the thread

 It’s like any other qualifier, it depends on where the context comes in. Sunny to sunnier, gray to deeper gray. That’s why each sentence trembles as it is comprehended, the knowing strewn from line to line, there’s only so much to go around. Whether taken as venerable ancient or beardless youth, there’s only so much time you can take. This is where the words may gutter, this is when the end is nigh. Each of these pieces written well past the point of writing, just the longing for the last.

Each moment comes loose when the wind sets things astir. There at once the furthest star, the sweep before the depths. There’s time to set a timer, time to count, time to tell. The empty so much more than arms and pockets, the hole clean through you, the cause that you caught as yours. It is there when the walls creep with shadows, when the ceilings are feathered and fondled by the ideas that spill out of your mind, the colors that you see clinging to the words on the marked up page. A rewrite might have saved your place.

So little left to take up a shelf, a postcard, a busted cup, fragments set by tense and the weary hand of fate. The song in a tumble, the soul on a tear, the starlight and streetlights and the brake lights of traffic hinted at across fields and between fence slats. The sound of that barn owl you never really see though you place it roughly in the sky. There the moon, there the memory, there the map you still fold and mark. The words in pursuit of the worthless, something to say when this insistent last arrives.

soliloquy

You wake to that old timey ache, those stones you have carried these long years away, and soon you are up on the hind legs of this old bag of bones high stepping out into these habits and chores. Just bells and spittle down all the dogs, give or take a ghost. Cats and crows and saving throws, this tumble of lingering life and awkward limb. Boring as you tread the boards, bruise and blood, rag clad and of poor comportment. Sometimes it’s only the words, sometimes it’s the blocking, all the way downstage just to share the sentiment. There is the time and the plotting, plus the projection. No wonder the world’s on fire. No wonder you wake up either worse or the same lousy same old same.

There is that moment, in the early turnings, where the insistent words comes flooding. The phrase finds you ready to fire, this sudden onslaught the works of decades of sabotage and neglect, the terms only a tactic of the negotiation. The blues that give way to the grays, the wings that work away. Some stir in the meshugas, the mind as it ties its shoes. Each breath tentative and the sentences settle along the power lines, the first flock to fill the thought. Find your mark and say your say, live to trod the boards another day.

So each dream starts another you, a reach or a longing, another story imbued with some suchness that holds your place. A sunken stone, your guiding star, the clink of ice and a distant barking dog. Some inkling to fill the long empty tension, the expression of the lingering press of language, the legend beside the mark on the map. You stride through the substitutions, the tongue taking turns claiming your own worthless name as you part the fallen curtains and stride to centerstage and begin to cogitate and declaim. The inside finds its way out, the final tally, the busted phrase. The stage is unlit save the ghost light, the seats are empty. The illusion complete, the convention met halfway. You speak your thoughts aloud, the room rings in agreement to your isolation.

where we wade

The roots have tasted rain and the dirt has gone green with opportunity, a shift of ambience and atmosphere, a taste of tongues yet to come. We wade right in, thinking after speech, the shuffle and scrape of matter paid forward in increments. The world is a phrase that’s always turning, from fumble to fiddle and from want to wit. The riddle of the rising tide in time with breath and heartbeat, another cautious countdown, another custom to declare. The skies go gray again, the afternoon a known unknown as the wind plants a flag to tatter.

Black clouds play backdrop to the fronts of sun splashed homes, crow call and crow shadows as they pass into text and inference, the window only as useful as the eyes and the frame. The work of words so like the work of wings that we rely on both to remain aloft, held by the tension between art and action, held in the spell of the evidence as time erases flights of fancy and otherwise. We speak in the tentative style of the temporary, feeling our way towards the explanations for our existence. Another shaky presence posited on oratory and silhouette, another is you is or is you ain’t without a stall in sight. 

You stand too still and the weather goes on without you. You stand too still and the stars streak on by. The years fly by in a blur of dreams and seasons, hemlines and lapel widths and the deep dive into fascism. The gusts and winnows of spent breath stippled into symbol, another sweep of shadow, the way the boundaries gibber into static and placeholders. The rain of days pressed into this stubborn clay, mud and oxidation and the host of habit. Something of the root, something of the crow, something lost both now and long ago.