on breathing

The even-handed air leaves its blessings in the blood, life burning slow and fierce. The sky settles in a holding pattern, moment by moment all the maps salted with such distant stars. Hard pavement talking to each little bone in my feet, some meeting of the minds of matter. This could be the last breath I ever spill, and that would be a fine thing. I close my eyes and wait for the brilliance of this seeming to fade. I close my eyes, wishing that this was but a dream.

An owl weaves slow circles from the clock-face of the grimacing moon, telling time its reasons. Feast and fallow, these slivers of exquisite bounty are the inversion of so much ache. The hunger of these wings, the shamelessness of this luck. Lingering so long that even the asking is out of order. Being so pure that all else is amendments and credos. Words left to the abandonment of each act.

It leaves slow, vapor trails and dewy steam. The burgeoning labors of matter always in transition, the poison spilled from lung and blood. Always a melting, always a dissolving-- so much of this is only process. Like the wish doused candles or the wanton dispersal of dandelion seeds, this identity is mostly myth and breath. Some aim taken, some wager made. This world, and nothing more.

remedy

Looking to the sky, I can't even get an answer as to its color. My eyes skip a few bands of the visible spectrum, blending hues when they color out. The blue gone gray caught in the fire of a sinking sun, the sinking of distinction into the long sigh of so much shadow. Overcast and underwhelming, another dusk too cool for the revel of bats and bugs. Another dusk bereft of anything but direction, night in tireless pursuit.

My bifocals are tilted back upon my head, though I can't remember what it was I thought I was reading. Magazine stacks growing along with my indifference. An article on psychiatric meds finished before the whole deal went into the recycling. A lot of photosynthesis and industry just so I can tilt my head and raise my brow. In a world that needs to measure you in wishes, contentment becomes a red flag for sedition.

I swallow cold water, feel the generosity of various aches as their chorus tunes up. The wind sweeps down for a drink. The day hurries as it settles its affairs. Cars rush and children squeal. Things that happened move slightly aside, and what might be lines up in queues of probability, pushing and shoving their way into tomorrow.

the reverse comb-over

After a week or so of delay and diversion, I finally got around to shaving my head. It is a task I very nearly dread, but it is a necessity if I am to maintain any pretense of grooming whatsoever. My baldness, like my lying, is of a distinctly male-pattern kind. A large purely bald spot on the back of my head gives way to a sort of sparsely planted wispiness towards the front of my head, and from either side a type of land-bridge grows to meet its mirror near the crown. This means, apart from a fastidious trimming and shaping to leave nothing but the sides, any hair growth veers towards true chaos.
When it grows outs, the hair on the top of my head is always reaching out in different directions, every strand for itself, lacking enough follicular mass to be tamed by any brush, comb, or dampened palm. No, having been abandoned and betrayed long ago by my hair, I can not afford any mercy on the shabby stragglers that remain. It is either clippers on a zero or a razor left to groom this mutinous lot of scalp bandits. Neatness demands of me a shaving, and I struggle to comply.

It isn't that this is a good look for me. When I still had hair, I let it run rampant-- pulling it back in a pony-tail to keep it out of the way, or in two tails on either side of my head when I was feeling pretty. It wasn't until I saw the large bald spot on the back of my head in a security camera that I realized that my youthful dreams of luxurious locks had had their run. I joined the ranks of the shaved that very night.

Bald looks good on some guys, but I have no illusions that I am one of them. I have a particularly large and enlumpened mellon, misshapen from too many blunt force traumas and too little high guard. The flesh of my scalp has a somewhat mottled look, and bug-bites and irritated follicles seem to map out fresh new constellations on my skull with each fresh shaving. The end result is a beady-eyed face peering out from a oddly shaped lump of dough that does little to please or distinguish. Mostly sporting the shaved head has served to teach me the value of hats and sunscreen, and the names of many professional wrestlers that kindly strangers are nice enough to shout at me while I lumber dully about in public. At least the look has become common enough to no longer be only suggest neo-nazis and circus strongmen.

That many other bald meaty fellows have adopted this look has to do with an inversion of an old hair-loss coping strategy. The comb-over, where one cleverly camouflages one's scalpular affliction with the deft combing of extra long hairs from one side of one's head over the naked and offending region, while still in existence, has given way to yet another act of tonsorial cowardice. This weak-kneed grooming tactic is, of course, the reverse comb-over.

The reverse comb-over, of which I am a confessed practitioner, is a simple procedure. Rather than concealing the shameful baldness with some mad combing science, one takes the bald spot and spreads it over the rest of the head. Thus, instead of pretending not to be bald, the clean shaved head suggests instead, "Hair? What hair." Or, in the words of World's Toughest Milkman Reid Fleming, "I'm not bald: I get my hair cut this way." It is like movie magic, only without the magic. Or any movie.

So fairly freshly shaved and virtually stubble free, I have answered the unasked questions that have been lingering deep in recesses of your dirty minds. What's a reverse-combover, and how can I get one? If you're so smart, why are you bald? And perhaps, most pressingly, "So what did you do with your Friday night?"

the seams

It is a blue of a furtive timbre, rich and slightly hesitant, abiding in the levity of the passing moment, trying to decide if you are the type to trust with secrets. It seems to be set upon by such green reaching that the bright and sunny yellows of new leaf become untethered in the giddiness of the spectrum. The long notes and the sad refrain, a gull of silvers and grays circling in such a stretch of blue sky.

The wind works the chimes hanging from the porch, beats out bells and gongs. A dog sneezes, rooting through alyssum and aloe vera, ice plant crunching beneath cracked pads and the longing of claws. A ragged cactus sways upon a worn stake and a nylon rope. "If not now, soon," gravity seems to say.

All the weeds make their mark on planning, reminding of all the labor spent to make this story. A fable made of green hills and English gardens, of war and disease and technology and theft. The place we are always seeming to be forever, however fragile the foundation and the firmament. The brittle expanse of these GI bill oases, shrub and fence and every breath paved over. The world worrying at the fissures and the cracks, life always that same song. That steady reaching, that niche to breach. The vivid line of necessity that permits all possibility.

sigil

It goes without saying that I remember that kiss, hard and long as we pressed against that wall. It goes without saying that I remember your lips, strong and fevered as they lingered over mine. It goes without saying that not a day goes by without some trace of you-- some myth, some vision-- crowding into my dull senses. A hint of wisteria, a ghost of the ocean, the smell of burnt oil and the flavor of salt. There is no mystery of me where you are not a suspect, no blown kiss that doesn't pass without the touch of your name. You are stitched beneath each scratching notion, haunting the voices that whisper in my head. Spilled milk and empty hours, you fill the shadows and the spaces.

It isn't so much that I chose this love, as I chose the losing. It isn't so much that you press so heavily from the past, as the future I intended has so thoroughly collapsed. The bridges we burn are as much our histories as the beds we make. The choice, or the illusion of choice-- it all plays out the same. The smell of smoke, the shine of mosquito wings. Irish music on the second biggest amateur night of the year. Sober beneath the wings of owls and the crawl of stars. Tasting tequila while sipping coffee, thinking of you.

These lost loves are such troubled proof--. The litany of love letters saved as evidence against all further alibi, the tears spilled and distance travelled. The others that were better suited towards the particular challenges of this burden, the ones that were left or were always leaving. The debts inherited, the misfit pets, and the books returned unread. Knowing that these desires are the mingling of need and wishing, mistaken fate and star-crossed deliberation combined to cost so much with so little gained. Knowing that to want is to lack, and these tremblings are another shape of self. You aren't the one I would wish upon myself even at my most self-loathing. Yet under these warm dark skies, I can still taste you. The flavor of midnight aches and labors lost, your kiss still marking my location. A sigil marking my blood and breath.

fractions

Just before the smoke subsides, just before the light weighs in, just before the cacophony of another day winds its way through the doorjambs and window glass, there is one slip left of the world you lose. As these tattered flags of worn-through flesh ripple upon the tent stake and kindling limb of rolling bones, as eyes slip along the ceiling and the walls, the questions escape at last. What name, what nature, what land unfurls within? The trailing grace of words sparking some unsettling flint, lighting at last another day of life.

Now the clouds of gnats have gathered. Now the sun has burrowed beneath the sky. All the constellations find their footing, and the music of unhinged meat takes to the wind. I scratch at some mysterious wound, wondering vaguely what chance has caused me harm. The skin has already begun its worrisome stitching. Maybe the scars will stay to hint of history. Maybe this skin exists for these swarms to feast upon. An indefensible host of hosts.

The stranger in the shadow, the face in the mirror, all the names spat into the wandering air. Everything in half measures-- the greater the contentment, the more horrible the crime. The day crunches beneath the feet of these lost crowds, the night warms to the subtle invasions of all these failed dreams. The best marbled portion is still burned upon the altar, hoping these tags and stragglers will be enough to safe guard my insolence. This noisy worship exhausting the empty embers of the world.

the introspecter

The days swarm by with little change but the temperature and the weather, fresh budding spring leavening the gray with slivers of green, hints of the greater green to come. Blue skies have broken out, with song birds in the pine trees and dogs sprawled out in the yard. Memories crowd and swirl like ashes after they abandon any last ember of light or heat. I am still loitering in the periphery, life flowing in festive and funerary ribbons right through me. I am posting again, these cartoons in the margins, these captions for the things left unsaid.

The break from posting wasn't so much a break from writing, though that itself was an attractive facet of the hiatus. It was more a brief respite from these habits of seeding my own isolation, the Russian roulette of recording these moments when every sense of tomorrow was dissolving, watching as I generate a precipice out of gray days and bad chemistry. It was about avoiding that shudder that ran through me while I watched the sickness overtake me, words clattering to the curb like reject brass. The heat of despair glowing in the dullness of my eyes, awaiting some untold measure of violence to curse the world with the gift of balance.

For awhile the weight of my consistent and overwhelming failures was a constant and bedeviling distraction. The combination of my depression and my misplaced obsessions made a particular poison of all the calamity I had tethered to my tracks, reason returning again and again to this path of the sinking ship, and the captaincy of dissolution. All of this plus the particular sort of prose-poem journalism I have been using in the attempt to capture the living truth of the moment, mingling the feel and the real made for seriously bad juju. And as we all know about juju, the bad kind is simply about the worst kind of juju there is.

Still, though I am posting again, I am in no way well. I am not cured of the blue murder streak that runs through my blood, or of the casual oblivion that lurks in the hollows of my heart. I am still as broken, as sad, as buried as ever. But instead of lingering upon every slip of longing, I am trying a little harder to play it as it lays. Less hope strangely makes a lot of kinds of living easier. Hope is another country, calling from across the sea. The world we are left to work with is something we can engage, figure out something steady from all these seething possibilities. So I try to find comfort in doing what I can, even if all I have left I can fathom is the fall.

This is the return to that same old neighborhood. That glimmer of twilight, that brooding touch of dawn. My habitual babbling now posted at a daily rate, a free lunch of dust and feathers. All the usual suspects, from the empty roads to the moonlit devil dancing on the line. Raccoons and raconteurs, filthy needs and bleeding reasons, all our cartoon pals on hand and raring to go. Angels and ministers of grace, you know what to do. Spill that breath and haul that ballast. That inverse wisdom is upon me yet again, shining like the longing of a sheathed blade. Waiting until the cards demand some wager, and the wind, when willing, will turn on its heals and flee, laughing madly into the night.