The sun wanders towards the west
hunkering down below the horizon,
the world replete in silhouette and
wing, crows calling out quitting time
while the sky switches skins, smoke
curling in the myth of mapping the wind.
The din of the uncut day spent in weed
whackers and traffic, home another name
seeking harbor in our loosened parlance,
these eyes opened wide to
the blindness, machines singing
We are here, we are here!
I couldn’t say what I miss the most, now that missing is mostly all I am. The failures of the flesh, the drift of the dream. The expenditures of lips to lick and rocks to kick, the drag and drift of smoke and sky as the coyotes and stars close in. Currently my hands are gloves and my fingers largely unfeeling, beneath a standing count of snakes and offal, symbols that I haven’t eyes enough to see. The years speed away, treading water by changing tense, the tongue becomes a heavy toll. Everyone now many worlds away as I shrink into carcass and collateral, fed whole into the maw of the intangible.
The explanations remain inexplicable, a stack of givens as kindling for the ramblings of language, inherent imperatives blazing away through the bones of beast. The dull daily diet of heart hollowing horror, hope a caterpillar paralyzed with potential devils devouring it from within, the tide of blood and bedlam thundering through the banalities. Teeth and knives assail the drudgery of identity, vertiginous limbs and the forever fall in the feels. I shuffle a stack of cultivated distractions, the very soul of disaffection. Every surface livid with a smudge of thumbs.
There are distances that are unbridgeable, finalities and formalities and engines perpetually idling just outside. There are words weighted with wishes, words spent as spit and breath, thoughts and prayers thought experiment bears. You walk along with open wounds— the ones you loved and lost, the loves that up and left you, the damage accumulated by the vessel on its voyages by the usual goons and perpetrators. The hallowed empties out, candles and kindling and localized tropes. Another touch starved stranger stretched out like a shadow, vivid flashes in mirrors and echoes, missing you like it was the point.
What more could we want from the world? A road or two to hobble on down and a whole sky there for the scraping, a place to put all your labels and plenty of art to fight about. It’s the sweet spot that we miss, the moment where desire and intention sync up the DJ’s selection within the happenstance. The song that lands upon the just so, the movie that reminds you of something missed in your life or shows you that you’ve scuffed up the circumstances to your favor. John Cusack holding a boom box high as Peter Gabriel makes his case. John Cusack in the rain shouting out your name.
The world is on wheels, the world is all wishes and wires, the world mostly lives in your head. We exist as the gist of ancestry and origin stories, a series of applied myths that gain or lose traction depending on the matter that erupts outside the mind. We scramble and skitter, receiving our orders to deny life and limb for some set of brutal abstractions that amount to little more than box top rules and counter factual fantasies, encouraging us to end our lives for the sake of the worst of the worst. Personally, I’ll stick with the sticks and stones. Words do not work in my favor.
It’s down to the skips and starts, poor service and a deadbeat heart. Another litany for company, same old same old on a roll. The hint of some lost song playing behind my eyes as I listen to the wind and the television. You always come in in the middle of the story, it goes just fast enough that you can’t catch up, and you leave before it comes to an end. The myths a movie that’s always on, projected onto the tattered sheets billowing in your head, outside the observable anecdotes. Our reasons are parsed out contractions crafted from contradiction and faith in something conveniently unseen, partitioned wishes claimed against the odds the flags of whatever hill looks good for the hyperbolic dying. Another story waiting for a screen as we burn the future down on spec.
You like to think of it like lessons, only they’re the ones that never stick. You’d like to think that you know enough to know better, or at least enough to know when to brace for the blow. You hate to be the sort for burst bubbles, but you’re not the sort to keep it to white whales. It’s all rockets red glare and blossoms made of phosphorus. It’s the racket and the rattle and the tremble of the beasts curled beside you. Sore from the speech, sore from the symbols, the glow and the glare and the sounds of glass in thumping repetition. The press of breath, a fog of condensation, winter reaching its busy fingers through wall and window. There’s one point, and no one ever stops making it.
It’s a dirty deal from an old gimmicked deck, a timeless patter that you’ll laugh off later but you fall for every time they work it right. It doesn’t help that you can see it coming. It doesn’t help that you can tell us how it’s done. The language is the misdirect, it’s the visitor in the smoke and mirrors, that trick of the light that tells us what to see. It’s a hard rote ritual, the sort of etiquette that teaches you what the magic means. It wears a thousand masks and bears a thousand names, and it loses its way in the story and the reasons, but it really can stick a landing.
It’s car alarms and small arms fire and yet another year is upon you, as if anybody asked. The cacophony is profoundly ubiquitous, all yawps and yowls and hoots and howls, unsustainable yodels and ill considered gritos sounding out all at once. Like a paratrooper, you’re always surrounded. There’s always explosions to spare, the streets strung with smoke and refuse, the rituals ongoing and often perpetuated loosely and with varying degrees of vigor. Some clock, some calendar, something to shoot for on down the road. Another season out to sea, another day more and less.
You wake within your summoned skin, a sting of blue a slash of white, and the sky on high spinning in circles chasing its tail. You say your prayers, hands high above your head, assuming that the projectile will adhere to the intention of its maker. You make your shapes, you turn the dial, more and more to feel a little less. The burn is the air, the burn is your flesh, the rust on the rails and the lichen on the stone. One more word will end it all, break your bones like the rumor to the rhyme. It all adds up, you think one more time. The numbers stick and stumble, the lying is all on you.
This fresh flesh remains unseen, working your schemes, pressing your levers. The tell comes from the wake your mind leaves behind, the rippling materials, the exposed beams and that touch of tongue to teeth. Your world blisters with your beliefs, the unspoken oaths boiling over into being, even these simple symbols enough to evoke the ache. The evidence will overwhelm, this wan insistence a warmth, a dot painted with red light right at the off switch of this life. Speak so all this truth takes flight.
This is the way in the earth. This is the way beneath the sea. The muttering rainfall, the weighted gutters, garlands of weeds hanging from the eaves. We are bodies at rest and in motion, the work of translation and evasion in our modified verbs, spells of effort and desire. You will want as all beings will, you will pick and choose among dreams and occurrences, even as little a nod or a lean just to steer the vessel. One day you stop broadcasting, you stop deliberating, the signal goes dark. A stipple of stars, a wish of wings, and a sky to string them all along.
I suppose I could go from ache to ache striving down the line, like Santa’s reindeer or Snow White’s dwarfs, listing all the parts that ended up in pieces or begrudging every moment from birth on downhill. I guess it could be the sound of rain flooding the gutters and soaking the roofs, the only talk on the television, the only music stuck in my throat. The litany my identity, it slides along the black ice of circumstance, the gathered collateral and the comedic impact of all those empty plans. A rictus grin stuck on my lips as I send some more smoke to heaven.
The mass accumulates, hollowed out intentions and the sparks fly from the friction, even the strange grows familiar. The arrow loosed toward the sky, the rest is threat and anticlimax. The numbers riot and roil around the permeable possible, the wise and the foolish all caught upon the arc of the tumbling dice, blessing and curse a single call. The fire spreads because the fire is always catching. We haul our reasons from the ruins.
The fire blazes, the fire flickers, the fire fades. This is the thread we are woven from, the text and textile, the world we are thinking through. A door in the dark where our strangers keep knocking, a scratching from behind the blinds, the night with every light left on. As tenacious as the shadow of water within the shadow of a glass, neither name nor act will last. The wheel in the commercial seems to spin backwards dragging along the limits of this instrument or that one. This continuity that only lasts while the camera is on. This name that only lasts while it’s spoken.
So what of the run on night? What of the rasp and curl of a smoke cured throat? These stories that I never get right, these dreams that never come true? A life cudgeled black and blue, bouncing bumbles and sudden stars. A burning root left untended like a runaway wish. Everyone loves an ashtray fire, the only light left to guide my staggered traverse. It’s only the hurt that lingers.
Midnight arrives to lose all meaning, the reading lamp halo on the ceiling, the cold seeping through the floor. Eyesight gone silty as my condition starts in, the resident aches in heart and bone laying claim to the fixed star fragments, the sketchy catch as catch can memory like a memory recently interred. Some commotion calls through the wall, cat or raccoon or enemy op as yet unidentified, but neither dog stirs. Still a few nights until the ubiquitous Yule and I don’t know from mice. The rats, though, clamber and gnaw away never heeding the chestnut on when to make hay.
The blunted brights of literary hues mingle with the sharp intermittent shift along the holiday spectrum, the window aglow with hints of traffic, tinsel, and off brand ambulance. I pause between breaths, the very air ringing with whispers of wind and rain. Awake without reason to the tune of suspended swords and the falling of other shoes, haunted by worn out demons and regretful ghosts as time grows unkind to the ill prepared, I take another fall. It only hurts where we are.
