or bust

Deep in the black dog bandwidth, smoke and wind and the way they placed the gravity heavily laden upon my frame and grace. I hang my head, watching the flight plans of porch flies adjust their geometries, some shared frequency there in the calculations. Lawn mowers sound out above the rush of the air and all the shared genres of song, bass line thump and weed whacker whine sandwiching the stray octaves. Nowhere to go and I long to be gone. Welcome nowhere now that there’s nothing I can be but me.

Impatient amid the scintillations, I still until I stray from the cooling winds and swaying tree limbs, the mind always ready to buck the harness and head for the fences. The bones report their same complaints, the sky comes falling down, but memory and the moment never stop tussling away. It’s the same old boards, the same backdrops, the seaside docks and cityscapes in calm suspension up the fly gallery. The same old hack hamming it up on script and off, the terminal condition of this spent discourse. Selling the same sad fruit and trampled flowers, the sign at the intersection held by some ragged figure asking too much. 

I don’t often know what I know, but I typically do what I do. I tack something stable once I figure out its axis, I like to know when to stir up the dust or to shuffle off to Buffalo. I am down to spare parts and dark arts, spending tomorrows and spinning gears to move the carcass from collapse to collapse. I fill the cups, I break the chains, I wake up to the same boulder waiting at the bottom the same hill. We top off the clockwork and spend the rest on frippery and magic spells, and prayers to faithless gods. Going nowhere except back to the B-side. Tomorrow or bust. 

duende

It’s still a little ways from sundown. It’s still the wind and the dashing smoke. Houses papered with pressed leaf shadows, the sun still kissing the swaying trees, the green reaches of the dreaming earth holding down the ground. There is a chill beneath these eaves, there is a cold grown of the lonesomeness between blood and bone, the haunted feeling of a fire burning low. The direction of the gaze away, always seeing while trying not to look. The light always rising as it goes.

It doesn’t matter, but I keep saying it. Like a line from a play that was all but forgotten, like a spell drawn out so long it lands like a nursery rhyme, the sort of skip rope incantation that knows how it goes. Like the words of a song unheard so long, your own voice startles as you sing them. Not so much a name as a call to arms, the stretch of letters, a sudden spark in the air. Not so much a name as the antecedent of all that remains. The streak burnt into vision, the seeing that got stuck inside my eyes, the stumble and the fall. The days go on, the lights go out, I only smoke and speak.

I never learned to shut my mouth. I have yet to reach an age that I know how to act. I still take it to the pavement, I never remember to tap out. Cool winds and cold fingers, eyes as exed out as a cartoon corpse, the world seeps right through me. Fleshless skeleton or aquarium diver, I am the shedding of the vessel and the wailing of the form. This relentless lament as that fixed star blazes through my brain. I sing out from root to crown, I sing from stone to star. The only heart I have ever had, the only poetry I know.

little pitchers

This one starts with the needle on empty. This one ends in bottles and brass. The long odd Sunday, the stricken god back again, eggs and rabbits and other time honored habits strewn about. All the roads weary from the wandering, all the bones speaking in the past tense, the blood always circling back to the prophecies. The soundness of the defeat, the crack clean through the being, the firmament crashing down to the foundation. Gravity a gavel and law gossip, curses on the wing and little pitchers everywhere.

The pavement and the asphalt and the folly that is flesh. The light that clings long, the light that hangs low. Something in the script, something at an intersection, the oblivion as we read our dooms aloud. They come at you with their crowd sourced magics, they come swinging with hired guns and singular assassins, they come calling with bright eyed beauties and slick talk and bricks of cash. Unless you begin from broken, they’ll stop you in your tracks. Unless you stay indistinguishable and insignificant, they will give you your name.

There are days I remember remembering. I remember the stories and the faces I made. Sometimes I add introduction and preamble, sometimes I wave my hand as if revealing the epilogue. A wistfulness about the eye, a furrowing of the brow. Music playing in the room, voices coming through the walls. Shapes moving outside the window, shadows stirring on the ceiling. Every word frighteningly alive, every target moving, we are skin and scar always just arriving. The weight of the ache carried down the days, living the only way to know you lost. Broken glass and spent shells, another record book number. 

cornered

The night right here in self selected fragments and ritual forms, smoke and the vagaries of sleeping screens. A light on the ceiling, shadows refusing shape dancing around the room, music swelling because it always means so much. A swallow of cool water, the cleansing of the palate. The inked in instances and the cornered ghosts, painting in wrong names and guessed at numbers, instruments all hands up high reaching for the decrescendo. The sky still has to be torn down by hand. The night cools to the curation, as constant as any guiding star.

The scales tilt, the spin goes askew, the night takes its time and takes it personal. The magic rides the rolla bolla, it likes to add a hiccup or two, skips rope in rolling bones and turning tides. The room is read in blue bias light and knotted smoke, drummed blood and the vacancy held tight. It’s a card trick, but the sort you have to deal yourself. Shuffle up and deal your favored spread. With you like the words are with you, through you like the world as it moves. I tap away and the rest occurs. The night is always occupied.

It doesn’t take much to fill these shoes, a little grease and gristle, a little bone to pin down the heels. It doesn’t take much to end it all once the physics is figured in. This drag of breath, this staggered heart, the sorries and so it goes. The whims and wants of the inevitable desolation, this playing the board to the tooth and nail, the stir of the antecedents counting all the way down. Empty arms and wolf sized eyes, come to cases there you are, flesh and blood on either side of the appetite. We were always way past words. 

out of line

The spell of the sparrow hawk is written in bend and break against the skin of the wind. The workings of the elder craft upon the manifest, all soft for sharpness, all speed for strength. The deft misdirect of the evasion, the brief survey of the scene as the next crime is calculated, the stitching of the seams and the singing of the world. The raptor’s unyielding gaze meeting my mind in my eyes, the old inklings, scripture and the central shtick. It reads my thoughts as I get a couple of snaps off, born three steps ahead of my ilk. Feeding stray gods and spirits like feeding strays and squirrels and birds. The opening of the offering, the parable of the sower meets the plow as the worm, a reminder that most hungers are not limited to the belly. The feast always exceeds the table, consequence moves in ripples rather than lines. The dive a miss and a lesson, life itself an appetite.

Thus the tangle of intentions, the spinning wheel and the turning earth. Thus the stricken out line and the sky flush with crows. The songbird medley and the stir of dogs, dust kicked up and teeth flashed, gnashing at the vacated space. Something lifted from the notation of hawk wing and wind, the shifting sigils of buoyancy and lift, something sharpened in the striking of the spark from stone. Late to the game, we edit out the ghosts, we make up stories to miss the point. This is where we take flight, upon the reaped whirlwind of these abstractions, all blessings bent to fill our bellies. All that is sacred turned to bread and wine.

I can’t say what the mystery might be up to. I don’t know what parts I have left to play. The cops parley a couple houses over, old women confer in the garage across the street. The cops pull out and round the corner as a mourning dove registers its complaint, the dog in the yard shifting her location, her eyes another lament. It’s one thing after another, consequences bunch up and spread their seed, the afternoon sun and the weight of white clouds piling in the sky. The reach of green, the whispered spell, my eyes heavy with intent. I speak in smoke and the dozen hungers, heaven thick with altars, the earth teeming with gods. The words seep and stray out of line as the spirits descend. 

a stretch

You awake inside your latest indiscretion, fumbling around with the script. Outside the songbirds continue with their lists on loop, the window in the kitchen framing a falcon who isn’t fooling around. The days are said grace, the days are all ring a rosie. The circles that we travel in, around and around and around, up until the ashes and the all fall down. The secret paths and the tiny consecrations, the hands dirtied from your work, your words smoke to cover the scent. Stray gods and found altars. The profound and the performative arrive at the ritual separately, but they leave together. Off to find forever somewhere in the haunting of familiar hills.

I still put one foot in front of the other, just not so many in a row. I still walk in and out the door. There’s not enough singing to my liking. There’s too much stunt work and endless soliloquies. The plot is smooth and featureless, the ripples on the surface of a pond, the mirror furious at the dark. I’ll step right through the fourth wall just to warn the other three. I adjust the aperture and break the frame. I use my inside fighting and get stuck with the leftover art. The night finds me and really dishes it out.

It takes some time to shed a name. To unhitch the machinery, to untie all the threads. It takes some time to be something, even if that something isn’t anything at all. All the efforts offered up whether made or merely thought of, all the claims placed and taken, with both sides nothing of the sort. This is the puzzle, the etiquette of the entity, the entanglement of the animal. Repetition and these empty visions, the phrasing there remembering the shape of your mouth. There you go, dizzy from the dreaming. There you are, scraping up the paint of my mind.

if I could walk that way

Fooled again, it’s so lovely to look at. The way in the way again, it’s so touching if it’s true. Spring heeled and moon honed, we move between cases. Sun kissed and world wept, we rise from our sleep of the just. The sword cleaved from the stone, the wasp that hitched a ride, it’s the glistening of the armaments and the ice cream truck orchestral. The gloom remains unmoved, the old man growls, the fustigated heart laments. These green and fervid days growing all through the stolid debris another false flag here in the world of the dead.

The hills and fields go green and yellow and bell blue, this brief flourish before the long burning summers and falls. There’s no accounting for all the asphalt and concrete, the slabs and box tombs that glare out in open fury as they too slowly turn into the earth. There’s no accounting for all the flocks and packs and cliques that squander everything they touch. It is the age of the fool in the year of the ox on April fool’s. There ought to either be a discount or a multiplier. 

I’m the sort of fool that’s always beat up and bug bit. I’m the sort of fool always in the company of wolves. The periphery teems with bird and beast, while boys on motors live out their chosen musical genre, throw away wheelies and fear set deep in their baby eyes. I sit and smoke while neighbors mix their lawns and wash their cars. Most of us mostly what we aren’t, excluded categorically from the far branches and the better fortune tellers. Fads and filler while the named and the thrillers catch every necessary bouquet. Stunt work and one offs while all our stories are stolen. Punch lines and walk offs, life and death a joke when they’re yours.