folding

Not so much the stories as the gaps, not the virtues but the lapses that persuade, feeding my time to the blue-gray distances, dropping my luck into the jukebox one sliver at a time. The sky empties of excuses, the streets fold into the background, we drive and drive. A whole world of want and waste abounds, crowned with clouds and stars. Crowned with all the invisible legions that help me look away. Some days bleed away, and I never hold my name. Some days grant little but ash, and there's not a word to say.

It is in the coffee seeming too hot, the sky too dark, the light too artificial. It is in the pain in the eyes of strangers, the distance we build in twitch and brick. The proof is in the conspiracy of blood and sense, of flesh and ache. The press of humanity that much heavier in the isolation of these made up monuments, these machines of selfish speed. An open book never read might as well be a stone dropped in a well. Not enough too much too often.

I cough into my sleeve, feel the foundations buckle with a raggedy breath. The music made by dead men plays bright and earnest, so much sweeter when listening through the loss. I shift my center, easing the complaints of the worried hip. Benign neglect of a certain kind is inevitably the same as enmity, only harder to fight than any wind or shadow. I have had my sweet days, had my small glories and the slow roll of peace. The rest is uncertain, bit parts in a handful of calamities. A beauty so boundless that it can only lead to ruin.

f-stop

The big damn moon posts halos in the thinner, wispier clouds, scrolling an impermanent O above us all. Not a trial by fire, but by smolder, this last ash hour held tight, balled up inside my heart. Wind chime music with so little wind, spattered asphalt with so little rain. Preposterous people doing preposterous things. All the world a stage just when theater is becoming a ghost town art. All the words in the world will not change a thing. People stay what they were made, and think that this is freedom.

After awhile the burden has to leave old Doctor Frankenstein. Bereft and cast aside, there is still the rest of the world before the monster. Wreck and ruin are only one choice here. The law of the jungle was written in towers safe in the pretty distraction of the city. Alibi written for an appetite for crime while the beasts survive together, with heart and mind and eye as much as tooth and claw. Hobbes and Rousseau both coddle far from the ruckus of the working soul, adding silt to the river of inventions, words estranged from the wheel of the world.

I idle, inflicting each particular poison in its favored dose. The sickness creeps through me, shadows cast out into the light. The hour changes, the light shifts, the aperture adjusts, but the picture is never pretty. Creases and scars, blues and fervors, love letters and salty laments. Smoke curls, leavening distance with bitter kisses. The moon casts its spells of madness and angels, making beautiful music before drowning in another measure of rain. Talking to myself, still speaking out of turn.

what to say, when to go

The night doesn't love you, and the day only stays up to see you break. Time's bitter river flows right through that hole you hide inside, tears and ashes, broken toy's and dead pets. Cold fingers fumbling with your clasps and buttons, you heart full of snubbed out cigarettes and the aimless applause of the rain. The nationless flags of empty plastic bags unfurl before you. Somebody ought to salute.

All the wounds of the open-mike poet are opened word by word. The weight of solace in the crowd makes for a curious science. The press of attention, the absence of honesty in so much urgent truth. Bombs and babies, the greedy thieve from the hungry, so many fathers and their busy hands. Earnest ink aging suckling flesh. Everybody's a comedian.

Dawn waits to wash over the eaves and trees, the moon on a tear in the scattered clouds. Eventually the need of these strays owns you, and empty of anything else, you try to be that useful thing. Watch the clock, mind your manners, try to strike first with the open hand. The virtues of this palace of bandits and devils worn upon your weary shoulders, word after word strung together, pearls for swine or popcorn for the birds. Hard to measure the current that flows through this currency, the cup turned over before the first round is done. Another day shows up too early, after again you waited too long to leave. Someone asks "hot enough for you?" And you smile despite the hour, the rictus owed to ritual, the price of omission.

ravish

The aching hour arrives unbidden, separating autonomy and automatic into their own spheres, casting that common magic of rinds and resin. The upright bass bowed for a moment, the unstrung sentiment the tone of shadow struck flesh. I follow the usual revels, the idle hands, the bitter dregs. The songs of cobwebs and caterwauls, the impressive weight of your absence running through my veins.

There are mysteries that infect my mind, simple truths that only your flesh reveal. The brush strokes of your unbound hair, the riddle of your fingers, the lavish persuasion of your grasp. The depths of refraction puzzled between your thoughts and eyes, how your bright lenses seem to luminesce with-in the tension of the object and your gaze. The music of your spine, the heavenly press of your hips, the casual elegance of each limb left to its own spells and hungers. That spent breath kiss that shares each emptying, lips and teeth and tongue. Such secrets can only confound distance, held so long so tight.

Outside there are stars and foot falls. Outside there are locks and doors. The rusted chain sound of a cat climbed fence, the chime and peal of ordinary things bewitched by the wind. Everything is overwhelmed by the space that you will not imbue. Frayed nerves, unsent letters. The imagined expanse of your skin passing through the fevered explorations of rough hands and hungry jaws, thoughts passing like prayer beads into vapor and the strummed-on bass. The haunted comedy of human existence, how empty is so much more than full, you thread through everything loved less. Untouched and ravished, you never let me bear this loneliness alone.

position

The moon tangles in the tresses of a winter-limbed tree, the sky a humble cusp of dusk blue. The street cluttered with dry shadows and the screams and scrapes of children. A pick-up game of hoops just around the corner while skaters posture and practice in and out of traffic. Seniors stroll along the sidewalks, carrying their sticks and staffs, ready for trouble. The pavement dries in places, awaiting the next rumors of rain.

Coffee steam and starlight. A cool breeze and a sea of frozen lights. The smell of wet earth and the sharp tang of hot bitter coffee mingle with the hard stamped stillness of the fresh night. It is the tilt of the sky, the deft leanings of constellations. It is the press of breath, the ache and the absence. The weight of work against the wheel of life, the moment before the moment, the insistent flavor of the anticipated.

Waking, it is the ache and the breath. The diminishing truth of the fever of dreams. A longed for touch, an awaited arrival. The strange distance between lives and wishes, between the longed for and the fact. This legacy of secrets, the ancestral roots of religion. From the remote geography of slumber to the reasons of blood and bone. Sense and sediment. The position of the satellites, the creased and tattered map.

the waltz

You laugh to yourself as this lonesome sound subsides. It is like that old joke, the song plays backwards, and you get your dog and you get your truck and you get your wife. Moving away from the pain, from the hapless dusk and brutal night. Away from the spattered pavement and the flooded gutters, away from the screen and the page. The unseen owl drifts further away, the startled dawn sifting through the rain and the gray. The shotgun thoughts fade, following the trail of memory. Bittersweet remnants of better days, that intermittent re-enforcement that makes so many burdens bearable. Maybe tomorrow will be more like yesterday than today. Favors need not flee us forever, you think.

Somedays you forgive yourself your worst, somedays you know you will never know how bad you can be, most days you struggle and strive, blind to the history and the memoir ink. Motive is such a precious precipice, the bare edge, the trusting sentiment that leaves no villains writing diaries. You wish ill on a stranger, you pay penance towards some disaster, you talk casually to the drunk begging for change. You do the work the day requires. Everyone left doesn't mean no one will stay. Everything finished doesn't mean your job is done.

It may end bloody, it might play out quiet. There might be speeches and fanfare, a flourish of friends and flags. There might be a series of diminishing beasts getting their bellyful. A future for some archaeologist, piecing together a puzzle of tea brown bones. Questions left unanswered, letters laying furtive in the remaining mail. You might have mattered, you may have been a monster, you might be the founding kernel of yet another dumb faith. No-one knows who will tell you. The truth abounds though the facts are hard to find. You laugh though, because every piece is a kind of freedom. You laugh because it is all funny from far enough away. Whatever the debates that rage, whatever the jokes that float in and out of sight, that last laugh the one argument settled. The mystery always easier when you start with the end.

labyrinth

You wake to the incandescence of cats,
you wake to the unwound rain,
all the dreams you saved lost
in the torrent of the times.
You move amid the song of bones,
structured by their secrets,
a hidden tower of ache and years.
The magic you cast with empty pockets,
the spell unspun from the threads
that dangle and tease fingers.
The clues to creation to worry and to pluck.
Set your face in the mirror,
hide your breath and your scent.
You center your eyes at the end of your story,
the one that is so clean and pleasing.
The empty building, the haunted orchard;
the buried stairs, the graveyard of stars.
Everything settled in the labyrinth of sleep.
A warm shower, the the cold rain.