these dreams of you

She goes to heaven on a little row boat I think aloud, the moon twisting through the trees mingling with my mind. You drift along the scheme of things, light dancing out to sea. Sleep comes calling, slipping along the tide. The dream moves so slow, drizzling down your skin. The dream so near to waking that I keep mistaking it for the face of the world. Something is there, just on the other side of memory. Something was said, just before the fall.

Just like that a small fog settles. Just like that the curtain call ensues. A sense of light, the feel of daybreak. All these appetites worn so near to your flesh. Your hip a long slow curve of the sheets. Every sense an impression, stage directions read aloud. That moment where your silhouette leaned into my memory. A halo, an angel, a stranger buried in silt. One slender moment that follows me, heels stitched to some tattered shadow. One slim dream mistaken for the call of all tomorrows.

I think it might be her, waking strange from these rivers of you. I think it could be you, wrapped around some mystery. The flow of your hair, the shift of your thighs. I taste the smoke threaded through this winter, see the clinging glimmer of your eyes. I taste the dust kicked up by the dog, see the clouds tailing your favorite constellation. I think aloud it could be you. Nothing unusual, sometimes I think it could be me too. The moon entangled with my lucky star, faith burning away, sizzling into streaks of lights.

exception

It is only another ghost of an hour, a moment suspended from all acts and consequence. It is only cold notions and sad rumors, the crumpled clothes strewn across the worn floor, the sing-song voices rising in the dusk. The ashtray of emotion, the fitful rhythms of a song meant for forgetting, the rusted themes dragged out once again. Standards and ballads, and the stars all play their parts. Poems and prose, and the roads all dressed to impress. I come to the telling crusted with salt and dust. I come to the telling with the cupboards burned bare.

There isn't so much a story as the words stuck in my teeth. There isn't so much a telling as a spilling, all meaning spoiling on the page. The heart arrives at its decisions like an ambulance arrives at a wreck, sounding out only once the world has its say. Life is left playing in the ruins, too fay and tenacious to surrender when it should. Sickness and ruin, riot and dissembling, root and leaf and vein and limb endure all the same. I confess my many sins, agree with the abuse and invective aimed my way, and know there is no way out for me. Still I shrug and shamble, writing my misplaced and endless obituary by the word and the minute. Still the sun pays its tab and shuffles off again.

I owe my life to the angels of better natures. I owe my life to the kindness of strangers. All these debts of tolerance and assembly, all these years of blank verse and dull resolve. Depression growing worse and worse while the ability to recover slows, my life in shreds and tatters as the new year chugs along. All the books are glutted with word after mealy word, dust on their jackets, creases on their spines. The day essentially the same as every other, the notable exceptions only those that have gone bad or run astray. The night already gathering in the shadows, every wing bent towards shelter. Nothing to say, and still I don't stop.

the leavings

All the light has gone to heaven, ring the moon and point each star. The sky conspires to pierce the night. The wind chimes all peal and stir, gossiping away. The world moves along despite all the blood and moaning. The world turns over despite whatever crime or waste drags it to a halt. Every house haunted by the dozens of things never said and tomorrows that will never come. Every ghost a measure of what might have been.

The hole grows, with every option given. The hole grows, billed later or paid in advance. The tattoo of bird song and cold engines rises, motors grinding away their measure, absent wings another declaration of war. Left to faith and happenstance, facts fail the worlds we believe to be. Left to our own devices, we always choose hell first. Dig a little deeper, work a little more. Make what you must of the waste you earned.

Now the day is loosed upon all this wind and dust, the dreams longed for either broke or gone. Another day lost to the ministrations of strangers. Another soul sold to save the face of tradition. You wake to the worn out platitudes and the gracious savings, motorcycles struggling to drown out every lingering charm. You wake to rust and distance and that foul metallic grasp of the inevitable. Swallow each misery until there is nothing left to do but choke. Dive in to each lie until there is nothing to do but drown. You are already ruined. Tomorrow will never see you again.

too much

The crush of empty souls gets to be too much, with the sun so high and the world painted bright and blue. Enough with the murder ballads. Enough with the empty threats and private horrors stitched into the skin. Such needy teeth, grinning without a smile. Such foolish hands, reaching for the sharp and the permanent. Why bother with any counting at all?

My heart staggers about its tiny rooms, moving from shelf to shelf. My heart trips over its own shoe laces, never mind the stairs. Beating too fast, wandering the halls all night. Beaten too bad, lost in the mortuary medicine and the water-logged arts. The streets go still and the light runs down. Dust fills my veins, this dry earth losing traction. This still night losing any aim at all.

It's been worse, but not by much. It's been awhile, but not for long. I limp from chore to chore, an animal fed, a sentence served. The world just waiting to remind you. Life never lasting quite long enough to forget. The dusk busies itself with even odds and traffic lights. The night won't ask anything at all. I don't bother to believe. I only suspend my sense of what and where. I already know there are too many, never mind the numbers. I already know its trouble, never mind the knock. All the assembled mercies at each others throats, all the bed time monsters free to walk to streets. My feelings all a jumble, my failings all in a row.

identify

The dusk settles the bet between the sky and the crows, clouds and phone poles, wings and trees. The ink dries slow and solemn. This is the world that bears you. This is the world that knows your kine. Every flight will fall, every word will fail. Everything tendered as smoke or ghosts.

The words are pressed between the pages, stiff-spined litanies forever holding their breath. The feathers bend  soft and strong. This is the weight the sky allows. This is the weight that bears your burden. Every eye so set upon the sharpness of each star. Everything written as boom or bust.

So much depends the poem goes. Heaven all about who's asking. The truth scribbled down as the most often abandoned, a stone sleeping on the tongue, a piece of glass buried beneath the heart. This dull hope, this deep measure. The body either dead or alive, depending on the words or facts around it. Breath taking to the flesh and machinations, rise or fall, gravy or grave. These wages and wagers, the shadows reach and stretch. The sparrow a sparrow whatever is said.

that mirror

We seldom see ourselves as others see us. Even the most examined mirror doesn't view us with any eyes other than our own. From the tiny flaws we see as scars to the beauty mark everyone else sees as a mole, most of us have constructed images of ourselves based on our fears and wishes and hearsay and flattery. We cling to notions of our personalities constructed from our self-regard and family anecdotes and astrology. A picture of a person made from a hodgepodge of cognizance and coincidence, the moments that we behaved as we thought we should while all the other incidents are swept quietly to the side. For some of us, the gap between this manufactured self and the self everyone else sees is greater than it is for most others. This is the part of the Venn diagram that encircles me.

The sub-group I am in includes all manner of crazy, delusional, and other-wise socially disassociated people. My group includes all manner of the severely afflicted, deep shadow outsiders, and the other-worldly. I say my group, but it isn't as if there is a club charter, or there are meetings with coffee and sugar cookies after. This is a bit on the too bad side, because I bet the minutes for those meetings would be hilarious. Or tragic. Or both.

Part of this affiliation is being a depressive, part is thinking I am a creative type. A lot more is probably a simple animal inability to understand the motivations and actions of others. It took me so long to grasp the workings of the wheels of much of society, and I spent so much time on the outside that I now find it hard to come back in. Play sannyasin long enough, and you might just lose yourself to the role. I spent most of the last ten years pretending to be a reasonable person, working with severely emotionally disturbed kids, all the while allowing my own fairly severe disturbances grow from bad to worse. Some of my own deficits were assets in this line of work, and I managed to hardly get fired at all. Now I am thoroughly unemployed, on the long downward slide into a sore and shabby middle-age, and about one hard look or wrong word away from a felony. And I don't care much for the look that mirror is giving me.

the season stays the same

The day is cool, the air bites bitterly at any flesh it finds. All the stars are out, taking their time, doing their part. Every breath is burdened with this sludge of meat and water, blood slow and secretive, bone dense and curt. It is the tone of confession and the tangle of crime. Breathing belabored with the usual punch and gasp that the common cold requires. The tension of need, the release of tears.

It is clear to me I missed my mark. It is plain to see how deep the mistakes go, how far they wander. The chain of evidence, so full of gaps and weakness. The line of the heritible, so full of blind alleys and dead-ends. The blood too strange, the ghost too gone. The poetry and the prose have all played out. If there is a next step, I do not see it yet.

I cough and spit and crawl along, no natural grace or human ambition left. Sickness on top of illness, like the cherry on a pretty please. Only the clarity of confessed confusion. Only the direction learned from being broken again and again. Alone for so long every thought seems singular. Lost for so long any light will do. The year slipped past, another year signed on. Another number offered, another countdown begun. All this change, and the season stays the same.