all sizzle

The mistake is mostly in the way we make things real, we touch, we taste, we talk about the feeling and the flavor. That we might build from blocks gives us the sense that blocks make up everything, that maker is the meaning for all that we might see. We are restless, we think in pieces, mostly missing the whole. We are small, and we are petty, and we rebuild the world with words in our image.

Grown from seething seeds, from a coupling of elastic molecular chains into such particular animals, from an absurdity of dust to an absurdity of hubris. We retain and shed, matter and the ideas born of matter. The culture preserves, and the culture deceives. Thousands of years of confounded mortality, whispering promises towards the fickle winds. We think ourselves divided: body, soul, and mind. It is part utility, part urgency. The truth is so huge as to be unwieldy, lies being so much more palatable and portable. And seeing intention lingering behind every twitching shrub and sudden bird makes the seeking of separations natural. Gods and ghosts and apparitions, the sizzle from so much steak.

It is the sizzle, this being, this living. We try to parse and separate, try to exchange our long spattered history for the urgency of transcendence. Pretend that the world and our selves are different. Pretend that the borders are impermeable, and that creation is a series of errors longing for improvement. Hairy thunderers and bodhisattva, shadowy planners and heaven's chosen kings. We are so much more, and even less still. This moment, then the next, and all the time spent and longed for. Contingency seeming like destiny once all the cards are dealt.

these stairs go up

The stairs had convinced us all that they led somewhere, so we followed them into the dark. It was a lovely mistake, to be sure. The wrecked room at the top of the lonely stairs, the smoke and the kisses. All those people speaking at once, all those people moving too close. Sweat and the stained eyes of passion, the fitful pitch of the treble, the dense vibration of the bass. Ashtrays and smudged glassware, rooms that were never empty. Even limited to the usual usage, the fretwork and the failings all glowed.

It was nothing then to sleep alone, though the novelty of it had hardly settled in. Different schedules, different lives, the residue of compromise settling earlier than any sort of hope or compassion. Everything is stories when you are so young. So bad at the telling, so good at the making. Too foolish to realize that you don't always choose the endings. Too bright to allow that things might happen despite your aims. It is nothing now to speak of endings, though not every door is closed.

Set out upon the night with all your hunger and your glee. Devour and partake, swept away in whatever circumstances must allow. Laugh without mirth, fight without anger, love without passion knowing your name. Doze in a corner, pass out in the street. Follow the stairs, though nothing good will come of it. Follow the stairs-- the story was written before you had a name. You will arrive as someone, and leave only once you are someone else. Change is all that awaits.

camera

The illness holds you from the inside out, closer than any lover, closer than any rumor of god. The slow gray tide of a dying afternoon drains invisibly into the hectic green field. Breathing is the ensorcellment of the flocks, walking the languor of the herds. The cold water, the hot coffee, the fleck and wheeze of every tortured cough. Raise the fence, thinking of the settle couch. Raise the fence, the warm bed like a dream long ago dissolved in the essence of the day.

What was witnessed in the tide of wild winds, the rough embrace of the livid world set upon the static remnants of the world once seen. The precious images we swaddle tight in our myths and longings, a house, a hearth, a family now lost to discord, memory, and time. Dreams of dying tangling sweetly with the terror of a fleeting shallow breath. Dreams of belonging, of happy tables and glad hands, all swallowed by the soul of the storm. Nothing lasts, nothing lost-- that dense conundrum felt so acutely at either bookend of night or day. Everything is alright, seen from enough of a distance.

Commit a dozen temporary solutions, little pardons granted by urgency towards clarity, and so many small flaws seem pardoned. The hands that clasp tight heart and lungs a measure of a love so deep and brutal it seethes in the beauty of your blood. Cough until the stars are all you can see. Make a wish. Remember the moment when the light was just right. Remember how bright the flames flicker and shine, in that precious moment before that last candle is blown out.

empty prayer

The phone pole woodpecker scans the sky, vigilant between meals. Problems of a halo of blue still gray rather than a crown of thorn and leaf. The skint offer of hills humoring scrub oak and eucalyptus when the only woods left near are either park or cemetery. The handful of places left here where trees can crowd and whisper. The woodpecker abruptly swoops north, and a crow mounts its transitory throne. The world has ways we can neither drown or fathom.

The mild morning climbs atop my respite, stealing my smoke and steam. Coils of gray rope trailing that Jacob's ladder draw of an open sky. The restless air stirs and shifts in its shoes. An early stirring of drowsy houses, as feast work abounds. That hurried, blissful baking, the urge to comfort and provide. I spit some sour remnant of my wicked idle tongue into the dross of leaf and needle. I swallow cool water, every moment the ritual ablutions of equal measures. Bitterness and pleasure mingling, pure and eager knocking darkly at these deep ancestral chambers.

Quietly I call the names and the markers. I call the beaded greens and the burial blues, I call the heedless and the removed. I call the flesh of the vivid living, I call the shroud of the shimmering dead. The stricture of language dissolved into symbol, the analogue of analog and digital kneeling before the feast of history. The frisson of withheld words a hail of static upon the skin. I call out the cursed pleasures and the glowing wounds, the worthy errors we cling to, the pitiful victories that will not let us go. I call to the fields and the forests, the sea wracked with foam, the cliffs swarmed with swallows. I call for the blessings of the uncaring world, and the burned edges of sickened mystery. An empty prayer of wing-clipped thanks, sent curling up into the light of early winter.

naked

At the border of silence and barking dogs, at the edge of night and awareness, in the moment before it all boils over, it slows. Light takes on the traces of honey, propriety blending with the sweet and the still. Those words you wear closer than tattoos. That ink of breath and savor. The air around you gathering, close and cold.

The clink of tin, the scratching of unkempt claws. The gradual warming of the malty head of the brew, dissolving into heat and bubbles. Moisture gathering at the stress points of cuisine, spice and hunger covering many ribald holes in tradition. The tension between tooth and smile, between unshaven appetite and the stippled reasons bound to the atmosphere. That glass smooth night, that mirror of warmth and steam. The black gaze of seeing forever on the burn.

I clear my throat, I take my measure. The gleam of carbon string and habitual ash. The dense embrace of absence amid every earthly persuasion. The empty plate, the suffering despite all knowing, the chair that will wait forever. Craft and objection, the simple scripture of the kiss that will never be. A toothbrush and a dim blue light. You awakening despite all the advantages of naked dreams.

equilibrium

The sky just stares, a long hollow lack looking straight through. The vice and the victims, the boards and the body count. The same daily scrapes, the whole world indifferent to the whole of the workings of the world. Turncoat gossip and heated invective, and the sky is far away, and empty as any pocket of anything of worth. The clock plods, the night falls. Everything is more or less the same.

Win some, lose some seems to be the formula. The broad gestures and fitful failings, the stink and the sickness, the mirror full of weeping wounds. The percussive plyings of disappointment, the gentle shiftings of good fortune. The candle changes into smoke and melted wax. We are all such uncertain fuel, wasting so much as light and heat. Pools of the possible, the flame dances and sputters, then drowns in a spitting hiss. So much contempt wasted for the inevitable. Waking alone, words askew in the dark.

So the season crowds and gathers, brittle grins and all that make up humanity. The plaintive longing for the communities you buried, for the family you burned. The urge toward proof that we still are capable of loving, that we are full of something besides brutal longing and a litany of scars. Its cold outside so the heat is on. The cold inside is outside our ken.

the vigorous declarations of the speechless

I am always at a loss, lapsed and stammering here at the cusp of event and reflection. Words flee, thinking fails, the usual palaver becomes quaint reliquary here in the churn and foment of deed and grail. The seekers chatter, the lost wail. I check my watch, then check the mail. It isn't the easiest, but it is pretty easy yet. Forgetting and forgotten, I slip between the shadows of nascent states. The weight gathering just before my tongue, I sigh and swallow. Quietly I linger with the vague glimmer of each dynamic inaction. No choice being a choice after all.

High tide tunes, a wistful calypso swings and strays. The singer so much more beneath the breathing of the song. Dusk idles, terse and delicate upon each curb. Traffic towing paper and plastic in the wake of all that light and carbon. Bass lines rattle windows, remind the guts of that last fated call of the gods. Apocalypse, Ragnarok, Gotterdammerung-- all the usual suspicious fevers dreamed up with a sore head and a sour stomach. Everything vivid in the auspicious shine of all fades, all blooms. The music winds through these sweet dreams and rough truths, sometimes I try to sing along.

All the education for a sixth sense and a handful of clumsy allusions. The tang of the visceral on the skillet, the acrid rush of smoke. All this ache and urgency for the bell toll of weathered bones. All this spill and plunder for a stolen kiss and a crumpled note. I can't quite follow the conversation, I can't see the meaning in the movie, or the message on the canvas. I clear my throat beneath the icy crush of so many idle stars, watch my breath materialize like some ghost out of literature. The poisoned father, the baleful partner more gravy than the grave. Last lines and curtain calls, while the world's stage mothers applaud and holler. Every exit parceled inside out.