, your name
a where, a when, a reasoned reckoning.
Now here comes the marked-up map,
the dots on the decision tree,
the presupposed path you spoke aloud.
The crown of stars,
the roots through the rocks—
there you are here we go.
The dogs charge rings around the yard,
flies taste at scratched skin and raw knees,
the radiance of the dusk
another retelling for the recollection.
Oh, the world knows its part
gifting this hollowed here,
scattering labels and receipts.
Maybe it is the descent
implicit in the way the symbols
stack, circles turning
inside circles, the wheel at work
as the end in the action eats
away. Something inevitable
that structure of fitful scripture
the cadence of water
rain making gutters into falls,
gray skies and dripping eaves,
want laying it on while
the battery runs down. The tree
written so often described unknown
as misnamed passerines,
raptors attached to the explicit
tithes of divination and
the divine, owls unseen
closer than names
come the night. Half allusion
three quarters vision from within,
the wings that do not pass
world after world, starlight
and the negative space
a longhand sky leaves,
branch and bird, wind and world
saying everything a little bit off
stirring embers and giving smoke
waiting as the earth comes around.
It’s like a sixth sense
depending on how you count,
the way you feel it in gearbox,
the way you take the tension, you hear
it in the engine, that almost
right smack there in your mouth
organ grinder out of tune
that taste you admit you miss,
the song as it laps itself
a sound like a lonesome light,
the war crackle humming from
some ancient shelf in your mind.
Here it was the dance of dust motes
the morning window and the bedroom closet,
a Disney train on the wall
that shifted in capered in the dark.
Lightning storms of static
beneath the blue blanket
dragging sparks through my hair.
Hidden reading in secret by flashlight
because I had to know
what happened next. Rain and stars
and animals, only a stranger to
every friend. I don’t know
what stuck with you. I don’t know
which parts are gone.
It is only over now in the after,
past tenses and wild swings.
Collapsed into antiquity,
apocryphal volumes and ancestral tales,
eras and ages vague islands,
hairstyles and girlfriends and
long dissertations on
why my boss is dumb.
Over and over the fading lore
passes through the wounds and
aches of the old ape,
life’s cruel slapstick and
cereal in front of the TV,
something sweet and easy,
cartoons and troubled comforts as
the world forgets me, then
remembers me too well.
Put your kings back in their cubbyholes, hang your gods out in the garden. Kick your faith off its pedestal, know your way is a course of water down a slope. Here in this passing fancy, in the pained turn of the day to day, we find our way. From just desserts to devout pursuits, the circuit to the drain consumes us all. Written as if rules the inevitable again and again, wrung hands and gossiping flesh, the moment full of such certitude collapsed into tumbling photon and a flicker in the feels. Oh, such sorrow! Oh, such beauty! We post our apostrophes, we roll them bones.
The lighter sparks then it ignites, a flash of light and heat below my right eye. Almost at once the smoke heads towards the heavens, the restless winds not offering a lot of options. I burn a knuckle on the blazing ember of the cigar butt, another small offering to the improbable unknown, smoke sent east while the sun sinks west. I ease back into my habitual station, spine and eyes effecting the ritual, longing and the heat loss of the complimentary. Something holy in the dance around the empty, the hollow of the vessel ringing through the whole.
I serve the ashtrays and the negative space of sky and branch, I serve the dirt and the hungry creeping legions that abound. This starved soil, this blasphemous destruction of the building blocks of soul, while we feed ourselves words glutted on words. The tumble of these unseen axes, the animal loosed in every revelation, our ferocious trajectories and our determined dooms. More and more my eyes are fixed upon ghosts and games, the long con entangled in our chains. Species spent in fits of pique and power, the top down desolation another destiny imparted from our suspiciously absent gods as we stack the odds against ourselves. My heart beats for our desperate bids for life and beauty. A light left on, a tithe for all the asking.
I live in the sworn at aftermath, in the avalanche of curse and consequence, where each effect unfurls. Fading flesh and bitter bone, the long high lonesome isolated in the epilogue, the glory just another story reordered with each telling. Here as it all unravels, here as it goes by rote, this kiss folded in a fist the diamond in the mire of my mind. Before the ghosting given by the dusk, until the rebuke of dawn, I bristle with static amid these fissile rituals. Sizzling at the subatomic but still beneath the eaves as I smoke on the porch, I am the promenade of ashes greasing the tongue of the greedy fire of time. These bones bear down, I fix my gaze beyond the horizon. Another wave of walking dreams.
This is the long way around it, full of dull meanderings and ornate tombs robbed for their heft and molder, words leavened into unseen fields and left in piles to mark the path. This thing of passing in and out of abstraction, the way we follow our footsteps back around to find our shadows seeding our journey, the way we mistake our strengths as we stare at our prophecies as they change their minds. The discovery is always part of the puzzle, the enticement of making a mystery of bricks, the man behind the curtain there pushing snake oil saying it was you all along. The self is always the last place you looked.
So I go sorrowfully into dusk, so I dread the break of day, the burden only shifted by the shovelful. The long night spent winding watches and sweeping streets, thoughts pacing with fists in pockets, ideas turning vicious in a turn. This heavy hand of shadow as the sun sets its shoulder to the horizon, the way I stare and stare. The words left to work the earth, the body failing at the fray. Something left as bone or smolder, feast and fertilizer. Standing as if spark had taken hold, the fragments taken, a purpose served.
Sometimes I wish the moon would’ve asked me before taking up so much of my mind. Sometimes when I’m waiting for an invitation I get invited the wrong way. Everything is down to the resolution of the details and the limits of the operation. Mostly I’ve been too busy wishing not to wake to get more than a gist of this business of being, other than the 24 hour neural bus tour around the bodily aches and all their mysteries. Here at the heart’s stubborn drumming the fount of all this troublesome dissolution is this distance between who I think I am and who I am. So I cast a shadow, so I covet the attentions of the moon? Even standing perfectly still is a long, long way to go. A lot is geography, the rest is character arc.
I suppose at least it’s proof of life, these lashings of the everyday, this leaning on the horn. Got born and kept hanging around, taking it day by day in doses of months and years. I ran out of roads in several directions at once, my candles all burned out. It’s as much the isolation as the time served Sisyphean, the same old bolder while the world just goes on. Some souls torn from me, some that just walked quietly away. The choice between this sullen spark or the thought of posterity, the habitual frippery giving way to phenomena and a familiarity with death rattles. This wind rushing in, to intimate, too familiar. The way I wish you would come at me, when I wish you would come around.
I don’t know how long I will linger here, sitting on the porch, fiddling with transmissions. I doubt I will out wait the moon as it wanes into third shift, always an ambivalent mix of blessings and spells, the secrets and hungers the goddess imparts. The flesh remembers its aspects, the magic and the all in grins. The smoke only hopes to jiggle the levels a little, taking the offered vacancy on the wind. I curse the day and mourn its departure. This enchantment still burns down to my bones. It feels like violence, it feels like breaking. The way it takes its time with my turn, knowing it’s over as soon as it’s said. It feels like I’m supposed to say it anyway.
This late in the day, the mail delivered and the banks all closed, the traffic keeps spilling as the shadows stretch and the pavement implores. Cracked asphalt and the perseverance of weeds the whole of the story, just life and the varying impediments that apply, the statistics on the can and will the tangible matter and the visible spectra. I wish I could credit anything save life and limb for this perchanced dreaming, these load bearing placeholders that are most of our work in this world. I watch as my stories unravel in the telling, as the earth persists in taking all our claims in stride.
The day drawls off, reconstituted moments unspooled between sense and sentience as this song plays as notes and the inferred actions of tongue and tooth, the shape of a kiss sending shivers towards the mortal. The sun in the shrugs of trees, this spark caught in a torrent of remembered limbs and lips. I sit, a mess of spoiled meat and recursive regret, caught in these hair-triggered synapses firing in loops and closed circuits while the point goes missing. It loses something in the ephemeral, these strange wishes granted by the daily blind grinding, something lost in the perception. In a world of infinite possibilities, it’s hard to get some probabilities to play along.
Smoke ascends and the winds take the leap. A sore headed heart and a broken starter, these aches that long ago won the war now spend their days rubbing my body’s face in it. I am all bad posture and stiff shoulders, leaning awkward over these pecked out fragments. Absurdly counter factual in my implicit ambitions, the abstractions fed by the self delusions of the ancients and the stubborn declarations of the design, I turn with the worms and seethe with relentless appetites. Touch and taste, sight and scent, and the music at hand. The sky is a held breath blue and the dogs are barking on spec. This want wants what it wants, however you work the words.
I have come to pick my teeth. I have come to part the seas, these winds that befall like ellipses the stagger between stories. Enough of this stitch of itching, this glimpse of sky, this depth of flesh. These lungs at last emptied, this voice at last silent. No claim, no grace, no contagion to give a motive or grant a name. It is just staying too long where the love’s all lost, nothing to grant the traction, nothing to excuse the blade. Oh words, how I have failed you. This brief blooming extinguished, another animal out of place. We lose pace, spill into habit and the periphery, eventually only memory and punctuation. I could tell you, but my trying is all but done.
At the moment I am meat and I am sorry. I am on yet another day atop the blur of hours and words I metabolize and exude, the story as it stutter stops, the horrors of the geologic and the historic. All around sound klaxons of dissembling, the dogma of doubling down somehow now the de facto, the race to oblivion prepared one billion ways. Thoughts smeared across the sky in some typical stupor, I breathe and cough and long well enough. Something in the way the pain bears down, in the way pleasure disappears into the rear view, the visible spectrum of the freeway lit that ceaseless moment as we move on and on. These words only glue for the mood I imbue.
It is the roach favored by surface tension, the ghost by the story and the crack of the fire. It is another last day, the reckoning of the rest, the restlessness of 3am in music and sign. Just me and the beasts on my bed, a bellows of song and sighs under the ministrations of a reading lamp. I have lived past my dreams and my readiness to pretend. Dust settles as smoke coils, a muted trumpet plays with the melody and the scales. Repetitions of the singular, recursions lifting their skirts, every plot eventually tennis. Each of us our mythos and where we put our mouths, red of tooth or bleating bloody murder, a set of maps and calculations as to every stiff and stray. So I long with the lights left on and the music playing. So that old black magic comes beating down my door.
I admit I missed the moment, heels dug into the metaphor, stubborn to the extremes of every sense. Time was that the eye could witness even if the words were out, time was that was among the unnumbered duties held sacred by the heart. But the material grows more permeable as the soul cools down, from thunder to fumes in a few short years, beauty becomes another ache as the world goes on without. Yesterday I saw some crows sweep west just as the horizon was flush with sun, piercing the will of the wind with a lean and a nod. Today it is children walking yip dogs that hurl themselves heedlessly at my dogs through the fence, it is the neighbors attending to their yards and cars. Trees sway and wind chimes ring and the moment waits until I blinked, and again it is the aftermath, an instant gone in a white hot flash. I sit and smoke as the dusk leans in close enough to whisper oh well.
I don’t know what to make of the silent crow in the crown of the tree above me. I didn’t speak of it to the crow. Sometimes your destiny is to mind your own business. More and more there are stories that are no longer mine, I follow along as best I can, pass along tales I don’t understand. There the distance between this want and this witness, the once was that lingers as I know it’s gone, the slow swim against the rush into irrelevance. Once all the lessons are only language, there is little to be said at all. This press against the inevitable and the unknown all you own of the blood and bones. This kiss just in case you still want the touch and taste, a morsel for the ministry of tooth and tongue, this breath held to measure in the syllables you incant.
Days have past since I started another round of saying that I cannot say, this dull plodding perpetuity trudging the boulder uphill, the bare backed rituals of calendar and clock. All this smoking, this spin of the wind beneath the eaves. A clout of sorrow and then the measures never met. The slow assembly of the inevitables out past the drift of probability. It takes time to awake as the fool tossed by indulgent follies, the twist in the telling, the fork in the road. I dream of lost worlds and flirtatious ghosts as each day the world is birthed anew. The radiance spilling over the rooftops, the shadows swelling like sails taking wind, the magic of this mortal portion. Facts moldering into fable, the mythos like a lover as it takes my tongue, ancient offerings and carnal sacraments. The feel through your bare feet as the the earth and the atmosphere dance a reel around your spine. This beauty that you can only pass along.
It’s 3:30 in the afternoon the way it only can be on a Wednesday, on a clear eyed day in the summer just after a beast of a heatwave at last relents. And leaves stir beneath the spinning winds, coiling hellos and goodbyes from the branches, the vivid scenery through a dirty window shining just so in the only set of eyes I’ve ever known. I start and stop in thick strokes of circles, the brushwork of blood and breath as the signals fire away, like any rooted thing some how turning towards the light. Here I exchange symbols for what I sensed despite my many impediments, magic beans for living beings, the world emptied of all but the incantation. It’s how the love is lost, how the hands are emptied, the sea of all I couldn’t imagine. This day and all I’ll never know or see.
This is one of the received worlds, the framework and the focus. A wording left over from some singalong. Clock and calendar, the black phoebe on the rusty porch swing, the dint of detail and the manipulative lens. This little spat of wonder, these fits of want and hunger, the laborious repetition that spin our habits into ritual. These actions that reveal the moment we were hanged from, the spice we paw for first. I am stuck in the sad and weary, I keep witness to the burn. To use the words until the ink rubs off. To surrender the shell for the seed.
I crack my back and plant my feet. There are always motions in need of going through. Traffic passes in wave and gleaming particulars, the flash of sunlight reflected through the screen. There’s the sort of wind that comes on a Wednesday, a sense of motion to hold my eyes open to the glare of a summer afternoon. This blue that wants so much to be the first blue on your mind, though it knows it will always be those eyes instead, this big spill of sky running late to the day. And you see it there, flashing before me, teetering legs and failing eyes. Seeing it as I never could, this moment where the prize had found me out, this pause before the work of the earth.
So the flesh begins its meditations, drifting from the mind’s ministrations into the varying moods of meat. So the ache settles on a direction, so the instrument bites the lip of the allusion, the bearings corrected for wear and tear and spiritual drift. Something to the ardor of the singing, something to the reason of the rhyme. The breeze laps at these perspirations as the heart cries out, the remembered incantation a hound loosed upon the hart breath on the heels of the word. The notation floats between phrasings, the notions held close at the angle of observance, the world ever turning and perturbed. These lyrics the stitching that fixes our stars.
This comes from the tatters I inhabit, this from the very conceit I intend. Headphones and stand alones, a shuffled list of many decks, a forced card from a gaffed deal treated as a covenant. Buyers markets and tactical retreats, this version always returning to the earth, this incarnation another arrow off its mark. These old echoes through conceded strongholds of ego, this eerie ringing through the rock. It’s the most wearisome of combinations, fists without snap or follow through, the mistaken segments of the text. Stuck in stretches, struck by stars, the tongue keeps at it. It’s a process, but particular disasters stand out.
It arrives in answer to unknown anticipations, it takes shape faster than the thought can follow, so abrupt against the perceptions. A swelling of the stir of leaves, a shadow pressed against the sway of limbs, inky feather or sun plummeted wing. The crawling in the dark, something coming up the stair, some 70s melody with a Karen Carpenter hook shuffling in dark. So these metaphors make the most of us, willing spirit and wasted flesh, the words we are buried in as they fill in for the want. We wake following the lead, tracking the dream or filling in the journey. I speak aloud to remain unheard, the radio left on against the night, static crackling into the black.
The trees sway a ruddy green stencil casting in my first glance mind tiny bouquets of sky blue blossoms of blue sky, a brief startle from the spark to the cognition, another moment where my first words go so terribly wrong. Casting away illusion for the next perception in line, the say so of my senses another unreliable narrator, still I try my hand at tuning into the sloppy seconds of the signal. The pieces I pick and choose, the pursuit of lie and line, the slick simplicity of the symbols that ring true. I say it is more story, I say that it’s a poem. But it’s only the smoke of the moment we burn and fuel. The shadow saddened by what the sun has missed. The absent guest, the empty setting.
We worry at the impossible while the ordinary provides plenty of limits to go around. Making proclamations to posterity that won’t ever cross tomorrow’s shores. Declaring our trajectories in arrows fired blindly toward the star specked sky, casualties and consequences freed by our self service, each of us easily so broken on our own and still insisting on the solo. We throw low blows and elbows to get beaten about the map. Sticking to the script of the deceivers, each of us alone responsible for protecting our neck. Legions of us, taken out one by one by the words of kings and gods. We have been shown the world, and have trained in the mystery.
What’ve I got left to say but the same old thing worn thin by ten thousand tongues and endless letters? Every day passes in brutal form, by name and number they tumble by, moon phase and featured constellation another sigh and ache. Sitting outside and dwindling with every breath, less with every lungful of smoke, eventually each of us all consequence as our stories dissolve. Voice and vapor, I sit in perpetual discontentment, the ache of is and the deeper hurt of is not. There are words of every stripe and flavor waiting to be dismembered and transformed. Skins of every description to creep into, all manner of pleasure to promise, every wish imaginable to grant. Tricks to how we long and tick, our fortunes stolen for otherworldly investors and all you grifters grubbing after crowns. The more I witness, the more I ought to keep to myself. Leave you to whatever heaven you would have.
This is still in the habitable range, though too pronounced of heat and drought to last all that much longer. This is still carried water, though the reservoir doesn’t show it. We move in haste across an estimation of our terrain, thoughts deep beneath the exhibition of turns and signs, threatened and threatening by tradition and design. We are known by knives and appetites, names and shadows always along for the ride. Carried along by tides and currents, dragged lucid and magnetic, the cumbersome storm and the overhead bag. Still you seethe and open wide, wave after endless wave. It was only ever more, despite the grandiosity and the high hatting, beyond all capacity you can claim. So it makes you a liar, and a dead one at that. So it becomes a poem, or at least an epitaph.
There are the ones with a pocketful of rocks. There are the ones drowning drunk on the moon. The stories passed around the fire, the verses added to the song, we stay up late just to keen and long. Tales told to elude confession, tales told to explain the stars, there in the details of the day and the shaping of the stones. The long path up the hill, the road all slope and bend, the structure there yet unseen in the foundation of the forest. The dimming dream, the brimming day, the way a whim becomes a way. The symbols and the stitching, the trail burning as you enter metaphor. The wants and the whereabouts, all the murdered darlings that make up the work of the heart. Nothing to follow but the moon and the shore.
There are the details of the day and the form of the story, Seven Brothers or Billy Goats Gruff, swallowing the ocean or clobbering the boorish troll. There is the prescient power, there is the surrender to the incomprehensible. This work of words, this unending flood, time comes thundering down and we tumble on. The depths and the delving, this cycle of the story, this engine of the moments drumming down. The sky stills below your belly, the earth an urgency in your bones, your heart repeating “the tide, the tide.” The etchings along the shortcut through the happenstance, this tale composed of anticipation and negative space, the restless tongue gently cradling the flavor of saying it aloud. It is more than and I am a morsel trailing salt and grease. The ambivalence of heaven left breathing, leaving words as gravity trails off into the past. Leaving words, waiting for someone to speak.
It is here that I sink beneath the horizon. It is here that, like the sun and moon, I dwell below the sea. Lovely pea green across the ocean blue, the journey of the eldest practitioners that we still elaborate, the song in the heart along the lilting waves. Lovers with their paths now parted, the dirt at the notional fork. Ritual a machine language, molecular engines to catch the eyes of existence. A sorting of the so and sos towards this lush ever presence, a few licks of the nursery rhyme, a hammering of the pulse. That sense of sinking, this unpleasant effervescence, the weight of limb and the press of breath. A brief halo of bubbles escape as you sink, flesh among the flood of myths.
The symbols settle like sediment, sealing off paths and rivers, muddying up the tongue. These skills that pile up as the culture condenses, these certainties set in our own stone. As magic as money, as tragic as any football plucked before the kick, the joke we take at face. Animals that hunger for the words to go so, each impulse devoured and spent as breath and ghost, the synapses rippling with memory and anticipation. We sort through our tastes and shapes and agree at least to be aggrieved, senses rising from the reading of a sentence, the skip rope spell that raises up a reel. The world that we’re done with never quite through.
This is grief that goes with missing kisses. This is the spinning kicking gravel, stuck bad in some way off track. It is done, but never over. It is gone, but it shows up each day. Maybe sad, maybe pretty, maybe just a formality of the further failure. Broken down to thoughts and habits, to the persistence of this system of words and ways. The lost and the wrong compound until they are a second skin, the first whiff of you anyone gets at a glance goes the story. The story that you learn while you’re taught your place. A whole world where you have no purchase, all these impacts that made a voice out of these lost threads. A style made from my stranded curses and selfish prayers.
It’s no different now that the word is out, there’s no difference now that the moon remits its luminescence, the sky still too blue to know which wanderers at last align with your precious sentience which shape at last you grant. So strange how these horizons move and apexes hold, the turning of heavens, the tickings of the earth. A shadow pressed like a flower, the arc of the beckoning and the bloom. The sun tips its hat, the stretch of light heralding in the incarnate dusk, this old whisper of synapse and signal. Oh this meat and bone.
I slept through most of the last unmasking, catching the embodied moon staring through my curtains a few days ago, turning my back to the archetype as if I had a choice. I dream dark and drear, sleeping in self defense. Too much less and less all at once, I say because this is yet another saying. Spells cast from the twitching lips of the flesh in fever, oaths burned into smoke smudged across the dancing winds. Will you go to your window? Will you reach for your pen? I sit in this long drag of last light and hard fall, neither now or again. Hungering depths and tasks unmet, all roll and no bet.
This want of moon, this wish of work towards intention, all the yammering of a heart that knows the number. To attend to the missed moment, to turn the corner of the labyrinth and find the exit sign in neon relief. To step off the carousel with the ride completed, loosed from the pain and ache of the fail and fall. Some slice of wonder witnessed, some sense that there was a moment of intersection, a right shared in the way of things. Instead the wind rises to the spirit of general heckling and ridicule, a sentiment parsed in heaps of numb symbols, hope huddled up in a corner.
It’s penetrated the foundation, it’s cracked the bright blue firmament, this smoke hardened heart. The arteries thicken and slow, the mortal blow a fist and a scalpel, a hurled brick and a dull blade permeating this fester of meat and mind. The nerves burn and fizzle, hot sparks and blunt howls. The whole of being turning into fragments and blurts. Words dribbling down my beard as I bury my breath star to star and stone by stone. Words thumbed from touch keys and the lumbering of blood, the continuity will tell you when it’s through with you. The scorched tongue touches the lips so slick and tender you think maybe all your telling is done. Then the mystery begins to contravene your conventions. Again you’re preaching against the tide, waves crashing down, fustigating you faith first.
There’s no pinnacle of abstraction to speak of, though it’s only the ghost that goes. There’s no banner to billow, no flag to proudly unfurl. It is the bones and their burdens, the animal always urging away. I scramble for purchase, I adjust my center and shift my stance, this self of skill wrapped around the empty I embody. Traffic passes, my cigar goes out, I gaze over drugstore cheaters as I feel around for a lighter. I drag at the cheroot, the flame feeling out the fire, this ritual at once this moment and a dozen intersections of the unintended intimate. Habituated to the text and the chemistry, the entity turns over. Burning in words and sparks.
I sit and smoke, so on and so forth, adjusting my breathing and moving my body according to the latest varietal pain. I do the things I have done before, heavy with the thoughts of what I will never do again, just old man war stories and a hunger for the halcyon never was. Still threaded with all manner of want and longing despite all the oblivion and devastation, these micro doses of subsistence hedonism, the paths and tangles of this tumbling down. This press of intention arising out of this litanous return, this poorly incarnated process spitting reasons, setting suns and rising winds. A breeze drawn through the reliquary, these prayers to faraways and long losts, this change of station the offering all along.
I have reached the age of unreliable instruments and staggered sense, staring over the foxtail swallowed yard, gaze fixed hard on the figment blazing in the residue of my thinking. Thoughts burned into the meat, icons and myths and the complications adjacent to abstraction, wheels that spin some ancient spark as my engines turn over. It is the persistence of absent objects and names we never speak out loud. The things the senses learn to anticipate, this endless urge to simulate these bricks and blurs passing while I sit and smoke, words to skew the witness tugging on the fabric. Words to weave and echo, the math best left to the afterburn.
The world bites down on my vestigial stare, slapdash shadows and motion mottled light. The worrisome turn of fantasy holding my every attention, a separation from sight and sense, this modicum of meat and machinery bristling with unbirthed worlds wanting the purchase of words. An incantation awaiting invitations, the words always there in swarms, free at a moment to burrow deep or take flight. The dappled asphalt and cracked concrete spilling weeds, chain link geometry threading the perspective, this smoke in my heart and throat obscured from the motive as the code takes over. This art an illness overflowing, an aesthetic of the weight of the great unseen held in the pressures of the flesh. So want begets want, and ache begets ache, but the work of the world needs no witness or word.
It is this patch on laughter, this plodding tread that becomes the path, this harness that you learn to pull whatever wagon or plow they hitch you to. The wide open limits of the roads you know, the sight unseen of the other side of the pass, the moon and what it obliterates. The rough touch and the gentle, the busted knuckle and the folded crane, objects now nothing but fetishes to burn the soul bright enough to shine unfathomed distances. These flashing fragments, this blinkered vision, these laden graves carried over from the equation: the shutter speed, the focus, and the aperture. These frailties falling harder than the flesh into earth, the reaching that remained a stranger, these reasons always arriving late. The want inhabited left just words left to sift and scatter. Every star so far away as to have always been gone.
It’s not the sparrows in the feeder, it’s not the doves on the wing, it’s not the blue blazes sky and the wind woven pines casting some cool with their shadows, some respite for a sinner come a sunny day. It isn’t the tremble in the telling, or the foretold dogging its day, cracked pavement and each shadow soft to the touch. The words work the stretch of tense and the scope of scale, hand me downs and ne’er do wells, heavily laid in the stir and the steer. The drag of wish the straying breath, the whisper as a touch, so attuned to the trip and turn of the arc of the slow burn. The heft of the memory as I think it back alive. The spark of that kiss the moment it is mentioned. Here among the begrudged gods and the hapless magic, we arrive.
So it goes, this rigmarole. So it goes, the warmth lingering on the lips. A wild hare, a pursuit of prophecy pronounced off the cuff, the countdown to this hungry arrival. All the days of bleak ache and resonant empty, the terms of mitigation and emergence somewhere stirring in the shallow earth, root and rot and fungal emoting. The heart now knows, the head at last irrelevant, the gut ringing out its riotous assembly. The reasons lost, the spell unspoken, only the drawl of the dreaming between our struts and seams. A shape drawn, sand upon sand with the only tomorrow the return of the sea. Knowing of this fall, this frailty, and the drag of this covenant with the tongue. Hoping to share a taste.
Shards of pots and broken bottles, puzzle parts and context clues to add to the heap. Rusted swords and hidden bones, ancient sanctities observed in the barrow beneath the fertile fields. These golden hills once occupied, the witnessed struggle and strife surrendered to the turning earth. All this gilt once coveted, all these rites now rocks and names never said aloud. Not to be the declaration, lost in the ubiquity of creation, I return to ash and loam. Want and lack, the fool fumbling each loss. The long star sprawled empty, the symbol spattered page. All these inferences and apostasies feeding some fertile other, this bespoke flesh at last a worthy dirt. I return the words as they come, invisible down to the incidental.
The day leaves without saying, the sky astir, the earth in ruins. The day is gone without a single glance, the signal of at least glancing back never received or sent. Just foundlings in the fundaments, the same old feelings dashed into the ground, a change in the air as the skin finds out. Something dead and something dear, a reach through the blue and past the sway, roots and crowns and right of ways. Scratching at some surface of the world that didn’t show, the imagination burning bright, perception goes another way. Now the time and the insistence of the husk, slowly this dance from want to quintessence, pared down by the path.
This dusk and the ways left wanting, the cool hue of shade upon the pavement, the constant proffer of used smoke. Adrift in the drawling traffic, a fixture of inconsequential transience, the proffer and the appetite. Knowing the streets by the corner and curbs, signs parked at the intersection, sigils in paint and glass. The winds lean wild and the empty opens up, a car or two then graven pavement. Cool and futile flesh pressed against the sharp end of the moment, a direction to heel to and lament.
Mostly it is in the scraps of sky and haunts of moon, the weight of the proposition, the drag of the thought. The waiting it out while the once was or the wished for tries to have its say, the hot in the atmosphere, the slow throat of incense trickling into heaven. Clay and ache and relic bones, the words that never leave you alone, remembering the deception revealed before the final slight. The duration this seething heap of woe and sorrow, the sharpness leading each feel, the here and now only so much thanks but no thanks. This shelter, this animal, this switched on circuit. Another compass joining the pointing at the earth.
It lines up along the impulses, ought or naught unto eternity, the utility of the dance of opposites. It is the tongue of flesh and the tongue of fire, these analogs of hunger, these waves of want and wish. The twinkling of machine inklings pitching woo with the entanglement of language, thoughts like stars dancing upon the midnight tides. Perception directed with intimacy and audacity as the wheel turns and turns. This life a fuse offered up to one blazing now, the missed moment always seen by the spark of its immediate extinction. The pride of punctuation, phrase taking and homespun idolatries. The wisdom leaning witless into the halted existence, wantonly pawing at null sets and snuffed singularities.
It is there in the cold in my fingers, the dwindling there in my grasp, the blood slowly gives up the fight. The tattered ends of the tapestry, our resplendent escapes into the sea of genes cut short for the organism, those missed connections and social deficits adding up to a map of eternity. Life lives to fight another day, those fated to end up smashed upon the grill not missed one but. I smoke these heavy metaphors, full of despair and attrition as my number comes up.
Another strange rain, the climate changing spots as it goes. A crow explores a plastic bag abandoned on the curb. Traffic passes shushing home on slickened streets. My hands burn to their aching bones, the animal frailty of my day to day ferocious and unyielding. Under whatever sky suffices, beneath any looming brunt, the countdown never relents. The beauty of black wings and street side appetites, the toil of mind and time, the magic of never knowing and never being enough. The mystery means to keep you missing, rapt and ecstatic staring holes through the waxing moon. The number of the loosed breath, the number of the journey’s end, wedded with hungry belly and empty hands to a symbol you can only not know.
Another wasted year, another circle around the circuit. Another wished for ending that never came near enough. Fifty six years, thirty of them well after I should have been planted in the past tense. This sick turn around the mulberry bush, waiting on the weasel to go pop. Years of bedtime wishes never to awake, as the body atrophies and the mind fragments, words and images and conversations sealed in this dull and fragile skull. Damned if you do, damned if you’re done, this life is wasted on me. You wake up, old and alone, aching for the end.
A lifetime of life unworthy of the word, nothing but a reliquary for hatred and mockery, a pariah plumed with expletives and contempt. Holding tight to what little seemed reciprocal, cleaving to the way the winds seemed to blow, ending up with the receipts of the imagination. The won love, the returned affections, all the stories you keep hoping come true. But I don’t know how to be a person that is worth it. I don’t know how to hold onto any value where all that I cherish is worthless. The liars and hustlers and thieves thrive, in this, the shittiest of all possible worlds.
I had hoped not to make it to this birthday the way I had hoped to perish before my last. Of course, it looks like I’ll have to handle this on my own. I am trash awaiting disposal, and hopefully I will achieve my end before the year is through. It isn’t just me that needs to be done, but if you think you have a reason to hang around, that’s reason enough. As for me, I can’t keep being miserable just so I can lighten someone else’s load. I am through with dissemblers and deceivers, and take no comfort in your long standing lies. I’ve only ever been a fool, useless and ugly and nothing worth the effort it takes to circle the drain.
Sometimes an instrument, sometimes an obstacle, I take shape late and give up easy. The sun has too much gumption; I let the typo have its way: I hit my bumps and potholes at speed. I blow a tire, I break an axle, I drag these chains throwing sparks. It’s the show that goes on, the proof of life gone to seed, the spectacle after the look away. It’s there— right there! But I can’t reach it. It’s there, and at most I am a ghost. The remainder of so much meat and miserable. The enduring afterthought.
The days pass fast, but the ghost goes slow. The carcass littered with curses and flashing lights, all manner of foreboding warnings and prophecies rotting within. I mix my carcinogens, I read my fortune in bones and gutters, the world pulling away with its lights off kicking gravel. I worked out my worth in words, and it wasn’t a figure I wanted to find. The flesh is weak, but the spirit goes first, the soul another joke on me. I smoke the latest charity, my body keening for redemption. Another flight I’m not fancy enough for.
There’s a point past bounce back, the energy finally insufficient to overcome the inertia. The local ache of bone and being clear in their testament, while the devastation of abstraction and expired intimacy dither in their poignant protests, their common complaint that green eyed devil me. Outsider and obstruction, incomplete in astonishing detail, an affliction to exile and shun. This long lonesome in decrepitude and constant grumbling, the earth alone to hold. A want for words on repeat as decades turn to dust.
There was never a want for words, filling in the margins, making up for time. The far side of this elicited ache, the heavy haul of flesh grasping at the atmosphere, a glut of abstractions meant to justify all this breath and blood. Conversations caught mid cadence, my voice aloud elaborating my bias, sorting ghosts and ephemera. Would that I did, would that it were, these beasts of want and dream. Nothing but the wait for the space to say, the will to choose a way. The medium and the tools at hand having their way with the supply and demand.
There’s the light despite the fading sky, the blue as it is beset with gray, the sun still having its say. There is the throat of smoke and the wisps of the wind. The song as it moves along, music taking to the gutter, the singing clinging to the trees. It has come a long way to know the dull attentions of this much alone, where my limits slough into fragments, sound and sight and this kiss goodnight. You stroll across my mind, but do not settle. The gone suits you now that you’re gone for good.
Not that it amounts to much, once loosed into the language. Not that there’s much of a market for what I do, mouth the sacred shapes of fetishes, paw at gaudy baubles and greasy mementos muttering hyperbole and sacrilege into the night. The wait and the want, the all fall down. Down to the ache, down to the burn, hard bit by the never learn I trace these few scant words. Here at the high point as tomorrow comes barging in, the lowdown ever lower, just wished after kisses grabbing after the dusk. Just the words and the once were, and the never will again.
I don’t know where to go to
find the chosen grave, all the old
haunts now prowled out,
the hollow below the blackberries,
the chair in the garage
empty, foxtails and shed hair.
There moving slowly in the sun,
then long gone, no wish
no work to bring you back or
bless your stilled flesh and
freed bones back to this
brief turn, pets and purrs and
tear stained truths, my love
nothing but words and weeping
now that the bill comes due.
A small wonder left to weeds and
the countdown clock the heart
becomes as we age out,
ugly, weary, lost, alone.
It’s not that your argument is attacked or
your precious name is so sorely wounded,
it’s the seat at the front of the class,
the preciousness of the teacher’s pet,
ever so smart and the last of
any given word. Sitting astride
your simulation riding each
tautology around your ivory tower,
your booming voice not accustomed to
a fair fight. Accountable to
consequence at your end of
the invective, unaware
that you never learned to punch
your weight, surprised at how
heavily the canvass hits you,
canceled by the count.
Measuring in moon form,
in dog days and worm turns,
seed husk and beetle dust,
the drought dry procession of
loam to breath held and
spells spilled, this furtive
yearn spent soil wastes
wishing for the renewal of
old glories, that ghost
gone for whenever there’s
some small thing missing
keeping the whole ensemble
at that moment before
completion, when it isn’t so much
a hope as a habit, stepping into
the strike, knowing the distance,
the difference from probable
to likelihood, home
coming and going, the signal
hinted in each incidence,
weed green and spring blue.
