falling forward

I should be sleeping, but I never seem to sleep when I need it. Instead it is loose ends and electric light and typing after trails I oughtn't even be thinking after. My bags are packed, the coffee maker is ready to go. All I need to do is get a little sleep, and the alarm will do the rest. All I need to do is get a little sleep, and I will be stumbling through another day of blunt labor and dull repartee. Once you get going, any mistake can become an occupation. Any little error can become the going trend.

I didn't see the stars spinning, hardly felt the wind lapping at my skin. I surrendered the front door early, locking out the skate boards and dog barks, locking in my indolence. I dozed there in my skin while the television sold its stories, and I worried after my wear.
A sore shoulder and a stiff neck. A bum hip clattering like sea rocked stones. The slightly sad, misfit feel I get whenever I get a good whiff of my life. I drank ice water, and I stared and stared. The walls flexed and swayed with shadows.

I am a lonesome sort, but every day I am asked and answered. I am a solitary type, but the conversation continues to delight and surprise. There are stars and there are strangers. There are stories I watch play out that astound me. There are stories I watch play out that I know by heart. Pretty little worlds full of sweetness and horror. Strange vast countries full of masks and bliss. I will dream some, then continue falling forward. Fall long enough and everything seems like flight.

waiting for my will to arrive

It isn't the mass, it isn't the gravity. They play their parts, but they don't hold me. It isn't the promise of heaven or the solace of death. No grace or extinction can beckon me towards tomorrow. It isn't this dose of blood, or these battered bones, or this burning ghost entangled in want and words that keep me bound to these lovely hours and wretched days. You are the tether, you are the claim. You are the stranger bound in these dim hopes that embrace my being.

You bear the mark of certainty, painted in shadows and salt. You keep the beat between my heart's gaps and failings. You wear the sun in your revealed skin, amid the sway of your hips you hold the mystery of the sea. You are not the words or the culture, but you carry them forward, paint them with your passions and your denials. That midnight crown you wear, not the poetry but that flesh that the poems ache after, shines in the thankless day. You are a promise you can not keep, a compromise of cast and tatters. We are tangled in these fortunes of flesh and failings. We signed away our souls before there were stars or spirits there to witness.

It is the distance that binds me, these ridiculous maps, these broken words. Skies dull with wonder, my life reflected in breath and sweat. My life in the broad periphery of the sweeping gaze of an owl busy in the hunt. All the smoke and cinders, the shed wishes and sullen kisses, the wanton moon and the dour tide. All of this infernal burning, these haunted branches and fuming sewers, this life of wounds and lusts and transubstantial spatter. I am broken and bled, feeding this illusion of continuity, standing too still too long. I watch the darkness as it gathers. I stare blindly, waiting for my will to arrive.

the limits of this light

My skin is the color of blood and dust, dull and blotchy in the limits of this light. I put the lights out so much earlier. Give my countenance a little ease from all that shine. Forget all the mirrors, ignore the peering window glass. Only the glow of this screen, empty and without purpose. Only these trailing words and simple mistakes. Nothing precious, nothing pretty. Just a sweat soaked shirt and a clock that doesn't even pretend to care. A sore neck and dim eyes, a dark room and a weary keyboard.

My hands are dowsed in shadows, sunken like so many wrecks before them, and livid in their task of plastic and pretense. They lead and they dodge, taking my advice on occasion. Then again they pick the keys for their qwerty placement, for the stretch or ease of each strike. They trail words and breaths held and smothered. They leave trails of statements that serve as maps and epitaphs. This work they pretend after, this task I can no longer separate from tedium. My hands caress the plastic alphabet, a little harder than is needed, but not as hard as the letters would like.

I empty the shelf of want when the room gets this quiet. I forget the polestars of tomorrow when my heart handles all the cards. When desire runs riot, I resort to ritual. When want fills this shape, I extinguish all the possible. Know yourself well enough, and it gets a little easier to bide all this time. Know yourself well enough, and it is hard to be in the same room so often with that jerk. I let the music pass through me, letting the songs linger but never stay. I let the feelings kick the bones until they bruise them, then I watch as they show themselves out. Alone does not need all this telling. Alone doesn't need these words following words, trailing the page in martial columns. So many words, when all I need are whispers. So much waste, when I am waiting for one held breath.

the wake

Something always ends up by the wayside. Something is always missed. No surprises-- almost everything happens at once. Even the things that happen to other people. Even the things that shouldn't happen at all. I go to sleep to the sound of the radio, to the crackling of the television. I go to sleep on the floors of strange houses, angry voices still pacing the halls. It is no wonder to be lost. It is no wonder to awaken so strange.

I wake up and the day is waiting. The dawn arrives, peeping through the blinds. Strange gusts of birds and sparse traffic. A knot in the wind, and anchor wed to flesh. The way the temperature is carried in the shoulders. The way the prayers seem to steam up from the grates. A flag loosed to the sky, save for the pole. A portion of smoke measured against this ravenous appetite.

There is always a part I meant to say. A few warm words, muttered in the hollow of a throat. That special phrase that runs circles around my heart. The streetlights flicker out, and there is water on the sidewalk. The early runner is visible by the light strapped to his head. He takes in stride the sprinklers and the refuse. We exchange greetings, then cling to separate directions. Distance is always growing. What was missed just trails in the wake.

trampled by the sun

Sleep long enough and the dreams will sweeten the deal. Sleep long enough, you wonder why you ever woke at all. The accumulation of hours finally weighed me down, and I slept through the windy morning into the windy afternoon. Tossing, turning, smiling at the devastating paces between life and dreams. Good old days that never really happened. Earnest lovers, close friends. The dead embrace without resentment, the lost finding their way back home.

I seldom hit the nail first time trying. I almost always miss my mark. I coat the moments in lapse and failure, the pressed flowers of fantasy, the treasured letters of contradiction. That precious ache of absence, that stolen moment that makes living seem so alive. The way your smile breaks the dull litany of sin and redress. The way your hair spills, the paths made of your flesh and my abandon. I said the same thing, again and again. I said it so much it couldn't possibly be true.

Let the light find you, leisurely and rapturous in that clouded window. Let the light follow, trailing sunlight in your wake. The color of your eyes, always uncertain to me, spilling into the languid atmosphere. The color of your eyes the only vision I will keep. Let the night that loved you give you away without a fight to a dawn so seductive and timeless. Let these pale and distant wishes be the least of gifts that find you after dreaming in the ragged dark. Your life, free and cherished. Your life, brighter for the darkness endured.

separate heavens

Everything should have slowed down. Every touch, every light should have been its own imprint. As if, when the time does finally arrive, it waits along side. As if when the truth is told it could do anything but leave a mark. Instead it is again the ebon in-between separating breaths, wading in where-ever the flesh runs shallow. My nature as age and pressure, my nature leaving prints on everything seen.

It never matters whether things are right. It never matters how hard it is falling apart. These parts were machined to feel the friction. These pieces are meant to write our ruin. The attention payed to accident, the dismal dismissal of the course as it is improvised. Lean in close, and the inevitable speak its mind. Lean in close, and the heat will shiver from your flesh.

This gratitude can only hold each error. This blessing can only be an echo of some lucky break. The room is cool and dark, and riven with claws. The door is cloistered in dust and light. I slow instead, while all reason passes. Heart and bone cling to the strings, building blisters from the only proof given for souls.

bust

No poems, no words, only sad secretions. A kind of unkind dementia, that sinless stone cast outside of the causal. A nervous tic that takes the place of paper. A spasm that inverts instance and ink. All the hours left wide open. All these seductions of the lovely and the brutal.

There is a shift in the sediment, the spill of a brilliant flow, the remix and the sampled piano. They spit that bitter wisdom, and my eyes are all but shut. The ache of traveling so far on skinned knees and vapors, the longing for the whole swallow, the named poison, fume, and fire. Always mistaken, always remiss. Flay the soul from the song, beat the dead horse into a lathered gallop, give me that gap and the fullness of your inattention. I could watch you do this through oblivion. I could watch you until every window goes black.

The long day played out, weary eyes and familiar failings. I am always a dose too much until I am not enough. I am always ready to grind the temple into dust. I am used to losing, used to being always on fire, always that self made spectacle and full-time preemptive counter-punch. The moon chased me home, and there is no wonder. The moon keeps pace, and I marvel at the ruin.

the script

These dreams were fed to the fire, the tattered comforts blazing so bright. This dawn was painted in the window while the motor was running. A stranger loosed upon strangers, glassy-eyed and wondering at the burn of it. The tired roll-call of the day and the day once more, the shadow cast casually aside. Thirst and hunger and a warry hand. Exhaustion bound to the intricacies of the clock, breaths just ticking away.

You moved in the stillness of the depths of sleep. Your eyes smoldered where there was no light. That heat, your gaze filling up the empty corners, washing away this scratchy skin. In the mysteries of another lost day, in the hollow sanctity of laden sand, in the lost words and ached for phrasings just this warmth is missed. That foundry of your stride, the metronome surety of your hips in motion and in repose. All awaits that sacrifice.

The day is fashioned from cameras. The day is made of lapse and fret. The time given up to the inclinations of children and the duties of the clinical bent. The hours left upon the altar of little left to do. Already the sky fills the window, and a thousand tiny tasks squeal and stomp. Everything awaiting this purported cause. Everything culled for the want of labor and the inevitability of work.

into the west

Awake to the shake and gasp of the gray traces, the broad trawl of dreams receding, leaving this strange and tattered world behind. It takes a minute to find the time and gather the ghost, sitting up still weary, acknowledging the gentle errors of the flesh. An ache here, a tether there, this sweet complicity of being an alarm of its own. Morning arrives, scratching at the windows. Morning arrives, before the fire finds the dawn.

The news of the day is a host of usual horrors. Death and strife and mayhem, an old friend slavering in his madness. Lose a little every day, life and all these wild appetites. Failings compound and virtues return to the age of myth. The strain of this long insurgency, facing that inevitable fall. The flesh aches and yelps. The sun is nowhere in sight.

Summon the shadows and shed this stillness. Waste this motion like all the wasted moments right before. It is a grand extravagance, to lean hard into each theme, taste the blood, feel the breakage. It is luxury's own soul to wear this ruinous continuity, this life and this living yet again. The neck pops, stiff in every attempt. The hip wails, angry at gravity and mass. It begins with these cold and lonely hands, finding their way in the dark. It endures long after the tardy sun has fled to its kingdom in the West. Futility a fuel, the direction is given. This reckless day is loosed again.

bright ideas and blown kisses

The stars are all lost, or maybe there is still too much light to see. The color of the horizon only another long shadow. The color of my eyes no color at all. There is to seeing too much wait left. There is in the sky nothing much at all. From the crack on the sidewalk to the streak of fading exhaust, time weighed out in separate measures. Everything there to build a map or write a book. Everything to count out all the bright ideas and blown kisses still in the wings.

I would say something, but the words only spill. I would split infinitely and define every article there, but you have already turned it off. The dusk fumbles in the door while I try to settle on a tact, or make out a trail. All the margins full of my muddled notation. Every line parted wide enough to let the meaning fall away. This breath, that name, the silly game that was never played well enough for even the narrowest sort of contention. Untuned guitars and bug bites, all the streets choked with near misses and could have beens. The grizzled remainders of a bad beat, the sound of something best left unsaid. The day is only different in the lighting.

I gather all the shards and cinders, sweeping up the tailings of your spell. Greasy ash and dusty feathers, a scattered circle and an enchantment scratched into skin. So it is you shed your story. So it is the candles are all snuffed. I spread my guesses out before I folded. It isn't that I thought there would be winning. I just try to lose at a less startling rate. The night arrives, and the mirrors are dirty. This flesh so wrought with endings. This heart so dull with want.

the drab half-through

You wait for the light to change, though the sky is all the same. A push of gray and blue, littered with the reverent sway and flutter of a sea of limb and leaf. A crow skates by missing pin feathers. If this slows it, it doesn't seem to show. Green light and you follow the painted purpose of the lane. Sometimes even you go with the flow.

Stand in line, wait your turn. This is the way of commerce, the place where they leave you once there is nothing left of you except these exchanges of tender. You wait to confess your wants and lacks, then pay to have them amended. You work the human side, smiling light and gentle. You give up some currency, you get the thing you came for, plus a few spat pleasantries as customs allow. You leave with an admonition of glad fortunes. Even the doors tell you what to do.

The mistake is tricks taken for craft. The mistake is thinking pieces make the puzzle. The will is always hard at work, shaking the cage and waving lost flags. The self is always mistaking justice for selfishness. It isn't that you were made this way-- the world grew up around you. You were built in history, and can only operate according to a few cherished mistakes. You were built before these ways and words, and can only see the world for what it should have been. It is over already, it ended long ago. You know this already, and have no reason to cede the day.

recompense

The radio crackled, the usual admonitions about traffic and explorations of the demography of war. It was all sunlight and the glint of steel, exhaust fumes and tarmac and a hazard every mile. Something so strange about an old commute, revived after so much time buried in rocks and dirt. Something so strange about a life that just won't be murdered, moving again towards another standing still. The radio spit static, the station all but faded, so far from the source.

Plodding through the paperwork, proving myself for a little taste of further uncertainty. The conference room quite, office types flitting from one concern to the next, that perpetual water cooler feel of the sort of workplace I have never known. I pause between scribbles-- almost everyone knows me. Long time no see, I thought it was you, looking good. Pleasantries and levity, from the root to the bough. From the earth to the sky of the predictable, all air conditioning and the hum along of that florescent sky. At least I didn't have to dress up. There is only so much summer can endure.

Waiting at the Doc in a Box for the requisite physical, folding arms to avoid rubbing elbows, caught in the flow of so many interrupted lives. Cell phones and epithets, scorn and sighs and kids in scrubs. I wait and am weighed, dance on request and piss as instructed. The tubercular scratch just beneath the skin bleeds in contemplative drops. The med tech laughs in all the right places. Outside the sky is coddled fire and fitful steel. I start the car and ease into traffic. Made from the stretch of hours and the condolence of crowds, I move again to stand in place. Everything left price and recompense.

savor

The lingering wind rustles all the stars, the mocking bird singing in full throat in the warm and restless night. I sowed sleep like a handful of hope and seed, waiting to find you dreaming. Birds sing and stars wander, slipping beneath your clothes, scratching at your legs. There is a calm to this rich subsistence, an ease to this immeasurable distance. A breath, an exhalation, then another portion held ransom for a little spark for these tides of blood and wonder. I gaze into the heavens to stare into your absent eyes. I whisper a secret that you knew before I thought to speak. I whisper without thinking or regret.

The hours have vanished into your dense abandon, every minute smoothed into your waiting flesh. You stretch and breathe, you toss and smolder. You emanate these fixed ribbons of ache and claim every adoration. It is of the set of your clever bones, the sway of your earnest tongue, the tidal grind of each muscle always in motion. It is in the nature of stars, this fine hunger, this lovely engine with-in. Your lips part, your tongue soothes your teeth of their very nature, the spill of night a river, your soul the inevitable sea.

My feet find purchase upon dull pavement, numb to the cracks and crevices, steady for all the gaps and sinkage. The breeze leavens the heat that lingers, too much sun and too little labor settling bets with my skin. My heart lumbers along, its rhythm and fortitude both uncertain. A piece of it wanders, measuring your stride, savoring your steady diaspora. All these stars and years only the foundation for the painting of this dark and brilliant firmament. Time stitches all its stories like loosed shadows to our heels. This broken toy, this shattered puzzle. Somehow that kiss endures, out here in the elements. Out here where all the pieces need to fit.

unbidden

The dream is so dull and typical that it was scarcely worth the sleeping. Stray cats and chain link fencing. The way that the wind has with the tides of trash. Waking is so similar it is hard to find a reason to stay awake. The body creaks and crackles, revealing new complaints and elaborating on the familiar themes of old ones. The mirror reveals fresh creases in the face that will not fade. Lagging chores and lapsed duties, the draw of the sweep of tree limbs waving to the heavens. Another ailment bent by little inclination, another nation to abandon, a stone skipped across the sea.

These scarred and unsteady fingers do their part, lumbering across these mysteries of language and plastic, typing out these lines that will not hold true. One tact taken, another direction unfolds, and the words all chase their tails. I watch the hands, I watch the screen. These sentences come, harsh and unbidden. Between the fitfulness of poor sleep and the parsing of these gray words, this small chore. The shadow laden with the heaviness of what isn't lit. The lingering ghosts, the pretty distances.

A sunken guitar, the voices of the dead rising from these parcels and tides of electricity. The sedentary magic of this or that opening secret passages and removing age old seals. The music plays and plays. I linger near this portal, bombarded by particles, ions leavening the spirit loose. These lives lived with-in the looking glass, bordered by summer air and the holes that culture digs in time. This life, lost in the tall weeds, wandering through vacant lots and broken fences. Words unspoken, cast into past tense. Words unspoken, written down the long lines of departure on the sands of this vast decline.

matter

The prayer beads are worried. The ritual spilling out of the restless spirits and into those busy hands. Smooth wood warmed by the work of fingers, by the grace of living flesh. Thoughts folded around the expelled breath and the scant syllables, spoken so often that their meaning is worn. The thinking even leaving everything up to the muscle memory, thoughts all but gone from the animal action. The world briefly opening, or disappearing from existence.

The world is full of strange magics, every light and trick explicable in next to every way save as experience. The feel is the brush work, the mind the canvas, soul the pigment, and matter the object that is always touched as subject. So much work, and the painting is never finished. So much to say, all the words leave to find another roost. As little as we know or see, we still manifest much weight upon these mistakes and visions. What more can misgivings grant? Craft vast wisdoms from our endless errors. Invent apprehensions to fill every gap and blank.

I am mostly empty. Full of holes, broken in many places, unable to ingest the experiences that make for faith. Unable to turn my ignorance into something past hesitance. I am blue and selfish, mottled by distrust and indulgence. I am caught by the ordinary spells of beauty and happenstance, attuned to the workings of beast and thief. The barn owl that circled silent, ten foot above the street at dawn, staring at me because I whistled shrill and loud, before it turned a wing to the steady wind and flew away through a four-way stop. The dragonfly that flitted so quickly in the door that I closed it in before I knew it was there, a glistening rapacious critter, all speed and armor and hunger. I am moved by the coyote and the crow, by the flocks and packs and swarms of the earth. I am moved by the towers of glass and steel, the crowds of ache and purpose. I do not know, and that is enough of a reason. I can not know, and that is all the matter.

she waits

This song is the tumbling of the earth, this song is the spilling of the sky. It is the blood trickling from the flesh, and the ghost hungering at the open wound. It is the work of roots and the way of stones. This song is never the words, just the singing. It is the air at the edge of the atmosphere, all those stars whispering their cold secrets in the language of infernos. This song is always shedding its perceptible skin. The color of a shadow, the color of a kiss. The color of cold water swallowed on a sunny day.

In her stillness, she still sings. That touch of light, that caress of shadow. With a move she banishes all doubt, leaving all the clinging and the aching in her wake. One move, and she is the soul of certainty, centered and glowing, wild and unfailingly polite. Even her distance is a kindness, too close only bound to bruise an ill prepared heart. In her nearness, all darkness gathers. Her gaze promises what mere flesh could not endure.

The song is only the start of this oblivion. Midnight skies rife with unseen wings, every being too warm and alone. This song is all phrasing and relief, the long sustain that speaks of enduring loss. She is rhythm, she is sway. The timbre of the reckless tide, the limber dance of light upon the endless procession of waves. This song is the long journey at last at an end, the wind just every breath falling in mad release. The stars scatter their gifts unbidden, the night crawling blindly through the streets. She waits, indifferent and amused. She waits for her singing to end.

tourist

It is in the last daylight gleaned from pine needles. It is in the wings unfolded against the warm wind, three crows embracing the west. Shouts and squeals from errant children pursuing their quests of noise and play, hanging like embers in the air. It is that sheen of sweat glistening in the sunshine, the sound of paws treading dust. The sky falls down, the day dies in denial, the night awaiting the typical trysts and uproar. The world waxes and wanes, all rush and faces, all bust and burn. The mystery doesn't bother with reasons.

From the gleaming dawn to the rusted dusk, I am at a loss. Things move, too slowly or too quickly. I go from the surety of dreaming to the labored plottings of life, from restless sleep to sluggish alert with little alteration of affect. I trade wound for weakness, mistake for theft. Clotted breath and rapt perspiration, stammered speech and staggered rhythm. Not so much witness as by-stander. Not so much traveler, but at best a tourist in the gear-work of the world.

Gray thoughts flecked with sentiment, spackled with the grave and the libidinous, I work at forging this forgetting. The landmarks of her lingering gaze, the brickworks of her labyrinthine mind. The words she would spit and sunder, her provocations only half in jest. I embrace the distance, the indistinct clamor of bone and breed. From hawk to owl, from crow to swift, from blue to black I stumble. I read every sign on the corner, I read every track in the sky. I speak a few words aloud, to myself as if to another. I speak a few words aloud, letting them leave at last.

ordinary

They worship the light then curse the shadows it casts. They love the filth then hate the rats it beckons. They are tribes and they are nations. They are faiths and reasons and all the alibis written to save a name. They live as if they were the reflection and not the face that is captured. They live as if they were innocent, explaining away every atrocity as if words had the power to erase actions. As if embracing amnesia made angels of them all.

I am no better. The same crimes without the apologia. The same evils without the religion to make it right. Even my tries at kindness do not come without a bleeding. Even my best intentions have beat downs attached. There is no fit, there is no comfort. There is only means, never meanings. There is only talk, never a common tongue. The hard earth and the empty sky. Crowds and crowns, covens and choirs. There is little but the pretending left.

So there are stairs and there are doorways. Entrances and exits, where little but walls abide. The collisions and the pretense, the lying and the prayers. The most fertile soil smothered in pavement, the brightest minds bent spent on death and flagellation. Bless the banquet and abandon all labor. Bless the children then leave them to scrape and starve. Blame every victim while you gorge upon their guts and blood. Do not ask again for my favor. Do not ever meet my gaze. All that I have left is mercy, and fury, and tears.

even so

It is small comforts and dark thoughts, another midnight burned down to ash, another day awaiting this fool's pursuit. The wind at the windows, the light in the hall. Fill the hands with habits, stifle the eyes with any glow. Another word, another breath, another deal made with death. Tomorrow and tomorrow, that dread proposition, that forgotten faith. Sleep comes and goes. The night moves on without you.

Abandon this procession. Turn away from the lamp and your leanings. There is that enduring sadness, but that is only the sound of your soul. There is that usual litany, but those are only the words in the play. Things get worse, and things get better. No one is counting up your sins or waiting for your prayers. Take whatever portion you can bear, knowing that there are always prices, always burdens given with the gift of living. Feel what you can abide, then feel too much more. The world turns. Everything is change.

The stage is crowded, and overflows with clowns and villains. No-one knows you. Even your friends are strangers. You follow the lines, you scuff up your eyes with useless seeing. You sweat and ache and toil, and for all that effort there is precious little reward. There isn't a prize that feels like winning. There isn't a victory free of wounds and pain. Take your place, because only you can do this. Take the stage, because there isn't any one else. The scene opens, and it will end. Make do with that light while it lasts.

absence sings

It is the skin's own addiction, that last hour leaving dust on the walls. It is the very moment, sliding through your fingers. Something shuffling just out of view, a sound like dead leaf walking. Something breathing in the dark, a feel like a dream waiting just around the corner, longing to go bad. Time is a notion attached to the changes in the things around us, an ablution granted in waves and miniatures. Will is an whim attached to the changes we pretend towards in our selves. The touch lingers, absence sings.

This is the story of the window before it was a window. This is the story of the glass before it was sand. The slow river, the glazed gaze of emptiness. The wish before the ache occurs, the breath before it snuffs the candle's flame. Something is always starting while memories swarm and roost. Something is always out there, if only the strain of language leaning in. The night seeps in through every emptiness. Whether thought or apparition, the night floods on through.

The clockwork remains only grammar, the glamour of the philosophized consumed by the way of the world. Sweet words, harsh tongues, simple whispers and casual flayings. The matter gathered in books and in beings. Ten thousand ghosts all talking at the same time, and the stillness clatters against the walls. This pause, this gap, this stretch-- cages and castles, kindness and crime. The fingers tremble in the naked air, never seeming to fit. That touch long gone, haunting these measures of bare flesh.

hidden

It is more than the miles between us. It is more than the sun in my eyes. The dusk is all nets and tethers, tamping down the powder, capturing so much with wings. Then the night arrives, all whispers and grasping hands. The world is too much to wait for. The world is too much to know.

Past midnight and the sound of feet, the sad lament playing on the radio. The hallways echo, stained with rat traps and dust. All these animal noises, lit by circumstance, filling the air. Noble brass and ardent gas, everything on the rise between these musty walls. All these skins and scratching, this sinking feeling all that I know.

It is less than a moment, it is less than chance. That moon whittled down so, smiling from between leaf and roof. That perpetual polka of Mexican music driving by, the air still brittle with birdsong. Once you were there, then so much left of your being gone. Salt on the flesh, the tang of smoke and want. Every ache painted so fully, the pleasure always left hidden behind some eyes. A road full of gravel, a sky still dazzled with stars.

the want

There are words I would whisper, as if you were near. There are things I would say, mingling wishes with your flesh and blood. The night bends around every opposition. The night abides every twist and turn. The wind carries my breath as it extinguishes my voice. It wanders until the words are lost forever. Only the want left from my breath remains.

It falls to you to listen, just as it falls to your blood to find the flow. This tide is immeasurable. This tide is lost to the stars and the kindling crackling beneath your feet. Twigs that shatter, small bones that you tread into oblivion, walking too far into the night. The air is full of hauntings and gleanings. The air is all the wishes ever made, bled into one. It is up to you to heed the warnings. It is up to you to wade into the flood of ache and need, abandoning every breath to the hunger that would swallow you whole. The choice glitters in the starlight. The choice sings in your bones.

My voice is fresh from oblivion. My voice is soundless and hollow, full of the unsaid and the never meant. I am long gone from anywhere you might find me. The loitering near your lips, the lingering in your blood. The grapes long lost from the vine, giving license to that fullness of the wine. The path long subsided into the wilderness, offering home to the one submitted to this loss. The wind falls down, racing past your questions, smoothing through your hair. The world long lost to miracles, offering this much magic still.

forgot

There were details that seemed important. Things that should be noticed, at least mentioned in passing. Words swarmed around them, and for a moment they were blazing bright in the lonely hovel of my mind. Now I look for them and they are gone. Forgotten is as good as never was, in these slow hours. Forgotten is as good as formless amid all these timid words.

I lost the watch, I forgot my way. The dreams run so vivid while the days blur and fade. Some small joke, some little levity. Something to cling to in the bright heartless blues and the warm dark reasons. You know for a moment it matters. It seems like a sort of proof, the answer to some question waiting up the road. Then it is oblivion atop oblivion, strata without differentiation. The buried treasure becoming only another lost hope. Another fossil trapped in stone.

When I began I had a story. These years passed, and I am left holding little but explanations. Schemes and theories and a childhood left on the fritz. The words obscure the landscape, they fog the faces and steal the names. The clutter limbo of lost loves, the muttered prophecy and the steam on the mirror. There is nothing to say, if I am asked. There is no one asking, whatever there was unsaid.

here in the ever after

There is that first light switch, touched out of habit, a muscle memory of deep magic. There is that single web spun across the walk, that hint of silver, that spell of silk. There is the lively waves of wind and leaf, the strange shouts of fear and isolation, the flesh livid with sweat and breath. Here in the ever after, everything is rivers. Here in the ever after, everything is the sea.

We linger in the reach of shadows, we harbor generous impulses of love and destruction. Eternity never that shining tower, but the subsiding into absence. That furtive exit, that secret sameness that arrives and departs in waves and pieces. We deny the charms and lies, out here in the long odds. Out here every star is lit with-in us and we are always out of our depths.

There are the old words, built out of air and time. There are those common spells, cast from the anchor of each direction and every animal want. There are the wicked works and the call to slaughter, the sadness built into these gimmicked systems. We are farther from the blood, so close to that birthing shore. The salt of seas, the tricks of time, the bounty of probability always our credo in chance and change. We all are falling out of this listing firmament. We are all always sinking into the light.

earthbound

These early wings, so dark and swift, seem leavened with a sweetness. A gentleness bordering on the shy despite such speed and skill. It is that observers error, to assign the pleasures of seeing and the humor of the mind to the subject seen. That capable mistake that we use again and again to paint our world. Still the swallows spire and dip, looping and darting in the liberal wind. That moment that Hamlet knew would be, and so let be.

How straight these broken roads and sidewalks, even considering this bend of thought. Weeds and dust, greens and golds. The sun blinding in the windows, the weight so laborious to hold. These little strolls tell our fortunes, the stubbed toe certainties that we earthbound abide. Drowsy or sharp as blades, lively or slow as stones, we step into our stories. Every day, it is life of the stage.

These flocks flit and feed, the abundance offered again alludes. Sprinkler showers and curbside breakfasts, songs biding their time upon the power lines, songs written anew and cycled again and again. Tires hiss and engines rumble. Whether we sprint or stroll, it is always the show. Whether our thoughts are captured or alight towards the sky, it is now that we are leaving. These studied postures, these hurried breaths. Our thanks are rendered, the show goes on.

true or not

It's no use. I can't separate these sifted longings from the long answer after your name. I can't turn off the blue movies that play in my blood every time I see your eyes. There are no photographs to tatter, no letters left to send. Every post is past tense, though I play act at calm. I hold you so close that even the distance you keep is gathered in my arms. I would litter your life with secrets. I would ruin your life night by night.

I'm no use. I thread each stitch with razor wire, I stipple my kisses with lies. You would swear by me though I seldom trust my self. The words I whisper, the salt I spill, the grasp of the luckless and the company of thieves: I have left it all in heaps and blunders. Every day wasted and tomorrow certain to never arrive. I would cling to your bitter. I would steal your flowing tears.

It is all lose: from the hours enshrouded to the dreams buried in warm hands and rough kisses, I only offer the surety of regret. The moonlit peals of your fleshed bared and breathless, the sloe-eyed weight of mornings of fresh coffee and bad habits. Folded poems and worn-through oaths. Cooling pillows and tangled sheets. Every passion, every promise, only evidence of my every caveat once we cross. True or not, it is only you that matters. True or not, I won't ever stop saying what you mean.

feather

I can hardly keep an eye upon the bright horizon. I can hardly look to see at all. Some days blunt, some days dwindling, some days left staring into the empty air. I gather the pieces I missed at the last sweeping. I make a little puzzle before throwing everything away.

The days first crows crowed in tandem, some turf war fought out atop a phone pole. I skirted the schoolgrounds, my mind made of strays. Last nights revels of cardboard and black powder having long died out, now only leaving the lost pets out scrambling, finding their way on unfamiliar streets. The dull sound of footfalls making this dull set inclusive and complete. A rhyme comes to me, and I am almost singing. The ache of the pavement, the thud of this dawn.

Every reaching still feels like evasion. Every grasp I gather somehow ends up lost. The sound of a voice, or the clatter of dishes. The longing to talk out something that isn't really there. The day turns blue and the wind makes its paces. I stare in some direction, and then I look away.

fireworks

All the smoke has gone to heaven, the ashes left us to build what we might of this world. Blood drawn in tiny vibrant vials, filling guts with the potential for eggs, wings soft and translucent in the still air. Breath spent on aimless conversation, stained like glass, drained of any but the most measured of purpose. How subtle the infiltration when so little spirit is left.

The random allotments peal and retort, a boom here, a spark there. Whatever seems to be deemed worth all this hew and cry. A lit punk explodes with audible disappointment, someone's 808s making more impact that all that wrapped powder spent. The wind is as gentle as a vague hint, cluttered with silt and ghosts. There are no rumors left, out here in the guileless night. Only the lit and the unlit, and all the variations in between.

You know enough to hope for nothing. You know enough to feel the limits left allowed. Staring towards the stars, speaking about nothing. This etiquette of a history long since rendered into myth, war stories and antiqued laughs. This dead end engaged in antecedent and dissembly. Tailings and slag and a miser's portion, this inertial libation. Another habit tipped, like a gentleman's hand or a braggart's bluff. Another small ritual spent as the darkness consumes it all.

temper

You killed the Buddha as introduction, kissed the sky as an excuse. All these limits seem to spill from your pockets, miracles from the earth leavened by your feet. It is only the blunt compromise of the familiar, the blur cut in the air by distance and heat. It is only the beauty of incompletion, your life a puzzle never to be solved. The water will evaporate, sipped directly from the soil baked by the immodest heat. You will be gone in a moment's notice, though your presence can do little but linger.

We are all waiting, to be freed from these poor choices and bad memories. We are always awaiting some departure or arrival. Life is in the timing, life is in the tides. The shimmer of the sand, the sheen upon the sea. Some would smoke it down to ashes, others would place it in a jar. It might be a flicker, it might be eons. It might be root or bloom or the dead leaf a-skitter on the wind. Life is abundant and sublime, and only known in the living. Ready or not, here it comes, always on the go.

They placed you in boxes, they kept you in their crypts. They made you dance to that awful song that only lived in their heads as it played again and again. They told you your Lord died so that this would be. The crucifix was broken by action and word. Yet you are all that dancing, your are the recording made of that song playing out. Days of drought and terror, nights made from substances rarer and so much more horrifying. You still somehow evaded and endured. I would say something, but you would already know. All the music and the singing. Your life so beautiful you could get lost just living it.

equalize

It isn't always me, just the skin I woke up in. It isn't just the name, it is the nature I have shed. Sparks light in the lung dark sky, stars and airplanes and satellites loosed to spy and whisper. The sickly glow arises all around, street light and houses and traffic all conspire to blind us to the night. The wind dries the sweat from my flesh, my hands feel more like gloves each day. This ache is not the measure of the world, only of the mistakes of my reckoning. Sad to fair so poorly at the only work one does, making these faulty maps, adjusting the wires to their analogous senses. Sorry to wear this shadow when everything around is all so dark.

I broke this soul into pieces so long ago, when the chores I had and the passions I endured were wroth with opposition. The divisions of utility often seem like those of calamity when you learn to tune the self as a stranger. This shard for the feelings of people, this one for the feelings of your own. It is a kind of acting, and a kind of hiding. It gives me direction when things come undone, but when things are slow and quiet all stillness sometimes riots. Parts are all provisional, parts purely weaponized. Parts are the echoes of the selves so long left on shelves that they have all but spoiled.

There is a battle to be had. But the fighting is so far from me the only damage I can manage is collateral. There is romance in the air, but the wind leaves everything unsettled. There is work to be done, but I still have yet to claim the crown from all the carnage I won in my indolence. The struggles that you must always choose you, but the fray that you yet may is always waiting for your commission. I like the ruckus of ruddy nature spilling over onto all these slabs of human certainty, I love the clear and inscrutable actions of bird and beast. Wood and creature are comfort, but the empty gesture is still my major skill. Sad to be caught indoors on a night so fine. Sorry to be looking after labor while there is so much work left to do.

extinguish

Bright eyes and heavy lids--
this feeling gives way with
the measure of a single blink,
that long stare so full--
longing and meaning and
unfettered animal bliss--
erased by a single instance.
Passion always tugs at beginnings,
polar attunements and the realigning
that makes such a mess of crossing stars.
Breath and fire entwined
those Escher tensions that impose
these sedentary limitations--
one thing then the other,
extinction imbued with noted choice.
Human limits seem the only things
untouched by exaggeration.
The flame embraced as eternity
snuffed without a thought.