sea legs

Before the first gray words begin to gather we know we're out to sea. Before our gait began to rollick atop the bucking deck we knew the oceans closing in. At once awake from that dream of your arms, the glow of morning gleaming in your gaze. Now the world without you, the shifted wind blowing straight through. Now the day dragged like that slain albatross, the old forms always bewilderingly near once the words give way.

It is that gasp of blue, the brittle reach of green dazzling the sun into rolling sparks and shimmering fire. It is the tangle of the tall weeds below the rancor of the sky. The wind splits into swift infinites, tailing and toiling without end. Here there be dragon, here there be grammar, beyond the limits of this poor defense. Still amid all this tide and light, the count and the converse, the starlight and the stride.

The day is still, though the tall grasses bend and sway.  Always your name there near my lips, always each breath bent on saying. This press of familiar kisses, this rush  of ebullience and froth, the words each now found as they unfold. This spell so sudden upon your tongue, every line your favor. Such a dull pronunciation, this reel my stale report.

chimes

The afternoon spills down wild from the sky, scattering dust and petals. The season pitches and unfurls, caught in e snap and drag of this unruly wind. The rings cast by refraction, the ripples shuttering the water's skin. I cough and sputter, my lungs caught in the persuasive draft. I shrug beneath the green horizon, the mantle of shadows settling slow as the sky just grays and grieves.

Every word's a runaway, every breath an extinguished star. The fertile dust of dreaming scattered in spittle and salt, prayers turned fetid lashed to these masts of flesh. Forget that I know not the days or the reasons for my dreams. Forget that I am only dust and teeth in need of filing. The story arrives from somewhere dressed like someone else. The story is stripped and fitting with our bones and breath and blood. What of names, what of riddles? Today is only always here. You are the only I you know.

The star will strike, whether star or not. The atmosphere will compress and burn, the world will split and shake. We will die or we will tremble, a thousand dire prophecy always just arrived. Someone will read aloud some long dead utterance as if spoken for the first time again. The arrow loosed, the bell tolled, the sign at last revealed. The end will come, and every reason will be equal. The end will come, eternity at last.

impotent

The measure of my incompletion is the unsettle of your gaze as it weaves and as it wanders the jungle of this disarray. There is no blow that could hurt further, no strike or wound that will injure more. You lie and flirt with calamitous abandon. You reject me with each heart beat, betray me with every breath. There is nothing left to feel from you, either too cruel or clumsy to allow access. You take from me this name and number. Leave me like your soul, bereft and desolate.

Still I shall always light a candle. My window all aglow at night. While I ache and crave your smile, knowing I am only filler and you are only mirage, you toil away with other hearts and so can never have my own. Go away, though I love you dearly. Go away, though I love you true. You are only born of lies and pleasures. Go now before all you are is this evil you pursue.

I know at last that I am nothing. Your whole world a carnival. Paper tickets and words like honey. Nothing but breath to keep you warm. Time undoes as it devours. The truth some sound like teeth grinding bone. My life bereft, my wings at once shattered. Dream your dreams without my witness. Live your life with someone else to humiliate and mock. I love you, but I know now how little that ever meant. Love someone true and without ruin.

incarnate

All at once you're flesh and bone, spared no ache or spite, harboring all the fields of paradise and the corridors of hell. The brittle cup of undue potency fueling the wild inferno of sentience. You always reach deep into the feeling, always stretch further into the burn. My hands just manifest to your containment. My kisses just so hungry and so hard. You tilt your head, you lean your hips. I fall upon you like blessed night.

This is the spell of distance, the writhing fascination, the incantation kissed with bated breath. These thoughts I write upon the whispers that spill from your fevered lips, this ache that is so overwhelming it's answer is your all. The long lonely nights where my hands can only wander for the want of you. The thick delicious twilight that smolders in your eyes, this flavor of wishes salting each savored breath as you call my name, and I find your answers everywhere you touch.

I write it all down as if a voice could save me. I write it all down as if the words could mean the same. Letters lost to the indifferent systems and brutal efficiency return again to be recoded, my heart my only hieroglyph, your heart my Rosetta stone. These poems that come from the unweaving of this broken ruined world, these ways that linger in the literature while their purpose drains away. This is the blotted parchment and the crabbed and clumsy hand, straining to reach your touch. This is the dream that descends in shadows while you are sleeping to become my waking life.

spiders

The gray winds abound, casting its wild magic upon the dust and trees. I smoke in slow circles, pacing the fissures of old worry, tromping my way through the dirt.  I pause to watch the wires dance, swaying in the limbs above, trailing wild strops of smoke against the back of the sky. A flit from the corner of my seeing eye, I turn to make a spider still, dressed in its shine of startled armor. Limo black and a distressed red, the jumping spider waits to scry my appetites. Am I enemy or am I irrelevant? It moves on, reading me cold.

I couldn't count all the mistakes I made, considering I am usually making new ones with every move and breath. An alarm sounds somewhere in the baffling distance. I listen through the web of songs and dogs, hearing little but the wind. The cigar butt cools in the ashtray. Little measure never even marking the map. The ritual's always the last things we leave. A scrub jay complains from the bones of a chopped-down peach tree. I couldn't even pretend I could claim to disagree.

I pass a web clinging in a corner, a handful of dead peach blossoms scattered like shed spider shells, pausing strange before the sight. They swing and sway upon the lines, held as if in suspense of breath. There is a geometry of intersections, of paths and notions crossed, a sizzling of neurons whispering where sense and surface blend. The idea of distinction so different from its skin. I stray along the paving where the gravel greets the clay, a parapet of outers and inners to pace and grope and claim. The roads are always knotted so tightly, I always have some untying to tell before it's over. The wind walks through me, her secret friend my only absolute.

waste

There never was another reason except that there was a road. There was never any path other than the one downhill. The years went by, the rest went nowhere. Debt and loss and the contempt of everyone around. Madness and tears and all the voices joined, the dismal sound of your own breath another noise needing snuffing.

The confusion makes the fury, and the fury tells the story. Here come the list of wrongs endure, the names of each double crosser. It is even true sometimes, which only adds to every fire, the sadness which you're made from the fuel and the spark. The mind is stuck in litany, unable to refrain from repetition and refrain. Once you think about, it seems silly that you stayed around so long.

You are bruised and covered in cuts and scrapes. Another absurd labor done for rejection, another beating taken to make this case for oblivion. You are old enough to know that you are the reason you won't get better. The sickness just grows until it is all you are, sickness peeping out from the abattoir of your wasted skull. In the end all you are owed is the death you deserve. Sometimes all that is left is to settle up and punch out.

humbled

I need just enough sleep to keep the night out, just enough roof to shit the sky out, that feeling of falling about all I know. The gray day seeps in somehow, the old aches seething straight down to the bones. The hush of tires on the wet road, the nattering of gears in the dark. Every promise plugged into something. Every oath a button pressed. The sirens sound and the dogs let loose. I am staring at the shadows. I am sitting in the dark.

Stared at by the shining eyes of electronics, the world always winding away inside these secrets, the pace kept even while sleeping. Every breath comes back in coughs and sputters. Each leaning some struggle with-in the blood, these glowing screens and comfort noises squeezed from our fingers and our phones. Something falls outside the house, even the walls allowing stunned alarms. Wind chimes peal and the rain comes unsteady. The still house trembles in the weather as winter drains away.

There's no use for your culture heroes. There's no need to drag around ghosts. The world is enough a stranger that it needs no disguises. The truth is harder than horror stories, why deify our brutal aimless deaths? I sleep and wake in fitful stretches and empty stretches, the window open to the alien eyes of the night and the ruckus run amok of the day. I linger here, hunched over a few meager empirical hopes. The words clip clop in dull cliche, fumbling with my thumbs and contexts, always working towards the muddle. Meaning gleaned only after an eternity lost to time. The story told only to hold back all these fallen stars.