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.

fast as you can

I move slow with the sun, old bones all mumbling beneath the searing sky. The heart seizes, the heart staggers, the bell tolls. Halos hit the pavement, boots hit the bricks. A song is tinkered out all hammers and picks, the work of the world set loose upon the wind. I walk in circles, alive in fits and starts.

Then the stars go all pointy before they double or they blur. Vision and sight become separate spheres, the music the clinks and clunks of unplanned impacts, constellations happily unaware of their human affiliations. Shapes crowd the peripheral, only scurrying and fleeing just as they’re nearly out of view. Mistakes made again and again, every day until they shake the stigma of their births and become culture. Another story to fill up the vast unsaid.

The horizon watches each further excruciation, the fierce work of tooth and talon whittling away at the stubbed toe of the monkey mind. The heart stings out its dusty tattoo, the paradiddle at the root of the rhythm a tale of busted sticks, the long game played out so long ago it dwells in the epoch of myth and legend. Grinning in present perfect as the past insists through all hogwash, the sacred somehow forever spilling blood. These lows delivered from on high, the evidence overwhelms.

the late John Garfield blues

Long past sleepless, the blue shadows flicker in the style of early fire and expired dreams. Objects loom and recede swaddled in restless light, the lean of screens, the bones of test patterns and cathode ghosts trailing like ellipses these stretched thin souls. No longer static under glass, hints and suggestions leap and strut along the ceiling and walls, the struggle of the story to remain unformed. The dead air always waiting with tension to draw, everything new and nothing changing no matter whether the postman rings again or how Lana Turner wears a sweater. The habits of the ancients, the customs of the form.

It isn’t always the channel, it isn’t always the cigarettes and Captain Kangaroo of the eternal ruin, that too close to the gutter to rise to the insult. Telephones that are answered on the second ring, letters of ink and paper blur beneath fallen tears and Paris rain. The reconstruction of consciousness, words and pictures and the uncoiling of the mystery as the pull of a voice and a match ignited on a heel. The spin of song, the skin bruised from remembering again and again. The primal compact of the stared down ceiling, the law of forevers made of never. That god revealed in the cracks like in the Dobyns poem, the fearsome stitch of the old oath breaker. 

After the art has ended, after the love has left, just the stubborn husk and the curtains astir. The eyes stay open as sleep goes through the motion, dreams clambering on the rooftops, the night scratching out cyphers with broken nails. Blood gone wrong an open book idling in the backlots of thought, the changing of the station, the whispering of the grease. The movie keeps moving well past the credits, loosed in these fevers of flesh and the cloister of the known. Dawn arrives printed on a broken deck, the last games always played alone. The hand that’s dealt, the corner fought, the script familiar but the casting unfathomable. A wash of color before the fade to black.

I remember California

Even in dreams the roads run dark. Even in memory the lights grow dim, savoring another savior, singing along to that favorite song though you never knew the words. Watching from the hollowed out tree of a heart, wings and their shadows. An inferential intuition of flight. 

The moon fades away into busywork and backdrop, crimes left from scene to scene. Oh, the echo. Oh, the clue dropped in an envelope. The die is cast. The sea in the air far from now and here always there, the crashing tide and sea lions barking, a Ferris wheel unlit and still. Kisses upon cliffs.

It is in the way they write memories, slips and snippets bound with song and scent, a flavor for a moment met. The bright stars, the shadowed woods, the way redwood trees descend from the roots of heaven. The incremental ambiance as details are recovered and reconstructed, taking on the savor of the immediate flesh. 

It is in the way we absorb occulted culture, the myths that wove the primordial tongues, the way these stories grow unacknowledged in these deserts of the telling. The Madonna and the monkey do. Highways dotted with signs and fairy lights, numbers for names and numbers for exits, the ghosts of the Central Pacific haunting the brutal passes where their bones lie exposed. Hollywood and the latticework of irrigation across the old latifundia and the Big One always in the wings. Streets sick with gun culture and serial killer migratory maps, and Bigfoot embarrassed for the lot of us.

The freeways always reaching, white lines in the headlights, white lines fading in the rear view. Faces with disappearing stories, faces etched into the blood, names folded into the forbearance and that feeling where you disappear. The flicker of years cards in bicycle spokes, newspapers flung into the drive, teenagers hurling stones and epithets as the clock ran out. The sky gone red and every breath a burn. Bridges collapsing into the sea. This old ache, this ageless enmity, the roads run and run. 

crosseyed and painless

Maybe the message arrives in the moment as a bird on the wing or a bolt from the blue, something lifted by the wind or moving deep below your feet, a spark to strike a light inside. Maybe it comes as chemistry, a tumble of pheromones feeling their way into the tussle of your blood and atmosphere, the structure a signal running through the ley lines of life. It could be the riddle of physics tickling at entanglement, the spun silk story of particles talking across the distance of some old collision, some ancient introduction in the primordial cauldron boiling over into your being. It could occur in that flicker of cognition, your consciousness a stylus freeing it from vinyl or clay or ink, stricken into the record by your prying mind. Then again, maybe the message is all in your head, Occum’s Razor always cutting it close.

Never mind trying to figure out the signal, too many years wasted between the measure and the map. The means of transmission often obscured by standard bearers and nervous messengers, unknown customs and dangerous strangers, words that move so knife sharp through us that we seldom notice the wounds. Bled out before you know, what a way to want to go. The rhetoric invented to keep tailing the truth, the talk too ready to turn colors, we follow the arguments we can afford. We stare through the frequent fires, the red glare only the occasional rocket, dollar signs where our eyes once were while they follow you around the room. Time will tell, depending on how it spends.

They say you can catch a glimpse around the corner, peak behind the curtains hanging at the bounds, take a look at calamity and beneficence in the days yet to come. Some shuffle a deck and deal, some throw sticks or stones, spill the guts of beasts or birds to earn a glance. Some will parse and piece their dreams, consulting scrolls and oracles, exchanging words for words. You watch the other monkeys, counting on the safety of the numbers,  the power of crowds. Others just crunch the numbers up and give them back as odds, reading you the chances as you gather wits and spine. There is a hole that will stay a hole. The facts are the first to stray. 

misunderstood

Chances are I took it wrong, hanging there outside custom and context, words left unexpectedly on the line. Objects in the mind may be other than they appear, given the labors of the self and the lingering of the smoke. I typically miss the over or the under in good standing, pick a cards and nothings up my sleeves muttered in deference to the form, forever working off cheat sheets and ersatz odds. It’s the problem with levity that gravity doesn’t always allow for ascent, bodies at rest and motion and the serfs of sentience. When looking for the evidence of recorded beneficence the rudiments of my cognizance will often find a slew of hurts don’t its and two for flinchings. As far as navigation goes, it’s not the most utile map to follow.

It’s like the bumping in the night, the creak of floorboards, the indiscreet hinge. Sure, it sounds like murder, but is it really worth all that getting up? The confusion is really more brand building, cosmetic alloys and the slide of misalignment, a flag to unfurl and a smattering of stereotypes. There’s no road sign for how far to go after getting it wrong, everything done to the tune of the dramatic turn and inflamed apostasy. Waking to a world so brutal even the mirror leaves a mark, creased and leavened with mayhem and spilled salt. Scraping footfalls and hushed breathing in the dark halls, the flesh itself a fever.

I saw the moon in passing. I didn’t wave, or say anything. The moon has made it pretty clear it has nothing to say to me, window creeping not withstanding, most of its signals aren’t mixed. All the heavens brush on by, clouds and stars and alibis. Sometimes the reason comes down to the season, sometimes it’s about hats and feathers. The signs are read, the signs turn blue, the signs are for entertainment purposes only. The inkling teeters on the precipice, an imagining of drumrolls and music in the minor key as the mask is removed, another mystery for the mistaking.  I fold fetal, clutching at an ache for comfort, curling into question marks and involuntary exclamations. The knowing comes and goes, as soft and elusive as smoke.