soliloquy

You wake to that old timey ache, those stones you have carried these long years away, and soon you are up on the hind legs of this old bag of bones high stepping out into these habits and chores. Just bells and spittle down all the dogs, give or take a ghost. Cats and crows and saving throws, this tumble of lingering life and awkward limb. Boring as you tread the boards, bruise and blood, rag clad and of poor comportment. Sometimes it’s only the words, sometimes it’s the blocking, all the way downstage just to share the sentiment. There is the time and the plotting, plus the projection. No wonder the world’s on fire. No wonder you wake up either worse or the same lousy same old same.

There is that moment, in the early turnings, where the insistent words comes flooding. The phrase finds you ready to fire, this sudden onslaught the works of decades of sabotage and neglect, the terms only a tactic of the negotiation. The blues that give way to the grays, the wings that work away. Some stir in the meshugas, the mind as it ties its shoes. Each breath tentative and the sentences settle along the power lines, the first flock to fill the thought. Find your mark and say your say, live to trod the boards another day.

So each dream starts another you, a reach or a longing, another story imbued with some suchness that holds your place. A sunken stone, your guiding star, the clink of ice and a distant barking dog. Some inkling to fill the long empty tension, the expression of the lingering press of language, the legend beside the mark on the map. You stride through the substitutions, the tongue taking turns claiming your own worthless name as you part the fallen curtains and stride to centerstage and begin to cogitate and declaim. The inside finds its way out, the final tally, the busted phrase. The stage is unlit save the ghost light, the seats are empty. The illusion complete, the convention met halfway. You speak your thoughts aloud, the room rings in agreement to your isolation.

where we wade

The roots have tasted rain and the dirt has gone green with opportunity, a shift of ambience and atmosphere, a taste of tongues yet to come. We wade right in, thinking after speech, the shuffle and scrape of matter paid forward in increments. The world is a phrase that’s always turning, from fumble to fiddle and from want to wit. The riddle of the rising tide in time with breath and heartbeat, another cautious countdown, another custom to declare. The skies go gray again, the afternoon a known unknown as the wind plants a flag to tatter.

Black clouds play backdrop to the fronts of sun splashed homes, crow call and crow shadows as they pass into text and inference, the window only as useful as the eyes and the frame. The work of words so like the work of wings that we rely on both to remain aloft, held by the tension between art and action, held in the spell of the evidence as time erases flights of fancy and otherwise. We speak in the tentative style of the temporary, feeling our way towards the explanations for our existence. Another shaky presence posited on oratory and silhouette, another is you is or is you ain’t without a stall in sight. 

You stand too still and the weather goes on without you. You stand too still and the stars streak on by. The years fly by in a blur of dreams and seasons, hemlines and lapel widths and the deep dive into fascism. The gusts and winnows of spent breath stippled into symbol, another sweep of shadow, the way the boundaries gibber into static and placeholders. The rain of days pressed into this stubborn clay, mud and oxidation and the host of habit. Something of the root, something of the crow, something lost both now and long ago.

contagion

It’s the fix of the dead eyed acolytes, it’s the spell check urgency of the unachieved corrections trailing the moment like train cars all rattling down the tracks, it’s the forced card emerging from the contingency of the gaffed deck. There’s no surprise despite the exclamation marks, no point outside this specific feeding frenzy.  Another fractured frame up, the picture never filled, the quest never completed. Only an anthem whispered in the night by all these chosen ghosts. Only a story you’re hoping would show.

There goes the scheme of sky, there goes the press of the stretch of shadows, another breath and counting. Wrong ears, wrong eyes, wrong time and wrong size. Once things start happening there’s never the right amount of telling, either ruckus or recipe, prophecy or hindsight ascendant. Creepy crawling along ley lines and reckless minds, insidious and vile in their fascinations. It goes slow, then speeds up, like Tina Turner rolling on the river. The allusion lingers despite the malingering of monsters.

There is little respite from the fray of this greasy gaze, slick eyed dicks and sickly lenses littering every map. Breathless voyeurs and their remote kin making hay with their obsessive limits as the days are shaped by action and its inverse. Smiles slick with glistening viscera upon souls only able to feel by first looking at the Joneses, the old plodding hierarchy of monkeys seen and done the only thinking humans really do. Swim with the current as the river transforms from rapids to waterfalls. As of this writing TLC’s prophecies remain largely ignored.

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.