reanimate

Dusk settles in early, with the Queen of the Night strolling up the disassembled driveway, passing through the closed gate by yard dogs and vivid greens. Never quite waking the words go wasted as they tread tooth and breath, hot animal extensions of the spirit expressed against the stress of atmosphere and organ. We go this way, or so I say without thought beyond the heft of rhetoric, we go like that. It has the taste of observation, it ambles like a fact. It finds us where it finds me, like the wonders revealed by idiot angels or the admonitions of the provincial gods, some strummed ballad rising like an anthem in the background of a dream. We follow paths or embody ways as second nature, too busy swimming to think that we are fish all but drowning in our own design. Awake to the pen scratch and brushstroke, we paint ourselves plain. The muzzled impulse, the colossal rebuke, worn syllables arriving warm in the mouth of the gloaming. 

Night so quick with the black cat at the fence, shadows strewn in all directions abound like elongated vowels of cartoonish exclamation, a throat cleared for no purpose save the sound. Another motion come and gone, arrival and departure, life’s perpetually burning fuse left as navigation through the possible. Mark and map only measured when read well enough to know, word and number magic when invoked. The habitual begets the ritual, the stipulations met and set of a mind, the kind of rekindling only allowed in the expansive stretches of the imagination. The appetites awake at once through the broad continuity, the wants without worth wanted all the same, the self a sizzling of the senses.

It comes down to the looking glass, the equilibrium of the atmosphere, gasses loosed with the insolent raspberry of the emptying balloon. The adulation of the vessel expressed in chaos and flabbergast, muttered like prayers by a miserable coterie of ham handed thieves and indifferent priests, the hard poverty of a hunger so unsated it is only the empty sounding out. The spilling wind, the chattering gravel, a winter of old bones and open windows written in the present tension. Waking from word to word, the lonely of the light left on as the dream wanders from skin to screen, this moon smitten bottle bobbing in the restless ocean. These tides always the take away, limbs swaying in the flicker of the resurrection left on read. As if a djinn at last unstoppered, some semblance summoned sentence after sentence, the mystery in regular intervals.