motif

The crow calling loudly outside 

the front window is the same 

crow hopping through buds and 

blossoms about the boughs of 

the front yard tree reaching towards 

the bright blue cool spring sky 

stretching itself a path to the sun.

Those black wings warning everyone 

heaven is farther than it looks.

Like the shape we call a star

marked like art across the firmament, 

it flies spirals down the skin

sight applies to the puzzle,

the mess the mystery makes of the map

the raw knees where the road

touches rhetoric sharp

jostling the gossip 

memory makes

the click clack of bones

off track, every vision 

a dare to look away.

lockbox

It’s the numbers I assigned to see you in the repetitions, it’s the name I wore down to letters and lore. Something to fondle in fist and fingers, something left to leaven the dreams. The weary report of the body, the circling of the thinking as the batteries give out, the mystery you give and the mystery you get. Always wandering from scene to scene and year to year, the self the cheapest sort of cheap cinematics, a narrative broken over what you cannot say. Someone dwindling in the rear view, someone waving in the blinding sunset sun, mirage water rippling in the black tarmac heat. Those first stirrings, dust motes dancing in the lush morning light, arriving from the elements as this flag unfurled into the reckoning. Relics kept in dresser drawers and old shoe boxes, the soul a story loosed in gasps and bluster, the sputter of a fire drowned in fuel. Treasure held until it is trash again, middens turned to barrow tombs, counting the days back to ashes. 

The moon fills and empties, the signaling seasons arrange their portents in incense soot and mantle dust, the count of closed windows and open eyes in the variegated light. Here in the aches and appetites we scheme out the signals we heed, the senses always swelling in the music of the mind. Stranded in the alchemy of accumulated ages we exude the certainty of our abandoned incandescence, we fight against our fall as our stubborn materials follow their chemical continuities, these fierce stripes and stumbling phrases trailing into unknown bandwidths filling out the forms. I am bludgeoned out of sync just saying it aloud. A locked box and a three panel mind, a page of pictures with the captions pencilled in. Your shoulders a swelter remembered in this life of cold and rain.

It’s down to the trembling of the animal, it’s up to the illumination of the room, blood and guts and the vagaries of luck. Wretched flesh and glorious ghosts in the spaces between the stories,  the shimmer and slide of streetlights over gutter water, the eaves stupid with the swagger of storms. Madhouse motions gnawing holes through the routines of clock and coffee, the heart thick keening of a need never met again, the sun bled slogan on a fading billboard encrypted by highway and forest with all those miles left to go. Stacks of books and the roads not taken, the ache the seasick tilt of the light of the lamp left burning, what a wonder of words without anywhere to go. Out in the epilogue there’s another world over, a name wasted on my breath whenever that number comes up. 

crumbum

It’s a song you can’t recall from some 70s FM canon, it’s the slip of the trick up the sleeve down past those same old razor wrists, cradling some plastic handset in the crook of shoulder and neck in some middle aged memory. The soundtrack of blackout conversations taking on the tenor of intimacy, a tension all but expired in the continuity you’ve acquired, a window always open to the rainy street below. Someone chanting their doo dah hoodoo on some indulgent vocal track, an echo of and echo, the crash of a careening shopping cart and the bad news flashing blue outside. Somehow the lows go lower as the song drains out into the good night grays, it gathers in the fabric and bunches up the thinking, so much worse and still not bad enough. The effigy they burn you in, the fetish they shape from your shell.

What the day won’t contend, what the night will abide, you move the lens from side to side. You see what the light provides, the dirt and grime and evidence in small doses and cruel rooms, from the filled in margins to the moody periphery. You turn from shoulder to cold shoulder, adrift in the demography like a body tossed in restless sleep, the dream logic left of the everyday. All haunt and hunger and a keenness for signs, the leaves in the cup, the hawk on the line. Wadded up letters and dusty old drafts, an object in a mirror, a shape moving across the blinds. Wrapped in your own arms, this inevitable embrace, this road of ruin. The animal and the entity a lost temple returned to the earth.

It all goes with the territory, walking the path between worlds and dreams, the colors are coming outside the lines. The circles become spirals, the scribbles heaven’s latest revelations as the camera pans, the swell of that song glistening on your skin. The ends wide open so every telling fits, from motive to mechanics, as the contempt snaps and paces at the boundaries of countenance. Your grubby altar like any feeder calls to all loose hungers and unanswered entreaties, reaching from foundation to firmament, a steady turbulence in the muddle as flesh and spirit dwindle to ash and spit. We eat their sins, we carry their shadows in the trappings of the other, the schema that settle like the strata of sediment into monuments of fossil and sandstone. The witness worn, need acknowledged only as lack.

the lookout

I’m down to nouns as the day runs long, all bleak grays and dull rain and gulls cutting across the storm.  With my crooked spine oriented vaguely to ley lines strewn haphazardly throughout the landfill the signal runs from rote to riot, ache and inflammation this last vocation as the vessel feathers and splits. I chain smoked the dread from the litany of days and the sky weighs down on these shaky frames, the sediment of cravings scraped clean on the crumbling curb as the gutters overflowed, rivulets and waterfalls and landlocked lessons where my dreams ran dry. A pile of words to hunch over as the dusk spills from the eaves, the open eyes of a diminished return.

It’s growing thin about the matter, though mass heaps it on thick among the consequences and the givens, the means turns meager inside this animal act. Side eyed glances of intermittent reinforcement to take in the length of ash and ember burning between my fingers and the percentage of battery left, to take glimpses of the greenery and the names of notable birds. Shivering a little in my shirtsleeves as I give in the creed of the scribble, the scripture of the screen, following the path of the blinking cursor and the stumbling thumbs. Sore to the bone as the exits glare next to everywhere with the inside running out.

Words written while facing the east with the skies a storm grumbled gray, everything that sways in thrall to the gusts waving treetop to tall grass goodbye, the wind lost in the weeds. Eyes wide open I miss a lot, filling up long passages of blurred sense and poor transitions with disputed data and old maps, looking to see the pin drop of perception while the spirit spins out. Some words that generally mean the weather, some pictures that haunt me when it rains. Mismatched songs stride on by, messing with the tuning, addressing the lens. The gaze beset by hungers and appetites alike, echoes and reflections and narrative deficits flickering in the bandwidth, sitting somewhere beside the point. One way then another less and less as the lookout gives way. 

pompeii

The moon still full, gleaming on the bones of the moment

the earth aglow in the imminence of this bare

albedo— a called bank shot over 

the sun’s shoulder, the forlorn witness 

to late winter’s wringings the truth known

hand to hand with the here and there, this machine

a dreadful sharpening, a narrowing by number

naming the graces of the ricochet once

the race runs downhill, the drip drop

drum machine drubbing the ambience,

the founder in the fathoms as

physics takes a picture and science takes a slice.

The days keep changing, today always the same

dull hungers and sharpened appetites, the marker

moving in clockwork around the wheel

the world always ends up, consequence and 

continuity marking exes on the calendar

page after page all aches and odds.

Oh, such breathless dreaming caught in 

the exquisite muzzle flash, the endless 

game of Russian roulette a bubbling of

hammer snaps, a flurry of flashes when

at last we are caught fully mortal

naked and helpless where we run out of road.

You can see the weather wander down 

the walls, the sky suddenly a crow cleansed blue

casting incomprehensible manga across 

the grubby ceiling, pressing stanzas through

the blinds against this witness, the circuit

words makes once the ghost says so

long, ash flecked mementos and photos 

waiting on the phone, the matters 

that prove my mettle all

pot pot kettle kettle. Here waving

tattered blessings in the chill winds yet

to blow, drifting with the broken

traction at the turn of phrase somewhere 

between the scare and the crow

something happens that stays unknown.

The rain falls and falls. 

porcelain

The cold touches its toes as

the song soaks through, 

the sky so blue as the winds 

animate the tantrum,

livid palms dancing in 

the storm struck sun. This flavor

crisp with stricken match

scratches as you taste

the incantation sparks stretching 

clean from your teeth

smiling as it slips

the words off my tongue,

the ink on your skin sharp

down your shoulder,

dazzling with the magic,

the beauty in the moment 

pretending to be still

cupped hands holding

that thought as the picture 

poses in your pulse

leavening sight with 

a gush of reaching steam.

even out

The sky goes gray slow, the turkey vultures turning the atmosphere to oil, gliding low as to float steady in the level of sight. The air fogs slightly at both ends of the lens, the anointed smoke uncoiling beneath the eaves as the cold dances enchantments ring a rosy around every bone. The unloved dusk and the quarter moon take the west and I watch it, swapping tenses in my mind as the symbol goes missing, meaning always a going concern as the words keep on wandering off. I stare until the vision wears smooth. I stare until the seeing evens out the thinking.

I’m still as a stone as the night pours it on, my heart alone running reckless, a rabbit with a hound at its heels. Out for the asking never for the answers, the structure of the story and the insistence kept as flesh, the horizon racing away as the hurt and the heavens endure. Cut loose and weighed down, the work of matter always looking the other way, while the hare won’t stop weaving through the looking glass. The cognition somehow tuned to the passion of the cross or the cleaned out slab free tomb, the plodding of the process or the glorious revelation. Thinking here the exhaust of the station of the smoke, fate left to the hard knuckles of Saint Fracas, the day somehow always devil’s dues.

It’s the camera without an aperture, it’s the picture without paper and ink, drawn to this yawn of stars and clouds and the way the shadows struggle. It’s the skinned knees of the fall from grace, the entanglement of people and places, the flora and fauna browsing and brooding on the outskirts of the boundaries of belief and perception. Cough and gasp as I lose my grasp on the instrument, the animal gnashing at Pavlovian bells knitted into the being. I hunch and tremble, beset and shivering at the gravid cold weighs in, every molecule a countdown and a reel. Breath slows, spilling into this surrendered skin. The balance always foundering, the self pestering away at the burn.