pretty bad

The times find their note from the tuning fork of the unkind, leaving a sorry song to wonder after your mind. You can follow the directions, you can read the instructions aloud, your train of thought left to rattle the rails to hell or heaven. There’s still the sounds of the street through the window, plastic wheels dragging over grass and gravel, traffic growling in the distance as the wind lays it on thick. Some rumble from someone’s speakers, some dying of someone’s dreams, the wait for rain and some essay’s theme. Nobody sleeps anymore, they just drink until they drown or smoke until they float. Only bad actors and missed boats, and everywhere the sound of cages and rage.

The calendar continues the conceit as the days dwindle, the past piling on as the future evaporates into sighs and furies and falling leaves. Stacks of books and peanut shells and last century’s stains. Wheelchairs hunched with dust and absence, the sun stippled seas and every measure of never. Bullets for wishes and crow weighted boughs now lighter for the trope of flight. Black wings and broken mirrors and spent luck all nestled in cradles and coffins. Despite all your beliefs and fool heavy philosophies causality ends in casualties. There will be a fall you will not get up from.

The punch lines all come with bruises, the promises with caveats and a shit ton of small print. It’s the cudgeling I won’t recover from, I have fallen and I can’t get up. The hangman’s handiwork lingers like a lure, the gape of the rope the zero sum and the punctuation time served delivers. No comfort to the creatures left in neglect, no consolation to the heart’s prize. Eyes closed in resignation, hands bound in infirmity, the sparrow’s flight says it all. Dirt and damnation and a line from some show you don’t know. “A fate worse than a fate worse than death? Pretty bad.”

new moon mantra

The sky above is blue and blurry with floaters and figments, the cheap cheaters smudged with the devil’s work, the new moon monstrous in its absence. Eyesight and vision often take separate trains, tracks crossing traffic clanging away in intermittent flashings and the side just short of hooroar. The given inch falling fathoms further in low effrontery, audacity pairing so frequently with the self declared self aware. The nations continue to insist on these defamations, the obvious lack inherently enraging. The uttered intentions caught in the wind, dribbled down meanings chin, a completed rotation around the sense to so much sentience. The curse closes around the desperate ink, the blessing spread like dandelion seed, buoyancy the confederate of geometry. Confession yet another consequence of gravity.

The crow calls late in the day, its cries cast with the stretch of shadows, with the spring of the evergreen ringing in the follow through. That corner of the mind where the paint never dries always peeking out from the unfinished edges, the circumspection of the unfocused familiar, these observant strangers serving tea from behind the blinders. The known amounts to less than the observable, these obdurate forms that linger in the vast occlusion, the blazing blind light that threatens to reveal the unfleshed aspects that bump and grind in thoughts unfettered. That coarse throat aiming at the assembly of kin and kind harkening still unknown marching orders, spilled tea and grievances and the map to the evening’s roost, all of the possible furtive in these great heaps of ignorance that serve as the world.

Lurking there in eternal nativity the shadows root and reach through the mumbling foundations, on through the blaze blue and maw red into this weary rally of roof and brick and bone and leaf. The cup is filled and emptied and spilled, cracked and reformed and filled to the brim yet again. The whole thing sheaves of the same ol same ol writhing and wrapping around the new, eyes aging out of the thousand yard stare, items thick with the dust of dead cognition braying out fresh intentionalities. All hat and no rabbit sings the hungry earth, the hearth only so much stone and mortar when the fire stays extinguished. All sizzle and no steak the song that hell has habituated in these parched hearts, as this unconditional surrender has its say. As in heaven, so in the hooks. The empty pantry has its fill of flatware, the set table a bounty of bowls and plates. The window remains ready to receive the moon.

wing it

Leaves fall, building piles and patterns and grievances, dry soil taking up what the season’s short of. The flesh takes on the torpor of the slow roast of summer, the meat only falling short of departing the bone, stilling to stew in all available juices. Land ho, sore hooves, and gaffed limbs stuck in whatever spot of bother the last stepped in. The local fauna know, with squirrels draped over fence rails and cats disappearing below unkempt homes. Climate and geography wrap them all up handily, with only the birds on wing escaping the day’s cruel escapades. Fly away, fly away, red red robin and kettle black crow. The sky above a wide open road.

Canadian Geese fly low above as gray doves spy from the farther pine. A scrub jay drinks from the old galvanized washtub as sparrows pick at the feeders, opportunity always a cost. Clouds dim the smoke colored sky while the ocean of the atmosphere drifts past, the firmament gone soft with the unwinding of the wind. Thirty more geese more or less add to the gaggle in the field behind the fence, and the neighbors’ chickens cluck with the thrill of being fed. The feel of rain brushes up close and intimate though so far it’s mostly drought dry, then a few droplets stipple the skin, and faith is momentarily restored. 

There is a magic on the wing, a spell woven with beauty, envy, and resignation. Once stolen away in flight, most everything comes down to trying not to fall, avoiding the sort of clouts gravity advances in spades. Something stirs the crown of the pine above— a jay, a dove, a crow— a swift passage of half guesses sliding through the mind. A hummingbird blurs the bounds of the periphery, the soul so stentorian in its absence as experienced thick this trick of words, each sentence served in the echoes of some decoded labyrinth lingering in the original Greek. Here in the anticipation of the fled abstraction of these partial observations, until lift, until the inevitable departure. Like the custom of the nation of yes, and the counter clicks out the signal, filling in the blanks left for cognition. Birds fly over that rainbow, wing it (where available).

capitulate

It’s a blindness that exceeds the eyes, a blank spot that only widens with time. The words go one way, the actions another, the mind makes up the difference. Mostly it’s just animal sounds, air escaping through an orifice, the grunts and groans required by physiology and environment. Chest thumping, howls and displays that came with us on the long road towards the particulars of our species. Rationalizations to pave over our fears and motives while we use laws to commit egregious crimes and pretend that we’re good people. We take whatever stance that allows our cowardice to count as conscience, to rebrand our bowing and scraping to clowns and criminals as proof that we are free.

Whole lives pass by in the callow mirrors of others’ eyes, seeing the meaning of that hobo culture the way they see that liar faith, heaven and hell and castles and thrones made entirely of far flung shit and shaken branches. Hollow hierarchy and tacked on reasons that prove little but bad intentions and weak knees. Can’t save souls, can’t help fools, can’t strike without heating up the iron. Caste systems and social Darwinism and varieties of apartheid and Jim Crow’s bones remain the building blocks of most politics and opinion where the dumbest of lies prevail. Every generation engages the same old holy slop and says Behold!, revealing the entirety of their ass. 

It reads like Revelation, but these days all the prophecies are self fulfilling. We elevate rapists to high office, canonize deception, and hide from our painful history and hard truths. Nature and nurture long since obscured by naive acceptance of the new bright and shiny, we turn away from the skid, so we spin and spin into the void of our hubris. Fly the flag in earnest over ghoulish slaughter, fly in the face of facts in favor of premeditation, fly off the handle whenever the evidence is mentioned. Stare into the rear view, see as it all speeds away. Every day a further capitulation, you find your self farther from your made up soul. A straight razor and a beggar’s bowl, you bear the bruises as you genuflect. Tell me that you’re good.

wisteria

Open wounds and empty arms all the valentines you’ll find among the offerings once fate finds out where you’re holed up, sometimes guns blazing, sometimes with serpent’s venom tippled in your ear. Always a reminder you’re not the hero or much of a villain, just another point in the plot, just something that goes bump in the night. Nights that once were scented with honey suckle and wisteria now bloom with the funk of dead blood as the cold cold moon gives nothing away. This too long life now a romance with the dust, bad medicine and spilled salt. Your face another fever dream, a montage of memories, bitter and dull with the obligatory damnation.

You wake pursued by odd notions and strange images, nothing but low impact nightmares and high concept jokes. You try not to engage the inevitable slings and arrows, the sticks and stones of this life alone measured in silence and desperation, minus the occasional groan and loose epithet. Back aching against the wall they feint and fall, the unseen hordes and the useless host only there to jeer and foment some hapless fools to the mortal ends they fear. The world won’t let you go while there’re still oceans of contempt left to loose. There’s nothing too terrible, nothing much good, just the relentless tide returning to offer injury for every insult spat.

There are moments where it seemed things could have gone differently, paths untaken and doors that remained shut. You forget it would have still been you there fucking up the road less traveled. The shreds and ribbons from just being yourself. Those long ago nights of an ancient spent summer, floral notes and the roar of the crashing ocean, are little more than mirage and revision. It’s these nights that plod and malinger that reveal your truths, stars no longer visible and spiders camping in the corners. You will sleep some, you will endure your day. No dream worth living, you live on in the lies of others. Some plot trips along, the illness you foment all yours.

inside aches, outside voices

There’s a sound out there you can almost hear, a voice caught in the throat of the wind, an animal lowing beneath the stars you never see. How’s that suit you honey bee, waiting on the weather, ever seeking the newest bloom? Rats in the proving drawer, raccoons on the roof— hardly how one greets the hoi polloi. There’s always points on the license and a party down the block. There’s something in the night you can almost sense that can see right through you.

The window is open to the air. The walls are there to bounce the noise around. The doors are locked to mark the hour. The ceiling is there as a stand in for the savior. The floor is there to soak up all the blood. The closets are for remembering skeletons. The mirrors await glares and gazes. The lights could go either way.

We grieve in place, rolling that rock uphill as the world moves and moves. We mind our Ps and Qs while everyone bows to partners and dosidos, dancing square against the ambient dance macabre. We bear the empty in busy limbs and hollow husks, hauling ghost and gristle over obdurate foundations and below the sly firmament.  Monsters and murderers gibber gleefully as we endure our grim certainties. Embroidered red letters stitched to every dream, the world slowly ripped apart at the seams.

reoutcarnation

You get a feel for the wheel, if only the repetition of the spin, and the counting of the spokes. You’re never still but the sameness becomes the suchness. You run out of words because they’re never quite there and they’re never quite enough. It’s a shrug, it’s a sigh, it’s rain from a clear blue sky. Pennies from heaven pounding in the nails, death the great croupier.

We are born into this world, we pass into the next, at least according to popular slogans and pamphlets. We plod along amongst the many peoples and the hosts, late comers to the continuity, killers and conquerors and halfwit clowns. We name our progeny for gods and gurus and culture heroes in hopes of ascendancy or extinction, hapless in our hubris. Blow out the candles, cut the cake, let the good times roll and do it again the next turn around the sun.

I can’t count the number, I don’t count in the reckoning, I just keep the cascade going. Busy hands both too clumsy and too clever, leaving the devil to their own devices, only sure of the next catch and toss. I limp along, wounds weeping through their pitiful prophylaxis, dead blood soaked sock and shoe the measure of every step. Father of abortion and miscarriage, I have no offspring to fall short of the arc of my own aspirations, no sequels to love and worry after. All the stories disappoint equal to their source, the heritable war come home to my door, lies all that’s left to lean on.