unbidden

It is the earth that moves and not the cursor. It is the feet and the fields and not the map. This warm sun, this striped sky, this river of sticks and soil and detritus that spills out of frame and into the continuity. The landscape pervades the atmosphere as the unspoken is spelled out as a lapse in milk and honey, a wandering so far away from first tongue dirt that the words can only serve so long before turning feral. There is nothing, then there is speaking. There was speaking, now there is nothing again. 

Smoke curls towards the eaves, the swole moon is waning unseen, and flies light upon head and limbs like a test of the flesh. Trash and dead leaves skitter down the street despite the season as the porch ants work their algorithms and a lone fly schemes about my elbow. This is the slow of the growing shadow, the stir of the statistics in the atmosphere, the dull plod of the settle as it spreads. It is the spider by the lighter and only ash left to offer up or down. There is a pause at the precipice, a vertigo above a yawning hunger, then a breeze resets the arrow. This plunge and the flame a flicker.

We echo into specters, we grow into the ghosts, these notions that we once inhabited now just light upon the water of the open road. The night arrives in illuminated rotation as the room is confined to blithering screen and earnest lamp glow. The loosed arrow falls, time on an incline, only music and mood. Curtains rise and curtains close, the show just goes and goes. We arrive on the scene, beneath these stars, within these walls and doors unbidden and unknown. The breath will ebb, the breath will flow, no worse for wear no one the wiser. The battered slate, the scuffed up silence.

episode

This one starts with the pines through the window, though I don’t know where it’s going yet. Maybe there’s a lesson, maybe the moon shows up. Maybe there’s nothing but the vamp, the one, the two, the old soft shoe. The wind is on its hind legs, and the sky is a gentle brushed blue, and the pines half shrug as they sway. I falter on without much else to go on, aimless efforts stranded in strays and eddies, a shuffle of loosely parked cars and gossip. The wind and the waving, and the obdurate stretch of daylight.

There’s a train wail, then the whole catfight raucoustra choreography with every hiss and yowl in the canon. The window is dark now so you know it’s night. The big empty yawning straight out into the air and localized effects. The empty on me all the time, then all at once. The fading of a pair of motorcycles, the keening of a far off siren, this feeling away from my aptitudes. Sometimes there are dogs barking and they aren’t my dogs. Other times, well, who’s to say? 

Mostly it’s the scene you make of it, dead branches blown to life by gust and zephyr animated by the sameness of the background. A sense of mountain range or star spread amid the spider silk and deadfall. One or the other, then one for all. I begin, a flinch or a feint, then some is or ain’t. There’s no telling because I am out of things to say. So brick by brick and bird by bird, there is a shape inside the skull. The path made clear in absence and inference, the passage becomes the text. An open window, and on you go.

the effin ineffable

It’s the way the world watches you through each crack and crevice. It’s the world that watches you beguiled inside your sight, this testimonial of chemistry, this scribble of quantum epithets. It scratches at your itches and lies through your teeth, a victorious laurel or funeral wreath. Every breath all rasp and ration, syllables slipping through flesh and bone, the cloister of the nasal and the brothel of tongue and lips evident in every prayer. The are a million million transitions, sums tippling from the tree roots, staggering calculations made entirely of the collateral coiling into infinity and exhaust. You build and boil in filament and plume, your secret only lasting as long as you burn. 

It all keeps coming so you fill in your fire with whatever might fuel you, the hard won placeholder as you tack against the billowing moments, the star you are in the minded map. Immediacy always currency in the profane exchange of nows, the seeing only after the say so, the vow gone as it is voiced. Everything errs on the effin ineffable, this expression of scads of peculiar particulars, this stir of collaterals reaching out to the firmament. This slow inventory, counting down by unfathomables, blood and breath and the stubborn depths. The stagger, the struggle, the grudging not so fast. The grace despite the placement, the strive behind the trash. 

It’s there as the sun beats heat into the scene so hard I can feel it in the shade of the porch, a soft opening of summer, a stamp upon the back of my skull. It’s there as the scenery is shaped by the laborious light, plaited grains and blazing chains and symbols shed to the syllabary, a loose conspiracy of various wings and halos and the usual harbingers hearking it all to hell. It’s that natal rhythm section bending your ear, all these lessons having evaporated years and years ago. No leads, no limburger, if it’s dancing then we dance. No primer, no paint, just this faint pulsing of the process. The tilt of the wind in what is missing.

monkey’s paw

I lost count of the answer staring at the ashtray, the remainders in some strange arrangement, the what it was that I was smoking. Maybe if I took a picture, maybe if I read the room. Instead there’s only evidence, the residue of ambient wishing, the hint of some coded clue. The song gets stuck in the shuffle. The song gets caught in the wind. I guess that’s what keeps me listening to the tuning out and tuning in. These gaudy stragglers, these spent fragments, the ringing of a chime. Sifting through transmissions, all echoes and repetition as the phrase overturns, awaiting this ignition.

So much for the scintillation, so much for the effervescent, so much for the spheres wheeling out a tune. The stars stay parked where they were. The moment gone the way they do. The plot lost until you’ve ridden off the rails. The flesh chills, the spirit slows, loitering in the leaves. I can nearly taste the kiss that sealed it, the magic and the monkey mind, the dirt to every deed. I can nearly see that bright tomorrow snatched away in the small prints and fortune stitched lines. The devil deal, the slap of the creator, something wicked shambling in the words. It comes on command and leaves you wanting behind bolted doors. 

Count your wishes as if they were blessings. Enjoy a mythos woven around card cheats and lawyers, caught as we are in the telling. The little dog nips at the fool’s heels and hams, such fun for the laughing, as they spill like Jack and Jill. The story is there for anyone to tell, depending upon such things as the rake of the stage and the average word count. The game is in your face and what is shown. The troubles keep coming, they soldier on and work in teams and platoons and hordes. Trouble knows you like the back of its hand, trouble comes looking. God’s love at best a beating, hell wide open because of everything you are.

underscore

By the time the day cracks the curtains you’ve already been up for hours, the pause and pacing of the night watching all this inking in. You’ve put your imagination through the motions, recycling dread and dream as the probabilities and anxieties race around the track, figure eights and tectonic plates in the gallery of your incessant engines. Daylight pushes through the grease and the grays in your drowsing gaze, rearranging the scenery and glamming up the dust. Again you press against boundaries, call down the spirit to stir your bones, scorching the firmament with your scalding prayers and pro forma epithets. Again you let the minutes fall as they may.

You think in eras, you think in titles, you think in hints and harms. You think in things undone and in the doing, scouring the checklists and keeping score. Where you failed and how you measured and the surprise that was yours and yours alone. Old masters and young turks, and the newest schools you never quite get the gist of, wearing the skin of shibboleths and the ghost of primal scams. You built the golem and tricked the djinn into offering up their terrible autograph, blue breathed and shimmering into the very semblance of the shape. The schism left like the lines of the tightly folded fist, another shape to take to when the light is low. The spell there smiling straight through your eyes.

There it is, the insistence in every ease. Here we go, the oldest tricks in the book. The moon shrinks, the night takes it out of context, Leonard Cohen is dead and stealing your girl somewhere between scrawled letters and needle skips. The dreams wear out just when you start to get good at them, the nightmares dirges made from drear threats and jump scares, prayers slinking unbidden out the door. It takes strange turns between serpentines, zigging when they think you’d zag. The stories fevers squeeze from you, turncoat gods and fine print devils pressing your breath through the breach, terms and conditions and promises made of lies. The squirming of the shadows with the light implied.

art for fuck’s sake

It’s not even halfway through May and the moon’s charge is running down, the day busy filling in the blanks. A long blue washed out empty flexing hard at the mirror or the spring, the ache a note sustained, a stitch to hold the thought so prolonged in its dissolution. The and ifs only as ifs as far as the metaphor will go, throat cleared to the sound of motors, smoke loitering below the spider strewn eaves. There’s a picture within the picture, a play within the play. A motorcycle dopplers into distance, the sky a blinding gray.

There’s an order read on rote, a way you take to scan the stacks, a science to your senses. The crow calling from the long dead branch, the wind splitting the tall bursting stands of grass into song and signal, a rhythm slowly swaying. The want in the wait, the jumping line of the story to the double Dutch skip. Something in the genre of foretelling, a feeling to the atmosphere, a wing waiting without flight. A convention to the conceit of these recycled symbols, the skin walking Lives of the Saints, the root reaching to molten stone and ardent star. 

There’s no altar obliging incense, no icon to receive any further flourish of skull and limb. There’s a hardly picture hung. The old ways insist down to the detritus, other nations and the anthemic thrum of ice cream trucks, the contrivances the earth informs weigh like covenants as the afternoon dithers away. Something is happening between the woodwinds and the brass, a stirring from the in between, a striving down to the dust. The details here to devil away at, the last light another round of Turkey in the Straw looping through the streets, the moon hollow hours away and already towards gone. 

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.