hand fed

It’s a bright blue day when sight returns, gaze spilling down the grade that I roughly gauged as the angle of the wind, all docile thoughts and claymores without caution signs as the spirit checks in with the flesh. All is wanting in that crowded lost and found, the caprice long since having abandoned the capers, false shadows and feints of the blade up and down the cavalcade. All gallows and grist, the final hypnotist not hip enough to read the room, everything left to the open stance and other hand fed inevitabilities. 

I will burn all the letters left, I will recycle the dusty notebooks and chicken scratch journals. Believe me, no one’s archiving this media. No one’s taking notes. Still waist deep in hoarded gewgaws and frippery, drawers full of ledgers dating back decades, and all the neighboring hatred. The darling detritus left to mark the bright fire of a past tense life, this emergent hovel, this changing habitat. The urgency of the tomb as people watch the clock and check their phones while I bleed out slow. 

Then this long stretch of twilight, this slow spectrum of the locally available gloaming. Then the hours beset by mosquitos and the mistakes of moths, soured souls and the thickenings of smoke. Out west gazing westward deep in the costume change portion of this endless eastern plummet. Each sleepless stretch steeped in sameness, the dance captured in amber, the altered countenance as the struggle sinks beneath the tar. Here amid glimpsed spirits and extinct dreams, these screen whittled shadows. The grace all distance and revision as the night buries me again. 

tempo

Sooner or later the moment arises there in the tub, where the dull reveal of you meets the water at its lowest point. At least the water usually has enough decorum to remain close enough to silent so it counts, so the telling is up to you, you detail devil you. Is it the steam that rises from the steeping, the warble of the opened valve, that seal that is so like a kiss you taste it on your lips. Is it the memory crystallized from glistening slick in warmth light, fluid in the whispers that slip like a tongue between phrases. You shine without saying, where the words wait beneath the burbling all about.

I missed out on childhood sweethearts and campfire ghosts, culled early for absent self awareness, taught a place by elusive blossoms and blunt force. Another rage sick wallflower to drawl and droop on their summer stoop. Another magazine think piece past the time of the magazine, anti social low functioning old men are sad and because they behave in unpleasant and negative ways. Sing me another song of sorrow. Hang another sack of crap from the boughs of the blues. Reckless with furies and affections, I teeter away in the rigging. Most falls are inevitable given a little time.

There you are and there’s the magic, there you go and there’s the spell. It’s in the stretch of your neck, it’s in the muttering of your bones. The spell doesn’t quit easily, the spirit there forever voting flesh. Your presence credits the composition, needles always stitching, silk gleaming from the eaves. Your presence takes a lot with it when it goes. The wound does its work, the clock loses a few to the count. Knots holding knots, the grip of the materials even tighter than the grasp of your intentions. There you go making wings and waves.

affect

There is a weight worn, a countenance whittled with thoughts and burdens born, all the various sorts of worry and weather that a face can carry right there in the middle of the frame. The sore eyed sights, the busily bundles metaphors, the unconscious cold reads of prophesy ready and waiting for these furthered complications. What fills the mirror, what fills the seats, what is turned to words and worms by the dull repetition of the conversational clock, upfront and forthright despite our obligatory feints and obfuscations. The recorded emotion etched into the flesh, carried on and on through our long and awful lives, waving like flags or the relentless pounding of the sea. 

The moon waxes, the night wanes. The room rings with the shade of dreams. To wake is to turn a light off. To breathe is to flinch at the touch of the blade. Vision woven with what the mind would make of it, aware as you weave the very air of this entanglement. No one watches while you mark the moon. No one sees you as you rewrite the rules. Is there a redistribution of emotion while you try on your next expression? Do you feel it in your face? You are seen by the masks and the statuary. You are witnessed by creatures that you would not care to know.

It takes a lot to move the needle. It takes a lot to leave a mark. All that is lost to lay a trail, all that is abandoned to render a road, uphill with the heavy load. We part ways in familiar places, close folders and watch the sky go wing struck, the freeway beside the parking lot long after the scent was lost. Violins threaded through the vocals with the west a burning branch. The feather weighing down the scale, the scene framed in a roil of smoke and obdurate verbs, the now and then a little heavy on the now. Here as light touches flesh, footfalls where the imagination once was, the words slip away unfelt. The circle moves slowly, the feeling doesn’t care a thing about the fit.

it could happen to you

I would say the hour approaches, but that’s just the clock playing up it’s purpose. I would decry the hand that’s been dealt, but I gaffed the deck myself. It’s a typical description of a nondescript life, poor choices and bad turns, ignominy and pockets turned inside out. Due dates and remembrances that should be forgotten. I sit with Pixies in a haunted house as animals pace and prowl. I sit with Liz Phair amid debris and detritus, every deck a desertion. The clock breaks the plane of midnight. The hour is now.

The screen is smudged, my glasses are dirty. Somebody ought to see to that, but the impoverishment is on the inside too. Dust and spiders fill the frame. There is a lack of much, there is a dearth of more, there is no there there. The riot act is a litany and all the sooth has been said. Life’s a mystery, so you should start at the end and work backwards. Life’s a sentence and it runs on and on. 

I’m not quite finished, but I am done. I had a third act in mind, but the writing went wrong. Mostly it’s mundane and miserable, and well above my pay grade. Love left on in another room in a cupboard, simple tasks elude my grasp as I pine and bristle, never quite not human enough. A bulb burns behind me, its light sullen and wan. I still have no idea. Not a thought that will profit, not a blessing that will bloom. There is good, and there is beauty. There are multitudes of wonders waiting for the right eyes to find them, all manner of beasts to covet and burden, birthdays that will be celebrated long after my candle has been snuffed. So have a little cake before it happens to you.

onward

All at once it’s only you and the wide open blue, a shunt and a shade in wait of replacement, the numbers only there to paint by. There’s the open window, there’s the climbing pine, there’s the words left behind after the reckoning has been reckoned once the writing has been put down. Reasons and whispers left in letter form, these remaindered oaths and mothballed loves left in books and boxes, some ancient tenders waiting to clout you out of the mists of memory. An exchange of epithets when an epitaph would do. Slings and arrows and all manner of swearing, the stranger there in stark relief.

You strung the noose, you signed the letter, you looked to find satellites in lieu of stars. You know the moon is waning from the mentions in the margins, you know the laundry is washing from the racket of the contraption. Strata of ash and embers curling smoke as the cigarette dangles, an accumulation of intentions sacrificed to fire and blood as the clock winds down. Burdens and blessings trading hats and jackets, some tv mystery playing out there in the thud and wheeze of the heart, dull reactions and worn through promises where your love used to go.

The camera in your head follows the lead, always looking for a clue as entrances become exits, rushing the door as if one more action will solve the case. The mirror holds your gaze as the ghost gives up, listless beneath these mortal sentences, the verdict all that is left of self. Chores and appointments in exchange for the conceit of a soul, motive the first thing to go. A load of laundry to place in the dryer, a dial to turn, a switch to flip. Some last evil to face farther down the line, a horizon further into dust. Something to slip into, something to kick over in the ruckus of the reel.  

diffuse

It is in the angle of the shadow, it is in the sweep of the debris, flights of insects and schools of dust. The earth is tailed by a scintillating ellipsis of particular sects of mote and infinitesimals, these sections of milled infinites stacked like tortoises down below the foundations, logic never able to distinguish between metaphor and matter. Rise and fall a marble turning down the drain, every thought something mixing myth and perception, a hint of memory and a few closed circuits of magic pulsing under the rhythm of the devoted moon and the endless ocean. The waving all wind and limb, the cradle upon the rollick of the precipice, the lion and the lamb always at peace between meals.

So goes the stir in the soil, so goes the turn of the earth, the willful mauling of each mouthful as if the tongue were wing or song. A warbler singing in the sundown crown teaching what it is to warble, all the rest only the education of the guess, the general heft and hue as breath would at once imbue. Oh plea, oh prayer, oh cry in the night—! These are the names and these are the stars, and these are the skies we keep in common. These are the times and these are the trees and there are birds that will remain unseen that know me from sandal to skullcap. Embarrassments abound.

There are bounds, there are markers. The geography lost to the legend, the details missed on the map. Two years dead nearing the dot, the decedent long since flame and scattered ash, long since the labors of the plaited winds and the restless sea. A when to go with the where, this moment that persists in this stir of happenstance and atmosphere, the bone deep steepness of the arc of loss. The sheltered sun scattered through the yard and the imagery, green swaddled branches swaying to the clinging absence as momentum gathers towards more inevitable ends. So it settles, buried beneath the burbling walls of sound and the busy failings of the flesh. Hell forever happy to do its worse, and heaven only as good as your aim. 

the inside is outside too

So the afternoon goes aching on, shoulders heavy from looking at the shape of the sky, some song through the headphones and some song that goes tearing down the block. It’s prop work and physicalizers amid the haze and ash and dirt, sheaves of unruly green tangling around the frame. It’s squirrel biz and bird work and windows that haven’t been washed save by the rain. Roads hedged by mismatched trees down to the last band of bright horizon, until dark clouds lour in bunches against the dense thread count of the gloaming as it weaves. These wants taped to the dithering mirror, these wishes unwinding at the first loose web.

So your breath slips and slides, your body and its wild tides. Earth and water and wildfire, this subtle symphony playing out in the brickwork of the elements, you all caution and chemistry. The night always new, the day finally broken, another scheme fulfilled. The story somehow stalled out in the drive, here we are, still amongst the livid living. We rain down our exclamations and declarative spittle as of this reading, the voyage between moments full of fine print and the unknown. You feel it as it drains away; you feel it come flooding back.

So I kept it inside, out below the night. I kept it clasped tight between heartbeats, down beneath the stars. I left it here where the dust gathers without dust. Where the words return to the dirt of the unspoken, to the furtive nursery inside these bones, the gallery proofs of some dark garden. That seething through the soil, that hint of the myth of self, the stir behind the curtains getting the point. The sun is gone and there’s no tomorrow. The sun returns the same old day. Something someone’s always saying wearing my sworn to skin.