the devil and the deep blue

Another day back into the bellows. Another race lost in the stretch, the length of limb, the weight of shadow. A little something to keep beneath your pillow. This little taste to get you through. All the sorts of salt we sort through and we miss a few molecules. Even as the eyes tremble meeting your unwavering gaze. Wings clipped back in the design stage, we are all lessons of the fall. The words go wandering, the mind all moonlight and the deep blue sea. Fingering the details, our devils on demand. 

I only know the imaginary and the ache. Your smile split between ghost and show, your eyes telling me all the things I want to know. There’s no question it’s a story, there’s no guessing at the gaffe. The way we wish so hard on the bones of some moment we never really met, the way we long in the languor and the loss. Another slow assault of evening, another failed campaign of night. I sit and spill over in wastes of weeping. I sit and ache after life and limb. I say it waking, your name on the tip of my tongue.

What to make of these lavish embarrassments of mistaken equivalence? What to do with these bodies worn off the rack? The compass of least resistance pulling out your path. End to end, this vast magnetism that compels you, the word unto. Some assembled pleasure, the watchmaker in the dark, a evident deftness revealed. The belt and the blindfold, the confinement of the stricture, the hand directed to the flesh. The plead imperative a whispered prayer, the oath imparted lips. Another night of imagined attentions and bowing by the book. 

blessed

Maybe I lit a candle, maybe I burned some incense. Maybe I made peace between me and the great unseen, rain falling all at once. So I spread my action around these wants and wounds, the tin roof patter almost a balm amongst these banes. Where the word touches, where the word turns, the way glass grays with condensation when bound by lung and lip. So the world is wept over, so the moon marks the whispers between blood and spirit. Threadbare and strung along, the fabric and the feeling. Oh the way you mark the morning. Oh, the way you bat the lash.

The sky is seamless shifting, story after story all the way to the stars. This tattered flesh, so worn and weary, wails and wails. The fire in the socket, the gravel in the gut. On and on through endless takes of enough’s enough, this prescient imbalance of being and burn, this haloed absence this earthly return. I am a flag for the tatters, I am an unfurling fit to the wind. Alone in the raging night, served by kindness and coincidence alike, I serve the witch’s shift. I bear the brand of heavy blessings and abandoned campaigns. Propped in an armchair, reaching up the skirts of the dreaming. The day ends again in ruins.

It’s the sort of flame that can’t be extinguished. It’s the sort of midnight that shows up all hours. Once consecrated, the altar’s always on. The signals it receives, the static of the constellations dragged down the years. Shards of pottery and burnt bones, postcards and fetishes and the power of intent. Write something down, let it yellow into irony or feed it to the fire. Whisper the name of your beloved kiss close against their neck. Once we are gone, we are gone for good. Blessed once, the savor never recaptured, not feast or figment. The benediction an aura clinging to the enduring bereft. 

unitard

There’s not all that much to who you end up caping for, with your heartfelt speeches and careful hair. Arriving preened and polished, wrapped and ready in the armor of your fuck me lingerie, ready to play to the empty altar. Glittering there on the showroom floor, painted in your colors, pressed into flesh. Squeezed between the hopes and dreams, you wake with the name spilling out your mouth, the meaning drizzling down blood and breath. This the way your wishes make it, the color and the claim. This is the way you want to feel it, naked all the same.

There’s the way you stirred the stars, step by step in stylish pumps. There’s the way you called all bluffs, falling hard into the concessions. Here the flickers, there the rumors, there’s that way you’re hair is pulled. There’s the ring, there’s the rigging, there’s the gaffed slapstick. The carnival logic rigmarole, the baiting of each breath, this note you hold and hold. Maybe I might tag you in, maybe I will dunk you good. True heart or heel the outfit will out, come crawling lovelorn or turned worm home to roost. The way you are fitted when you’re bound to go all out.

Maybe this was meant to flatter, maybe this was a mood on its own. The storm sorted into strip and bristle, a measured spanking from the stratosphere, livid skin shameless and taking it at a run. This flicker of my salacious gaze on the devil’s details, the burnished bouquet a burning branch, want turning every touch to fuel. Look upon this, my cape, my role. Look upon this unitard, clown sad, fool bright. Here we go, spinning through the hay, O here we go reeling through the fields! This is the song you plucked me from, this is the proof as you play.

a taste

It’s like it’s late, though it’s really all a blur. The waking and sleepwalking, the calendar on shuffle as I scuff and crumble. I’m bedded down more for comfort than sleep. Alone in a cold room, with the pain of the beatings and the ache for old lovers warm against my skin. Oh, this ancient craving. Oh, this first falling always waiting on my lips. My world has gone to unread threads and run on blues. Thinking about the way you kiss, missing the taste of you. 

The night is always hanging around. The words crowd around polishing the want, the words pile on reaching at the ache. Fitful and ridiculous, I cut quite the figure for the tools at hand, the outlandish dreamer tilting windmills in the toss and turn. The stars are out there if you look. You looking is what I think of when I see them.

It’s not as if you’re in my dreams: you need sleep for dreaming. It’s not as if you haunt my days: mostly I’m my own ghost. A pronoun for the apostrophe. The way I am always sitting close, saying these things out loud, the sound part of the story of the ways we’re found out. I sigh despite the artifice, always half down for the count, half in a trance. The sticking of the invocation, the waking to almost hearing you speak. The distinctions in your breath, the ending only what you do next.

clutches

Mostly these days I wish I was dreaming, at least when I’m not wishing I was dead. The hours gnaw my bones with languor, savoring every wince and ache. The days amble past with spit and sneers, snuffing last lingering hopes, seeding pain between blood and ghost in lazy strings, the sharpness of the sun leaping off the windows of a passing train. I am sick and I am seething, beaten to pieces by being, torn apart about the soul. When I sleep I am brutally alone, stuck in the cage of my own clutches, bony shoulders and cold hands. Dusk and dawn, the curtains drawn, switches turned off or on. 

Look, I’m sorry that I ever met you. I’m sorry that I ever got this far. Nothing tender even in the dreaming. Nothing much but numb or hurt. The little that I’m left with and the whole lot harder to come, the calendar another dog, another galaxy. The snakes and sticks we reason with, the perfect illumination of every emptied shelf. Now all I am is out to sea. Now I’m only time doling out the sentence in bruises and in breaks. Staying where the words don’t work, front row for the train wreck that’s assured.

So I lay me down to sleep, curled on my left side, pillows pinned down by my heavy head and the crick in my neck. I pull my tatty blankets up around my sore shoulders, the worn out sleeping bag and the consolation quilt, all cough and huddle wrestling down the relax. Once I held a pillow tight, placeholder for my misplaced lover. Now lovers are over, and I clutch tight my own flesh and bones. Oh lost love, oh great empty, gathering chasm and gaping nirvana. Now the night comes early. Now the ache opens up its heart. Hold tight this fearful creature, hold close this inevitable end. 

gazed

It’s right here, the moment looking you in the eye. It’s right now, the cunning around the curve. We sway and change and set our sights, we burn our hearts in effigy for the ones we began at the gone, watching the road and thinking about the next one while the one we’re done with chatters and navigates. You already know I miss your eyes, the crazy way I gazed at you. You knew how much I’d miss you before I was a glimmer in the eye. It’s been gone so long, it’s hard to know how hard the going has gone. I’ve been nothing for most of whole thing, ready forever for the bad I got coming. There’s no going back, there’s no going forward. Just the sound of now bumping away in the night.

It doesn’t wait, it doesn’t ask. It doesn’t explain things along the way. You sleep, you wake, you slip between aspects. The music rings out and sends the mind a reeling. The music rings out and a body might like to weep. So isolated and readily disposed, a turn of phrase, a wish to a djinn. The devil shakes your hand and checks for fingers. The tide arrives as you empty out your breath. I bear the mark, I wear the mark.

The future is headed straight at us, and hindsight isn’t helping a lick. You are here forever distant and aloof as all the lights go out. The thunder rises from the gutter, rattling windows and shaking walls. It isn’t that you do not see me. The truth is you’ve seen me too much. Nothing left but vile repetitions. The flicker on a bedsheet as the film flutters off the reel. The story photographed between the scenes a string of emojis. Not even laughter left to cling to my husk. I have been extinguished, smolder though I may.

hex vector

I sit among my ills and idylls, sinking light and soft smoke, mortal aches and open eyes. The time trails my foolish heels, the little dog having itself a laugh. From horned moon to horned moon, a sky dyed for every moon. The skulking up the rooftops, the ducking into ditches, the reel and dirge and carnal urge ahead of the accompaniment. I grit my teeth and breathe a life into the ember. I hem and haw and add another log. There is magic in all I miss.

Ask the ravens, ask the stars. Ask the card you cut to as the fire danced. It’s all above board from a certain angle. It’s one hundred percent legit if you word it just so. As you occlude your intention, this separation of word from will, playing the subtext instead of the scene wears out the spell. Count the breaths, watch the seasons burn away, the whites of your eyes to the depths of your ichor. Swallow a little of what you spit, set the trap and sharpens the stakes in the pit. A presence in every observation, a phenomenon gone in every moment met. Anything can happen, working against your words.

I ought to get up in a minute. At least maybe I should think about it for a bit. Another day behind the mule, another never under the belt. There’s always one or two more things to do, and nothing much to them but to get them done. All these years run straight through me, these tatters everything the wind and worms wouldn’t take. These devils and crowns all lying around, the sharpest of weapons, the softest of shrouds. These bones beating a dull tattoo as I rattle through the rituals, this face held tight as I am covered in the dust of dreams. I long for a separate say in a different world that’s gone well past ghost. Hanging from the branches of these attachments, dangling over this magic missed.