potential

You say goodbye to the messianic sky, the bygone blues, the gray and laden clouds. You say goodbye to the books and baubles of the shelf. Rifle through the boxes, turn every pocket inside out, put aside the labors you owe to ghosts as you wander these avenues of the labyrinth. No one answer will ever do. Every traveler down the same shared path has a journey all their own. You lean against a pillar. You sit upon the bricks. There goes the scrub jay, there goes the crow, all these inseparable alones. The green anointing every crown, the roiling at the roots. 

Heaven in the grip of blue, sunlight slathering the opportunistic greens, grim and ebullient in the same smoking skin. Two or three beasts to feed in the deep belly, tricky wishes and fiddle fights, skull stuck schemes become breath and bone in the knucklehead domains. Some fief lord or haughty daimyo, some weird claimant to one realm or another, the monkey always ready to show its ass. Reading the crowd sourced world with the gaffed hierarchy of us angst ridden apes. Everything happening all at once, somehow always ending up about us.

The words strung around the tree, the palpable anticipation of that forever imminent eminence, the allied appetites and that tragically eager urge towards the precipice of yes, ands. We pass the sacred phrases back and forth, sewing the saying into the say so, at once sacred offerings and melodramatic grifts. So we sing and serve the thick of matter, the dreaming we drift through, the passing of the visible spectra on a soap bubble’s surface. I smoke and grumble, the bardo between the ruins and the dust. Another fuse lit to spark and fizzle. The trees as green as I can see, the earth speaking in everything.

subtle

This is the history of the entity. This is the story of the smoke. Aglow in the ambient and the albedo, from the shine to the surface, from the ember the ash. Time is another thread of the essence, all double stitched through our dimensions, the resonant vibrations of our shaky seeming selfs. I speak aloud in idle hands and dirty work, in the rattle of trash bins and the sound of glass that’s had it, in these scintillations of ephemera that brush against your skin. Half bled out half exasperation this press of held tongue and sealed lips, the assembly of sticks and dashes into the affinity of a kiss. The flame and the carried torch.

It’s in the way the night encroaches, the porch light orange and the screen door silhouettes, the sway of shadows and the business of the dark. The street sounding out and the gutters cluttered with sticks and stones, the jet engines overheard and the lowdown of the all alone. I ache and sway, and stumble over my own too certain stride, I gleam and glide and always find the right crossroads to collide. The sound of darkened steps and lights left burning, a tale of windows lit and unlit. The stare and the implication, the chair and the television, parked cars and proximity lights. The body global, the ghost local, the mystery a lot of crossed wires and mixed signals.

Here we are with the music playing. Here we are with the lights down low. This moment and it’s reception. The translation from room to room and flesh to flesh, the combo racing up the scales teasing out the melody while calling out the beast. This flicker of tongue and lip, a dry breath, the sound of an engine idling. Silky smoke and weathered flesh, the skull and sinus toned voice as I sing along, the fit and the features and the endless fusillade. These are the words I strung and strummed, animal and entity, lonesome and lust thick and ringing into the ether. This is the reaching beyond the touch, the intimacy of transmission, the propriety of the switch. The things I say when you read me. 

shuffle

The day is slowly sinking into the strata, the bashful blue sky soaking up the sun, spring tumbling head over heels from root to shoot. Something for the shine, something for the smolder, something for the memory of the match. From scorched fingers from playing with fire to the cold bones dragged through the depths of the atmosphere, this form rings with songs and ghosts. From scrub jay pretending in the pine to the tobacco drawl drowsing beneath the smoke on my tongue, the day sparks and strays. Old earbuds plugged into my phone, I give in to the sophistries of the mechanism and let the daemon stack the deck. Song after song going through the motions. The illusion of movement by changing up the tempo. The mood leaning hard on the gaffed stack and gleaned blood.

The music sets off reveries and memories and strange montages, rented momentum to call through the core, breaks and bends in the signal sent straight through the flesh. The tune occludes the moment, raising revenants and herding ghosts, picking notes and pressing chords here in the meat and bone. The song a hoarded moment and a renaissance, old and new and probably something blue, the world taking some strange shapes where the spirit bunches up. This sieve of blood and happenstance and the husk of the tongue. The trick within the algorithm, the busy architecture giving form to the slipping, the bouquet of selves gathered by the old song and dance. 

Days turn into decades, the search becomes the story, motive just another slab holding down your grave. Our small doings, our faded names, these gardens of memory and stone. The seasons blur and the fires fade, a memento trailing flesh and words, the one and done or the slow dissolve from agent to object. The flourish and the riffle, the palm and the pass. The choosing is always a force or a gaffe. You do a little shimmy, you throw a slide in, maybe show some leg with that shake. Here deep in the dwindle all we do is dance. Parts and pieces, the hollows of the passage through form and feel, the light left on so we don’t miss a trick. It all goes wrong. Caught in the tempo of the tide, we flicker as we fade. Someone else comes along until every turn is taken. 

glimmer

Two in the morning it’s all train wails and tv light, the movie moon so full and spooky, the simple spell of black and white. The room a dance of shadows, the only sound the recitations of the dead. All the time and what it takes right there with you in the wide awake. A turning of the pillow, a shifting of the bones. The ceiling always swimming, the window given to gossip. Night after night, the switch and the light.

You drift around the details, you float around the plot. The things you said to the ones you love, worn razor thin in the replay, unmitigatedly cruel and serpent’s tooth sharp awake in the dark parts of your heart. The things you always hear, the things you’ve always known, pacing the floor across the ceiling. The dialogue drifts in and out, something in the story too close for comfort, a line left hanging. The words alone, and the word alone, and somehow everything is said. 

It isn’t always train wails, it isn’t only two. The clock doesn’t care what time it is. The clock doesn’t care about the looming alarm. I wake from dreams full of friends and strangers, walking around nonexistent streets, traveling with the dead. I wake from dreams so fragile that they escape recollection. Only some mote almost coming into focus. Only the glimmer of something that was almost, the ache unto the isn’t. Waking in the dead dark quiet or to the riotous reports of the dogs. I wake as the same disappointment, the same emptied vessel in the nation of dreams denied.

grin

I’m not by nature a smiler. I generally haven’t got any teeth in the game. I take a bite of every line, take my taste of every declamation and utterance, right out of the horse’s mouth. These days it’s all declarative toothaches and the gaps where teeth used to be. Force is an honest player, it knows all its lines, it knows its motive from cause to consequence. As in the vagaries of bone, teeth always have a story to tell. Time and collisions and where the blunt force shows. The gaunt affect and the skull sharp grin. The show gone on from where the world got in. 

Time goes by and it’s counted in seasons, time goes by counted in reaching greens. It passes in life and limb, it passes in ashes drifting toward the dirt. But injury and infirmity are the architects that we build our history around. Fistfights and split lip tooth spit smiles and the stubborn insistence of tooth and bone. One thing then another, then you can’t whistle or spit right. Damage done and grim gutter medicine. The old black magic takes its cut, down to the glisten and the splinters. Down to the gristle and the grease. 

We remain as testimony. We remain as evidence. The curve of the cursor, the inevitability of yet another line, the vessel is cracked and it overflows. I speak as if my story isn’t only the sound of my symptoms, the wheeze and unintended sibilance, the stagger implicit in my stance. I speak as if the words were work, as if the saying makes it so. The earth slips east as the sun makes its excuses, crow for crow and star for star. A long ago played horn sounds out above the traffic and the caws. Breathing down the sky into this small cacophony, lit bloom and stolid bone. The flesh blessed and sublime, curling along the reason and the reach. A word spoken close, showing teeth.

reconnoiter

There’s the angle and the aperture, and all the lofty rhetoric. There’s the stone angels giving you the signal. The miracle has come and gone, with only the stories ever staying. Now there’s chords and notes, scapegoats and golden throats, the landscape of the revelation. Coils of smoke and sawed through rope and the cobwebs in the corners. The window always open, the atmosphere always getting in. 

The waking keeps claiming me, some signaled stress, some set alarm. A dog down the block, the cat on the roof. The wings loosed at once, driven like eyes to seek the sky. The day after day exasperation of the expected, counting by calendar and constellation, the empty receptacle and the sliver of the morning moon. The dreams that need me interrupted by the world that doesn’t. 

The sun comes out and sets the scene. The winds repeat their hastened chastenings. The animal is stricken with some sickness, an uneasy quease about the seams. The entity takes it personally and accounts for the curses, patterns always there for the picking once the seeing gets stuck. Look around, the angels say, somebody moved the rock. Look around, the angels go, the ghost is on the lam. Here I go, the skin of the witness as the angels say come see.

rubes across the rubicon

We arrive between cataclysms, at the gracious side of great devourings, and just like that we become the dreaming. Beneath another too soon blue and the fresh breathing green, the restless belly and the road of life. We run our mouths and our learned routes until we have to rest our heads, something to serve as shelter, the respite of dreams and some pleasure if we’re lucky. Strewn about, concussed and useless in the service of ghosts, a few shovel ready from intent to entity. We’re told it all adds up to something, god knows think nothing of it.

The sun speak to the skin, the cold whispers to the bone. We are lost and found, pursued and followed and left alone, dashed and ragged and a sight to see. Golden amid the worlds great fortunes, stubborn beneath the debris fields and the collateral madness. The map and the moment, the ache of our trajectory, the mass of these fleeting impacts. Biographies and betting slips and every giddy conceit and horrible onslaught ever. Every day evens out. Each night adds more. 

It is close to 7pm on an April afternoon. I sit, a tangle of aches and appetites, feeling the sharp of the smoke and the chill in the air. Cigar sitting to the front of the senses, eyes poised tight towards the periphery, longing in alignment with the lay of the land. This idle here in the teeter of blood and breath, this sediment of collision and sentiment, this season of being the uncoiling of the burn. We gather our forces of one side or the other, follow the tides of flags and famine across the rubicon. Every day it’s the same old thing.