the distance people

We are born to words and signs. We watch out the windows, we wait by the phone. Sitting so still, the sky sweeps past us. Smears of stars and clouds. The blue hued harrow of every breath. The tightness unspoken in the chest, a burst of color always almost there. These hard turns and crabbed hands, letters moldering away. Alone, alone, alone.

Lock me up with ink and flowers. Send me to the remaindered places, the ones you’ve left for good. The stories that we tell ourselves to hold the days together. The stories we remember as we stare into the sky. The stars striking and the wheel a spin. The paths of the ancients and the parable calendar. The clock on the wall and the picture in a frame.

I would have words, but you’re always sleeping. I would have hope, but I never remember my dreams. I have grown old staring at screens. I have grown old watching the fall of years. Some strange case, some odd leanings. A heart choking lonesome and the scrolling of smoke. Tripping on my injuries and mumbling verse and curses. Stones in my pockets and the search for a cause. The light that finds me too bright and tactless, I turn into the myth of night.

open casket

The time has passed, the deed’s been done. Reddened eyes and tear slick faces, the empty husk and the hollow ritual. All that was given long gone. Dusty shelves of books unmoved, tchotchkes and orphaned keys, the laden name dead on the tongue. Love just another word laid waste.

This is an exercise in the futile, the banality of the choices still left. Check the figures, fill in the forms, what is there to keep you warm? Wind and wishes and the spider striped ceiling. Heartaches and mementos and the rats in the walls.

Write it down to keep the record. Write it down to work it out. It all comes down to the bent of the reader. It all comes down to the work and the pain. The crowds with all their gods and ghosts, fool’s prayers and loaded fragments. Weep away, we are always leaving. Weep away, we were always lost. The name never spoken, a life like footprints taken by the tide.

traction

Painted green in patience, the world skews vaguely towards the clock. The placment of the causeways, the reach of the flora. Each skin wears a countdown, each name earns a notch. Between arrivals and departues, we are our dispatch due. Glass and plastic, carpet and tarmac, every surface bears this wait. The sky is graced with clouds and planes. These abrupt disagreements with gravity.

I wait like all the others, in contention and dismay. The aches all settle in as the plans continually change. The words stack like cordwood, the words stack like bricks. The plane evades all prayers and numbers. The plane is a story that changes as it goes. My mumbling heart can ken its kin, even as the blood starts to burn.

It doesn't take too long for the tale to take. A few scattered words, a quick slip of the tongue, and all the crows have settled on their plates. We sidle past our purpose, we outlive our truth. The sky once so full of heaven now stippled with brittle light. Buoyancy built of vast engines and startled carbon, lift left to the bitter tills of our trampled hearts. Only left with this world so full of falling.

convalesce

The days arrive wrapped in words-- the good, the bad, the blue. Know the sky by the birds alight, know your bones by the ache. The things we say just slip away. The bare intentions linger. The needs they have you'll never know. They certainly aren't you. Faces slowly start to stray until you're the stranger they once knew. 

I creep along these dusty halls, these dog swept corridors. Quiet in this shuffling skin, the flesh my only heir. Waiting as if in faith, moving as if in chains. I am daunted and I am dire, removed once from this world, never to find my way back. Interred in these jagged hurtful thoughts for all around to witness, each step straying further from sense. There are never words enough for the sort of waste I am.

Return at once to that pristine path, the beloved self, the hidden choir. Let your voice ring out above the fray, let the losses lie. Pretend along some chosen path, sanctify your crimes. Believe in the light that loves you, obey the court where your heart holds sway. Sing out to the unseen heavens, never mindful of the souls you burn for warmth. 

reckoning

The rain returns, settling bets and breaking fasts. The rooftop sluices gravel, and the river of sky spills over, wedding waterfalls with gutter streams, turning the wheel yet again. Green weeds and lovely mud scatter like markers on a map. The landscape squirms beneath the slovenly pavement, freeing aging rumors from shallow graves. All the ghosts in motion, the storm beckons and bends the mind askew. 

We place our labels, we hold our breath, we wait and wander through word and skin. The story steals our reason. The story clouds each sense. The world walks one way, and we go another, shouting slogans and singing anthems. The world moves on, and we do not even know its name.

I wait under the awning. I pace the muddy porch. Footprints on slick pavement. A figure in need of distance. A face that wears like a mask. I watch the flood swell and subside, never looking at the rain. The storm holds court in my heart, my dreams all born drowned. The reckoning all that's left me.  

contrapuntal

There is a drift in the machinery, a part of all this speech that stays unsettled, the unspoken words always winning the day. There is a power in the unsaid to wreck and rile, the license for the disquiet stirring behind the eyes. She sees it all and says little. He talk and talks until the meaning goes away. Love lives within them, awake and alive. It is warm and bright and has their number. Love will not bankroll their hearts' great hopes. The drift will have its say. 

They move past the sweet in the sorrow. They take apart their piecework clock. They each sing such very different songs. His love conquers all, her sad future history. He is right, she is right, and so their path it parts. Tears flow and words fail, and the world keeps moving on. He is standing still and she is pounding her beat. Streets and stars and shared beds. Mementos, and love letters, and the detritus of the all fall down. 

He clings to her skin, he lingers upon her breathing. She skips and sulks, his words never quite syncing up with his fleshly heir. He is thinking bliss and babies, the fundament of the blood. She is thinking burdens and bones, his inheritance of ruin. The music falls in step with heartbeat and footfall. The seance of thought, the graveyard of memory. The calendar finds the slipstream, the machine kicked into gear. There will be words and acts and refutation. He aches for the unlikely resolution. She imagines no outcome, only the ghosts that haunt her heart. The love goes on, with or without them. 

the vital

There comes a day when the clocks and calendars abruptly stop chasing their tails, when the sunken stones begin speaking as clearly as the summer sun, when the murmuring earth and the whispering trees all sharpen the distant points of long ago stars. All the misfit dreams that haven't starved or broken settle on a shelf full of sheafs of dust and chronicles, their songs left to music box and calliope. The grizzled beard goes gray as the steel and granite empty from your bones. Your foolishness and your wisdom all sound just the same. The days, though ever as seperate and varied, all linger in this foreboding dusk as the long cruel night begins.

You find the break, you mind the cut, you feel the rain fall in the strumming beneath your skin. Heavy hands and rocky hearts, how far that wishing star? Every certainty some fairy story, some lullaby that trails off before sleep is called. The air trembles with motors and musc, the rumble of unkempt engines and the thunder of a untamed bass. The sky is all kinds of blue. You wait for the stars, you're always waiting on a sign only you can signal. The affirmations of change settling in your skin.

You go green with envy, you see red in rage. You see your chances dwindle as you abide the bent and burn of this new and unfriendly world. The stars come out, drizzled in distance and the secrets of creation. The victors bang their drums and thump their chests, unaware that your power is only kept in check by etiquette. The stories toss and tumble, while you draw down hard upon your roots. Let them claim and libel, their tongues the only flags they follow. The blood still boils through you, vital and indomitable with the anthem of your breath. Time is to be told.