the ruins

It is the story of Icarus, forever some set of wings pressed hard against the hubris, always some sky on fire to abide. We glide above the clouds, the plane the ever-moveable feast confining these guests of heaven. A slow boil of a crowd, these nested destinies and intentions. Fingering bright devices, shifting in our seats. Spilling words and staring at a clock we cannot see. We stumble along, the sky all about us. Every thread awaiting its weave.

This is me, heartbroken on the aisle. This is me, just catching up with her words. Is this really happening, did she truly do it? She broke up with me, tearfully, but at a stride. It all sort of came rollling out. Too crazy, too stuck, too sad. And of course, far far too old. I lean hard on the armrest, skin sweating, breathing shallow. I am buffeted repeatedly by other lives, adrift as they may be.

Another strange extension, another reach into another heart. Alone amidst strangers, my only solace these small sad words. I am thirsty from the circulared air, my lips a constant tongue tested dry. Joints ache and tears swell in barest check, the journey itself suddenly awash with shame and sorrow. I take advantage of the altitude, stringing raw prayers together, seeding the clouds with want and fear. Please, I speak from silent lips. Please don't let her let me go.

exasperate

This is the way we wear our endings, dust in our lungs and on our lips. This is the way the tide abides, sputtering exhaust, carbon vapor in proud plumes rising high above the hubris of our names. A way worn, a dull tread of dreams. A body of meat and manners shed, leaving but works and words. The faulty embellishments of this ache imbued and licensed by the fables we take as truth.

She sleeps many miles and tears away, weeping to the horror of how she must wield her heart. Birth and blood and the list of reasons. Babies and birthdays and ages never known. She knows the burden of just the facts while her wishes threaded tapestries, this last hope that she cannot be. She passes salt and clings to shadows, free of the future he would assure.

The stunned report of thumbs to screen, the moment ever as I wear it. The want and sorrow at my core. My heart as I only know it. Dead limbs and the voice of the wind. Love is always the endurance. Love is yet this oblivion.

grayscale

Not that this is any secret, but things don't always go the way they were planned. The best laid plans and the God that always laughs. The prophecy that is always about to come true. The lights are on and the road is always open. The smile that arises to remind you of the reasons for teeth. How the day changes, how the heart soars and sinks. Still we speak of reasons. We stack phenomena and happenstance, and remark on how mysterious are the works and the ways. The years pass in droughts, the rain runs in rivers. Tell us again of the kingdom we can't find.

Our minds all wind through the same long wander. Our blood flows from the same ancient oceans, our stories all lapping at that long forgotten shore. We guess intent and see wheels turning, even though the only stirring is the wind. We stalk secrets where we would hide them, see ourselves in every maker's mirror. All these puzzles and these mysteries imagined, the problems we make by thinking that our thinking makes the models true. All the colors that resonate a song of fecund light. Dusk comes and the colors flee our sight. Gray shadows swallow every skin.

At long last the rain has come. The sky drips and pisses, the gutters burble and flow. The season begins to rock itself to sleep, and the crowds all gather and cling. I watch while the skies empty and the streets fill. I settle in against the sharp-toothed wind and the ways that elude me. The season of the blood bound and the celebrant. The world we wrecked and the life I ruined. All these stories that play at reasons. All these questions they had answered before they were asked. The sun goes down and I am the same shade as every other thing. I am painted in absence like the rocks and the rain. I am just another question answering itself.

departure

The miracles we abide diminish as we take to the sky, the scars of highways, the wreaths of flickering lights. The voices narrow as our words cling to steel and glass. We rise and enter the anonymity of transience, another set of lights sliding across the night, another shape to blot and blur the stars. We pass above our insistent settlements, these beads of home and struggle and urgent traffic. We pass into charts and schedules, a people bound by direction. A tribe bound only by the skin in the game.

So you pass into the meat of memory. So you fade into a ghost in the veins. The thought of you a faded captive. A voice left out to ring in the rain. Another dream amid the calamity of passage. Coughs and elbows, all these strangers speaking at once. Another hope aloft as the world slips away.

This is all the rind of language, the moment held like a breath on the page. Another animal condensed into a set of symbols. Another voice left to mark some stranger's eyes. The place I was, the name I answered. The drift of days and limbs and sheets. The evidence gathered by my absence. The words that will fill the world I left.

rhyming on the inside

Things are always spilling over, meaning bleeding like feelings from the flesh. We scuff and scrape and smudge everything we touch, cryptic sworls the signatures of our busy fingers. Boundaries broken, borders crossed, everything seemingly immune to our habits of specificity, save the ideas we cling to with all the mad fervor of our faiths. All these fears and wishes paint our every brush. There is always more within us than we can contain. We are poor vessels that set forth leaking all about the world, then declare how much of the world is wet.

The feelings will not abate. We are this weave of stone and dream, the resonance of the instrument, the page when graced with ink. We write that it is written, never even slowing for the joke. This world always seething with our senses, the song so familiar because it must be recognized to be sung. The knots in our logic, the loopholes where we bind the spell, these limits we can never see. So close the reasons cling, enfolding what I may know, yet still so sure of my love. You are where all I want and the world intersect.

This is the measure of the magic, the slight shift of tense, the way my breath glistens against your skin. The sudden spill of probability, the ubiquitous aligning of the cosmic such and such. The casual spell of being just in time gathering at every sense. Love so fast and certain it seems sure to be a trick. A sign of the times or a fire in the mind. It is distant until it is upon you, and then it wears you as its skin. This chill calling gooseflesh so swift upon you, it feels as if touched by a ghost you always knew was there. These lips folding words, these fingers holding tight.

word by word

There is nothing but the body behind this sheen of self. This compound of trillions of seperate trusts,  chemistry and the usual concussed thoughts. The seething of the ancients, marrow mouthing the sounds of all the gods and ghosts, moving my lips as if they had a choice. The ruined country of my own invention, words left lying all over the page. All joy, all sorrow the staved in skull of freedom. Smiling with the teeth of ground gears, weeping with the tears of clockwork I write out my lists and plans. Unproven claims of exception, the sunken stone thrown so close to reason. The soul of poetry just another affliction.

I am the child of indolence and ineptitude. I am the words unfurled from tears. The welcome worn, the miles wandered. The cage of inaction and the course of history. My mind now weak, my body a shambles, and still I cling to this empty name and direction. The sour stomach and the hungry heart. The blessed bitter taste that lingers in every single thing I say. The way the world moves on, however wrecked or broken. The words released, as if they were ever held at all.

It is early here. It is even earlier where I am from. Here the morning sieves through the poplars, not the pines. Here the dreams are run aground before sleep even has the chance to fail me. The words ignore the hiss of my breath and the sputter of my heart, the hum of my blood another symptom of this afflicted legion. The ache and sadness just so much dissention in the ranks. This drooling, seeping, barking meat coddling his last conceit. I wake to find each wound waiting, the price of this subtle magic greater every day. I wake to find the loss I always arrive at watching for the first spilled tear. One word then another, the plaintive tone, the want of grace. It is the disease that documents each last poem as it breaks me word by word.

insufficiency

I pace the earth like always, worn-through shoes and worn-out bones. I drag my shadow through the dust. Flies light on my limbs as I still them. The world escapes me when I pause. The loosed arrow, the haunted hall. The weight of the sun burning at my flesh. Aimless, I scuff my soles away on the pavement. A lost child too used to the wild myths spun by the heart. A fool driven by flashing teeth to fall from the edge of creation. Everything flight until it isn't.

The brittle needles and the pine limbs sweep the ground with shadows. The wind leaps and pauses, giving life to dust and smoke. The heart wants to beat and breathe through all this ache. The press of heat, the push of this reckless fusion. The blue of a sky so full of birds, the breeze creased by wings and need. Another brutal summer as gentle as a kiss. Another brutal season, made painful by this broken witness. There are no reasons as the trees sway and bow.

This is the fever as it wakes the fleah. This is sickness as it earns its stripes. Every sup, every morsel turns to ashes in my mouth. Every blessing, every bounty is weighed against the crackling of my poisoned heart. It is a habit of madness. It is a choice made of bolts and blood. I seethe and spit, all the beauty of this wide old world an accumulation of dust. Another waking into this failed flesh. Another dawn coming down the lane, the sun as blameless and bright as any beloved child. The day breaks in waves.