dust

It is the deluge measured in thirst, the famine by the size of each plate. The moon pushes light into eyes staring into the shadows, filling everything with cheap revelation. The span of a reaching branch, the fly sleeping beneath the leaf. Some dazzling beauty caught unaware, a candid photo thieved straight from another life. Something now hung upon a wall, a trophy celebrating trespass. We make virtues from all our crimes, continuing to live in the sickness we will not see.

Spring comes, and almost immediately the battle begins against its bounty. The horrible engines of lawn mowers and leaf blowers, the sprinkler water streaming down the gutters. The ability to adapt becomes the latest bloodletting, the endless sacrifice towards gods of lies and squander. Such waste and fervid destruction shouldn't surprise. What else to expect from these cultures built upon the worship of death?

The strange fruit falls in these towers built from words, over-ripe and riddled with bruises. The deepening errors, the confusion of idea and object, of word and thing, have led us to this precipice. Leaning upon the laws we made ourselves creatures of a vast and foolish faith. We made a virtue of belief over the senses, dogma over fact. What piety we find, lighting all of creation a-fire. What holiness we teach, grinding all of the real world to dust.

only this

The sun settles into the flesh, reflection and radiation binding in this being, hedging yet another of life's many bets. Complexity from simplicity, somehow the unfounded stories still need their tellings. From the blue wolf to the green turtle, from a sun murdered each day to a chariot always traveling west, the magic lives on in leaf and breath. Egrets flying overhead at dusk, bound for whatever marsh awaits them. I adjust my hat and remove my sunglasses, still warmed by the touch of that ancient and shifting god. Myth or fable or self-delusion, I take my blessings where I can.

The dusk settles over the skin, hush and riot in crowd and storm, the unleashed anticipation of reckless boys and the pure weaponized will of moth and mosquito. I smell of smoke and sweat and sunscreen, that vague hint of coconut and industrial conspiracy. Victorious in completing next to nothing, I move on to the work of this fresh night. Coffee beans to grind and bets to settle. That awful ache that is close to home, the inevitable blackening of any sustained blue. A few words to tend to the wasting of the day. A few words to lend themselves to waste.

The moon has its methods, its mysteries and spells. All those spring laden longings, all these bared shoulders and sun-slaked limbs setting into their midnight selves. The sound of music everywhere, the lingering work of the bees shining in the apple blossoms swaying in the breeze. I watch the sky loiter and bolt, clouds giving way to constellations. This lonesome feel giving way to something gentle and lethal and true. Only this world left, shedding days as it unfolds, common and astounding.

satchel full of light

It isn't that darkness follows the light, or that the light here needs to leave. It isn't that the feel of ionized air and the least of breezes, or that chilling your bared flesh feels too much like what you taste of love. It isn't the density of the wood or the pressure of the sounds that spill and spill. It is only that anything you can carry is a weight, even if only the weight of your held breath. Even if it is only the shine of reflected eyes upon your skin.

Now every word you held back is the prize you can not give away. The left unsaid and the left undone the same. So you choose instead to push on through these itchy sheaves of letters, wind your eyes tight around each curve and line. You shoulder aside words, your meaning all that really matters. You read these wishes like you would give everything left to write them now. Being everything you have to give until at last it is clear and bright.

Feel the tightness in your chest, the strength of your intent hand moving flesh and bone pressing so very near your heart. Feel the release and the radiance, the pleasure of know the grace of these shifting plates. The place where every burden at long last lifts you, and your weight is displaced by the draw of your shine. Where finally the things you never said are free.

breath and boil

Memories slowly boil away, changing states as they are warmed by the cool morning air. Where there was rain there is now starlight, where there was green there is now a night's worth of unabiding gray. It is ever too dark or too bright, always almost and even when certain never quite. I lost a day to old bonds and chaos, broke a few secret rituals and yet another promise to myself. I would keep score, but these thoughts weigh too much for the hour and for my status, and memory is such a fragile and fruitless thing.

Instead I make my mark just leaning into the mix. The business of sorrow, the clarity of joy, the realistic lies of language and art. I watch for marks, read the cracked ground for any trace or clue. Observe all the usual comings and goings, the changes and the sameness, the happenstance and definition of the inside and the out. Bird or bat, star or planet. All the satellites orbiting and becoming one another. One breath, and then the next.

Out here amid this residue, out here where complexity aches so, we wait even as we wander. The stories and the facts, the dreams and the steps, the aim and the exhalation of the shot. The old gods so shoddily abandoned, the grim new ones that ought to be treated just the same. Lost souls and letter writers, thieves and snipers and crummy poets. The architecture of the carnival and the garden, the path made with no illusion towards permanence. We are so lovely and so evil, so very nearly forgotten. All the grimy confessions, all the night-terror awakenings, all of the stories everyone is so afraid of that the pretend to lose them in bus stations and in shopping malls. They are always so close to being lost forever, that they are resurrected without a thought as to why. Always something novel and thrilling, stolen from the cheap dissolution of oaths misspoken and the sort of things no-one ought to say.

storm warnings

Time thickens, it drawls and mutters in the shine of dust and the distance of dreams. It creases the wind with its sniper's focus and its lawyer's heart. Ticking clocks and clucking tongues, all my tomorrows misplaced and disordered. I am lost in my own thin skin. I am propped against all motive and intent. The sickly crawl of every hour, drowning every emotion save one.

I am gone, in this deft and loquacious blue, the startling hue of a sky on the march. I am gone, a shell and an opinion pointed towards the dimming east. I am empty when I aim, the words spilled on the floor and scattered about shabby furniture. This gathering of tumult, this slathered heap of dead pets and blown kisses. All of these letters, all of this misspelt fury, caught in these gusts and pauses.

These lamentations are the worst of indulgences. They seek to leaven bitterness with reflection, seek to build upon emptiness what I could not craft in the world. Wheels with-in wheels, these shabby infections and dismal cults. The radiant and the willful, and then the tattered rest. Pop songs that bring tears unbidden. Recording each absence until there is nothing left to say. Then saying nothing just the same.

fixation

You sway upon the secret axis, between the flame and the lotus, between the serpent and the wolf. With every step you dance and smolder, every stroll sends many brave men to oblivion. You weave music from the very air, calling down clouds and flowers, tending to all your storms and swarm. Dark wings blotting at the sky as the sun wanders the world weeping, aching after your warmth.

How they have spent their best words and their blown kisses, salting the lonesome night with their tearful pleas. How they have spent the engine of their fortunes, trying to find some shine that could light your eyes. How long they have burned with the grace of your fire, how long they have shouldered the burden of proof of worth. You with your magic of spring and blossoms, your scents of bee-line and crow-flight. You with your ten thousand revelations radiating from the alchemy of your vivid living flesh. What chance is there when you own the cards and make the game? What is there to winning when you already have it all?

It isn't that I don't feel it. I am bound more than most to the workings of the timeline and the lapses of living. The world hums a droll, tuneless song as it surges through me, this collection of gaps and gluttony, this assemblage of opinion polls and guitar licks and archaic tools. The rhythm of your hips is the beating of my heart, and I feel the flames consume me, just thinking after you. Why should things be any different for me? I know that want is a full-time thing. Only its direction ever changes. So let your bounty sing and pull. Let your beauty align with the spheres and all their seeming. I am used to being on the outside, used to the sucker's bet. When I have been wrong about almost everything that isn't measured in blood, why would I even begin betting with the house? Having already denied myself so much, how little the difference left in denying you.

clockwork

It is bordering four in the morning, that rough and solemn country where thoughts roam rogue and the mysteries of the night are outweighed by the baggage of so many missing dreams. I dawdle at the keyboard, wanting to spill enough words to free me from any further obligations. Wanting just to get this profligate posting business done with, to check one more thing off that never ending list of things I ought to do. The hours are turning, slow and cumbersome-- that slow fuse always burning, that sand always on the verge of running out. Three forty in the morning, and the time for sleeping has come and gone.