separate

The train wails, and something arrives as it passes. The old ways awake, drawn to the sharp peal of feeling, the placeholder pull of that plaintive cry enough to call out even the doziest of unencumbered appetites. The rails another accelerant, an accumulation of atoms and intent strewn about the long suffering globe, these inadvertent antennae speaking in dialects that gods and ghosts believe belong to them so concrete is the extruded expression. Made up minds making up for lost time, dragging thunder through the cold mountains and haunted hills. 

We are recorded in our lapses and our capacities, the deep ache stamped upon our architecture, a resonance of the distant of our reach. We bleed and spit and devour trailing stain and bone, inducing gravity and scattering our myths across the scenery. The clenched ember, the cold read, matter muttering through palms and fingers. We plead case and cite precedent, knowing how hard we argued out the paint the joinery. Oh to want long past the feeling and the flesh, one hand blind to its opposite. Oh to dream in brick and mortar, in the press of living breath.

This is the napkin note, the envelope sketch. The words meant somehow to resurrect a moment or invoke a notion, the day gone dark as each hunger casts its shadow. A sign left behind like the broken dove savaged by the Cooper’s Hawk, cast down to be consumed by the earth. Every day the stretch of never, the uphill stone. A place spelled just so in the weight of a sentence, a drop of ink into the restless sea. Hands there to fill out pockets, motive put in motion by the sustain of the whistle and the clamor of the tracks, a separate mark to hold each measure.

know your mule

Dip a toe, throw a stone, the water isn’t waiting. Ask for mercy, pray for rain, the work won’t do itself. There’s a shortcut to most how dos, you cross a river by crossing it, the quickest path is the old straight through. The literature is readily available, life lessons and hard time. There are always steps to follow when you’re out blazing trails, bullet points and storyboards and parables galore. Put one foot in front of another on repeat and the rest almost writes itself. The rules you write are so written as you walk and whistle. Offer up and bear down, and hope your back holds out.

I am down here smoking on puzzles I have made of procedures, thinking with grease and embers about treetop mysteries while I serve my residence in the earth. I mumble and drool upon the fleeting phoebes and the fastidious wrens, watching a dark eyed junco attend to a peanut left by the crews of squirrels and the local crow, the collateral always there when you start this sort of conversation. My eyes turn up towards the picked over branches, still bare before the rumors of spring. The architecture of this arrival, time measured in root and reach. The phoebe dives stitching foundation to firmament, the crow in the gutter feasting on motives. 

We wear away our inadequate masks going from op to op and task to task, serving that which is speaking from behind the screen. The vivid predicate and the litany of flesh, taste and appetite and the pause to birth unexpired alibis. We carry our water and daily face our fates, here where the remnants drape the ruins. Here where the words give out and you wake with the sun and follow the stars, where you tie the threads and weave away tomorrow’s tread. Setting forth with your veiled disciples through wood and underbrush you put the moon to use and the sea through its paces. There upon the last penitent period the gravid ambiguity between the vessel and the path.

iteration

Again the wonder wanes, again the symbols slip into the lapse in the contraption rendering the ruins in common tropes and equivocation, the harsh and hollow economy of the hustle and the hop to.  Hands all of a sudden cold and set to trembling, the season setting to with its strict spells and brute cudgels, change and empty pockets provide the shiver and the strive. The spark ever close in this conscription of particles, the seethe of flesh and the shimmer of whet appetite, the inherent conservation of meaning down deep in the stacks. All the ache of this aggrieved meat, freedom always frying pan or fire.

It’s in the atrophy of the apostrophe, the better angels lost to hell working the sins at their seams, the tongue gone numb before you got the taste and now it survives in these notions always being run aground. The script sinks slowly into torpor, no amount of articulation capable of arousing the leaden lyrics left. The terrain so long dead of dreams reason can’t find its purchase in this conscripted alphabet, the cells of the cypher only a west coast ghost, a memory of a masterpiece burned so deep past the brain the images persist from mind to mind and flesh to flesh. 

So this is the shape of the missing pieces, the honeycomb of the mystery amid the cloister of bees, the buzz dubbed in to tune up the inferences through the atmospherics. It is cultured to grow upon the occluded and the occult, imagination giving in multiples, the expected amplitude when the open throttle may only muddle with the unknown. Language the stones and bramble entangled with the lathe of longing, the applied animal and the implied aesthetic tumbling in the dimensions allowed. Whether great art or blessed altar, it takes the suspect form. The road implicit in the path worn before, the ritual just victuals plus time. We come to to the truths they’re using, waking before the words. 

houses in motion

Somehow the sun managed to swim the sky out past sight, the afternoon stippled with screaming children, Paul Simon songs, and crows. Somehow the story, having long since ellipted out, winds up right there at the station ready to replay the whole dull tale again. The wounds of winter hardly healed, and spring comes knocking, unwanted weight and all. Succinct increments and indeterminate eternities, depending on how you adjust the tongue and the air to the carburetor. From every angle they’re going at it blackened bones and blue blazes, you untouched by giddy grace or the angles of alliteration, catching the gist and hitching a ride on the tide of the latest contention. The music fades in and out, the poem right there waiting for you to open your big mouth.

The world weighs in, and mostly the palaver remains unkind. The senses makes sketches as the details endure, the calumny painting over the particular and the impertinent with broad strokes and old chestnuts, the story always overflowing even when it’s on empty. Nothing lasts save the worst and the best, the riddle only ever answered in all the rest. The hills slide away beneath the sky, a wide swath of wishes bubbling beneath the fissile cinematics that hold sway in the everyday. The world wanders away from you if you’re not careful, it forgets your form and face, names you from its myths and nightmares. You turn your head for a second and you are the stranger in the streets.

I’m out here living on the borderlands of the givens, hidden in a shambles of black feathers and old skins. I’m lingering long in the all but gone, trailing smoke and trickling libel. I live mostly alone, a mutter of dogs and sticks and stones, a relic and a remainder unfit for life and whole numbers. A shibboleth of saved receipts and spilled milk laments, a stutter of past cyclones and butterflies fluttering through leftover love language, all extant evidence proof against these claims of poetry and burnt fingers. Life gets spent in the wrong tense, only nows and nevers playing at forever, flies in the window and ashes all down. Shards and silhouettes and the brittle bones of spent regrets, the sun comes for what’s left of my sight, bright horses and fires in the night.

the ache underway

Here it goes, with the murky horizon swallowing up the sky, the first spoonful of the gloaming there among the clouds. Here they comes the whispering of facts and riot acts, the holes in the roof and the unlovely truths. The place past prayers and nightmares, ghosts speaking plainly from their absence and their evidence. The place where the price comes due in shades and flickers, the plate in the microwave, the shards in the trash. The unforeseen collateral and the predictable outcomes there on the floor, the love that ran its course, the ache that’s always there and the ache underway. 

There it is, that long last reach of sunlight, the play of light in the sweep and sway of the pines. The body clenched between everyday arthritics and the bone burden of weather lore, between winds ambivalent to spring and winter, between small scale memories and the stories spilling relentlessly into the long lost. That moment when the orchestra hits that sting from the score, the peal of the big reveal sold whole hearted, eyes wide to the twists and turns of plot plod and bridges burned. Hat in hand, head bowed to the inevitable unforeseen.

Even once the years play out it stays, too close not to leave the occasional mark. The heavy holds court, the colors, the flavors, the clues you should have taken as they seem. The very favor you feel you labor under as much angle and attitude, the blessings unclear below the rubble, the spell lingering in unspoken lies and lives. Time flies as you witness it more and more, the current of clock and calendar a river in a rage. The words don’t want you, and every eventual uninviting becomes a force of the rote, the things done routinely take on the sheen of the norm and the radiance of destiny. A year further on, close enough to burn.

the whole bang and whimper

There you are amid the din, this immediate tide of every returning river another signal on low and high. What is this among the numbers you might say if your the type. This tuning in upon the morsel, this ancient hymn glistening upon the bones of the respite, the whole wide stride of it somehow come to the well tied tongue to symbol and drum. The light there right in your gaze mirror and glass and the immense reflection. The light there in your eyes as you squint and listen. The wish always weighing each consideration, down to blood and equivocation. Right there where what the heart wants is a better warden.

All balled up, sheets and sweat and breath heavy in the dark. The fleeting memory, the shiny teeth of the dream, something livid just behind the moment. There in the reach, names and reasons, some dreadful exposition treading just outside the mind. The nightmare lines all taut in the wheeze and crackle all close up with the shadows in the lungs, the body’s burdens clinging to a bedlam of incorporeal antagonists, bad dream boogie men and the evil astride these ill endings. The thoughts rushing in on waking to another world there in the night.

There’s no telling what you’ll miss, the winds getting their wander on, the crows as they place their orders. It’s the sounds of bells and traffic as another month bleeds by, painted skies and all the harbingers a buzz. That banging on the door that only serves to set the nerves to jangle and the dogs to barking, some tired patter of words the decrescendo to brushback the bother of cold calls and unwanted salvation. Sirens softly doppler out of earshot as the sway of sunlight and pine boughs offers its counsel through the open window while the dogs howl and howl. The inkling mutters beneath the skin, that ever there dread that indulges us little threats and glimmers as the tide comes crashing down. Now and never, the flood and fold of this desolate forever, that moment before you blink. 

the dope

Here below a single lit bulb the shadows lie still while the walls tremble with the laden weight of countless freight cars going through town somewhere out in the night, distant clatter a broken rhyme for the grime and clutter, books and props and clustered wads of intentions left to drift and die. All the wisdom left here just spittle dribbling down grizzled barbs, the ring around rhyme played out, only dust and downfall sticking around for the postscript. Every instinct left is tooth and fist, gnawed on scenery and oration aimed at the cheap seats. Like a late twentieth century clock, the illness blinks on and off and on and off since blackouts became the rule and exceptions found another pate to crown. The pretense there only to serve another shoddy plot, the room read down to the appendices.

The ceiling blurs and blends, a thatch work of smoke, breath, and regret. There the consolation of light’s limitations, a wan halo, the long reach into the deeper dark. That steep descent that Duchamp nude takes behind the peal of the paint, the room ringing out in the wear of the era, the heritable swaths like the rows laid by belt in the muffled hues hewn by time and dues owed to dirt. Myths borne by weary fictions and a mattress on the floor. Radiance and radio waves, aches bathed in blue bias light. The memory fades as it becomes more certain, scripture taken as gospel, the gasping of a carp writhing in surprise upon the rough sands of its sudden ascension.

There goes the day, sky blue sky and bright sun and all that sort of meshugaas, as one orients the order of these origins. The eyes opening to the light escaping from the curtains, the raven call among the usual gang of crows, that spark into this earnest remark. Dogs lazing with the stretch of the afternoon, dust ensorceled by the slow reach of the stars long game, this looming now commanding every available attention. A recorded voice reports treading water amid the flood of other tones and tongues, beneath the rumble of the league of machines, a truth easily reaching all it needs. The one thing, then the next, just as prophesied. This tumble through the lines that reach from the sky through kites of chiton, that reach in leaning teeters of rusted capacitors and hanging cables, from the feathers to the fence. The barely measured favor to await the next breath.