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Never mind the warmth of the sun. Never mind the threadbare sheets and the tangled dreams. Night fell. All the stars came out. All the birds folded their wings away, leaving flight to other heights. Nothing was gained in that thin remainder. Nothing was left to hold my place.

There were words scratched into memory. There were letters left folded and unread. Places marked in books never shelved. Names inscribed and never read. These hours that idle and spill. These swarms that flood the skies and brush. This skin marked, again and again.

I found my feet hard to find. Stumbling to them as I lost my way. Staggering under the press of flesh and the ache of lingering on. The path of the fool, the path of disaster. These stitches missed in counting, these seams hidden between meanings. The night falls and the world eludes me. I limp along, lost to the mystery that compels.

fable

Dusk settles and the mosquitos descend towards the flesh, salt and sweat and that dwindling bar of light painting the broad horizon. The green over blue view of that brilliant sky gradually extinguished, leaving a starker, denser palette huddling in my eyes. Colorblind, I see better after dark. I am waiting for that first full press of dark. It feels as if I am waiting for you.

The night is warm, and deep with stray imaginings. Soft conversations and coffee flavored kisses. The sounds of companionable laughter and the drift of eyes and fingers. The whisk of clothing sliding off and the echoed voices mingling in the steam of a shower. All these tired treasures and silly leanings. The weight of absence you assign to everywhere in the world you aren't.

It is a fantasy with-in a fantasy, a tale that requires all that is known to bent and twisted, reality tied into knots and bows to match these dull whispered wishes, these yearnings that burrow beneath the skin of every night. I am a stranger and you are a ghost, the past seeping up the drain into the present. I am all words and bones, you are all blood and fevers. It was a lie before, when it was real. Now, as heat and shadow crowd these rooms and sweat beads upon my face and limbs, you are a story made up to explain the vanishing of the moon.

inertia

I never really knew what to do with a day so bright or a sky so blue. I never really figured out just where to look so I wouldn't have to shield my eyes from the sun. I cast my shadows, I take my clues. I wear my sun glasses and keep my eyes on the road. I keep my head down and try hard to hold my tongue. Nobody's fooled.

Coffee from the drive-through, a quick visit to the bank, I pause for a moment and fill up my tank. Without the commute I spend an awful lot less on gasoline. Without working I spend an awful lot less time on the road. I lean against my car as I fill up on gas, watching the traffic fill the futile intersection. I watch as people go about their lives. Without a routine I am always in this sort of trouble.

I could go back to bed and sleep until dusk. I could roll over and sleep until tomorrow became today again. I feel the long slow slide flowing beneath my feet. I scuff my heels on the vast decline. The sky so bold and blue, the earth all green and teeming with appetite. Another day lost to me in the details. Another day peeled from the calendar and tossed aside.

cepa andaluza

I know that she is writing me all of the time, in sky and cloud, in cat and owl. She is leaving every track allowed. I know that she is nearing close, headlines and poor jokes, the trembling nethers of the very earth below. Each shadow cast a kiss I just had missed, proof that I should begin the search for truth. Each of us unrequited, though in different means and ways.

There is a weight to this shadow. There is a heft to this sudden wind. The world telling me secrets that I am just quick enough to know I missed. Always asking, always watching. The romance of the hunt, blood warm and threat stifling the air. I watch the stars sifted through clouds, the wind unwavering and alert. I scan the sleeping hum of the silent street. The strange way nothing happening seems so livid and aware. Unseen eyes that promise, always almost there.

She always whispers, always leaves some trail of crumbs I crush unnoticed. Such a stark concern, such fine romance. She whispers in glee and sorrow, in anger and regret. I never listen well enough. So I hold this grudge and carry this torch. I plunge headlong into the danger of her wake, these nights dense with possibility. Following her trail, risking the last trap on the chance that I was wrong.

calling

Smoke curls away, some dismal signal, some coveted fire abides. Gray skies and the dance of flecks of ash. Fingertips stained, skin cracked by hot embers and cold dry wind, the vague painted on look of concentration cast towards the earth or air. Dogs shuffle and paw at the damp ground, the weather turning cold again as the day dwindles into cinders and afterthoughts. The flesh endures these wan toxins and the flecks and sparks of perpetual change. The flesh continues asking, even though all the questions are through.

You are somewhere, tangled in the atmosphere, your tongue cluttered with things you can not say. You shine, layered in light and sky. You glow, a ghost of untrammeled notions, a measure of unventured depths. You shoulder burden after burden, always laden with more than your fair share. You sort through the stacks, always able to find just the right spine to crack. The words always find you, and you treat them well for their efforts. If I knew it, I would say your name.

There aren't fortunes made with the little I happen to know. There aren't fates awaiting my change of color or my shift of thought. I name the aches and watch the fauna and gain nothing for any victory won. I sort some words, take some notes, leaving with a little less every time. It is true that I could find you, divine your traces and pick up your track where ever your feet have fallen. But my talent is in the telling. My calling is only the sorting of the shambles, the discovery of what it takes a thing to break. Every story ever written, an aim towards the end.

irreverence

The sky did its part, bleeding out gray and beaded water across the dampened map. Rain tangled with leaf and bough, spattering the pavement and slicking back all manner of boundless green. The hours just steam away, lapped up by the ravening wind, poured into the clay bidden earth. The storm leavens whatever's left of the afternoon, soaking each entreatment, drowning ever prayer. I watch the street, all cars and crows and raucous conspiracies of the other usual suspects. I watch the world as it is watered, punctuating it every now and again. Habits die the hard uncertain deaths of any deity faith can manage. The rain falls, whatever the words might want or waste. The rain falls.

There is never a shortage of gods and ghosts to haunt the shadows and cling to parsed reason. Evoked in all manner of blaspheme and epithet, damnation rings out its claims and callings. Hell and blessings stain each naked breath, shouts and curses trailing children and their dim keepers alike. Never a quiet moment that can not be cut with a careless tongue. Never any idiocy so startling or dull that a call for God can't make worse. Always I take whatever sermons are offered by the trees and the crows, and leave the rest for whatever cries and screams the rest of the chattering public deem worthy. A mother motherfucks her goddamned kids, dragging her shopping into the house. Blessed be, and then some.

Call down the rain in sheets and floods. Call down the storm in rattling thunder and fiery flash. The scrub pine drips and sways slightly, the mocking birds divining their next battle plan from grasping limbs. A scrub jay calls its threat from the fence post and the power line, supping on all manner of creature the rain would drown. A host of gulls sort out the field out back, taking the sleek skies in force. Nature endures insult and egress without any favor or hope. It is the theater of deep time, of the tireless cycling of probabilities and likelihoods over these plodding brutal millennia, each species winning only respite from the broad course of eventuality. Each appetite a calling, sounding the culling of the hungry and the fed. Each day a verdict reached and read. The rain falls.

renunciation

I've given up on starlight-- it mostly takes its own sweet time to arrive, hiding somewhere in the depths of time. I've given up on wishes spent and hopes deferred. It has been a week since I shook off what gainful employment I had and ventured into the landscape of these residual outcomes and epic fails. Some battlefield shed of anything but the aftermath. Some action bent around the gravity well of dismal choice and foolish heart, pinpoints of brightness lost in the long everafter before me. Flecks of ash and bouts of rainfall. Shades of gray, depths of shadow. Alone again in these numbing crowds.

The pavement has dried again, in these open moments before the storm, water always finding another level, the sodden gutters and the thirsty wind. A gray and white stray drinks from a puddle, eyes alive, watching for the least proof of inevitable betrayal. Children run and squeal, working all the play they can into this brief respite from the pouring rain. The crows work their rounds in slow circles, following human carelessness and the opportunities provided by riding the heretic winds. They call from the highest vantage, their voices the prototypes for every unseemly machine destined to break the silence of the sky. Everything fits so well when enough is broken.

You will find me in the moonlight. You will see me all a-shambles in the drowsing rain. The headlight flit of a ragged profile turning away into deeper shadows. A trail of smoke idling in the eaves. It is all renunciation. It is all apostasy and bad timing, the certainty of the world expressed in fits and stammers. Words written once all the telling is finished. The story crawling on once the epilogue is done. A life mostly living, whatever secrets are stored or squandered. The reach of light always exceeding the capacity of any eyes to see.

promised

It is all downhill from here, the gutter gathers it dues. Not the stars supposed from that poet's vantage, not the abyss warned of by some old-time biblehand. Just the ease of water finding out. Just the drift of layer upon layer of ash and shit and dust. Too early or too late-- I never remember which one or the other. It is only where I end up, drifting awake too long. It is the sigh of where all this dreaming starts.

There is no need to delve into each symbol. There isn't reason to go and find small secrets out. It isn't that all the mystery is spent, life all explained and laid out. It is only the limits we learn, never quite catching that break. We explain it all with our casts of thousands. We press into clay and bleed it black into dry reeds. Ghosts and dollars, and all those nested numbers. Gnats always in the air, no matter how tight the screening. Take it for granted that these words are all but spent. Take it for granted there is something more.

This is a sad frontier, where I have stumbled. The night is never dark or empty. Always a light on, ever the rattling pipes. Rain batters the windows, becomes a swift drift of hail. Sleep pouring down in sheets and stones. The frozen kiss of time undone. A little kindling, a little fire. I carry what I can, fumbling after a light.

ache and ease

Is it the wind again, is it the spattering rain? Is it the gray tresses of another midnight storm, is it the shape of the crawling dawn? The weather is always tapping on the windows. The weather is always trampling down the roof. I do not know what it was that woke me. I do not even know that I was really asleep. So goes the earnest work of dreaming. So goes the workings of the world before the dawn.

I lean above the stippled pavement. I pause before the shape of the falling rain. Each breath flows clean and cool, the air shed of bad actors and minor ailments. That enduring hush of water falling, the street slaked and the gutter sluiced. All manner of stream and river trickling down every skin. The tune rooted so deeply that it blooms in each unguarded moment. The song of ache and ease freed into the gray traces.

Take it as it was once written. Let it be a prophecy for all these loosed tomorrows. Let it be an alibi for each accident found out in the clockwork of the day. You never know when any dream might end, in fright or in passion comes the broad dissolve. The mundane and the fantastic bled out by heavy walls and seeping lights. All those faces and names coming back as this broken vessel fills yet again. The day arrives, all bells and news and boots on the ground. The day arrives to wake you in the night.

punta umbria

The frogs sounded out in the schoolyard for the first time in many year last night. I was out on the back porch, lurking in shadow and smoke. Rats scrabbled from the roof to the scrub pine that leans dangerously over the house, scampering and scratching in the night. The rain had let up for a few hours, and that calm that is the voice of all manner of prognostication stretched itself out in languid certitude. That humbling crush of the air itself slowing long enough its exodus to pool and still before it runs away in gust and breeze. I went inside for the long night left me. The world without me was in order.

Tonight the winds are on the rise, and I envy them their wanderings and sprints. I am heavy with heat and torpor, dumb and dirty and more than a little insane. I feel the dull cry of my beating heart, I taste the flat bitter note of old coffee and a strange metallic tang on my teeth. I live here where idle moments dwell, in caves and boxes and in holes dug hastily in damp earth. I live on the scrapings of human kindness and the spillings of a culture of glut and greed. The winds run wild, and I am a small still shape, spitting fumes and epithets.

The house is thick your absence, full of these articles of spent faith. Electric light plays electric tricks, a shape moving in the next room, your hand reaching for the door. The air is layered with these shed hopes and disheveled dreams. Your dress folded over the back of the rocking chair, your underwear tossed about the room. These years that speed away, growing small and distant, fleeting and dismissive of my touch. These years all gathered in scars and knots, the tangled stories of cities and all these gathered strangers we spend between lives. Some sense each breath holds, of where it is going and where it has been. Some measure of want against the fluidity of the world pacing in the night.

action

The gray rolling sky sheds rivers of mirrors upon the rough commitment of the pavement. Small slate reflections of this world so loved by light. Flecks of ash levitate, boundlessly free of flame and breath. Before me the parsed poetry of weather unencumbered by doubt or faith. The silly trickling of the mind as it tries so vainly to ply its trade. The rain sweeping through the traces of want and will while I settle into the deep periphery, that sad brand of this flavor of truth.

I drink the coffee, already cold in the cup. I read the pages, so elegant and intense. I have cast my lot in with oblivion, and so am feeling that momentary freedom made from the dissolution of all resolve. Slowly I accumulate disorder, unshaven and without the least measure of grace. I inhabit what is left of the machine fully aligned with the accident of birthright, that manifestation of nature and nurture spattered amid the grass and leaf. I feel the years and the misgivings of chemistry claim my name. The ache is all but white noise. The ache is just another pin in the map.

The keyboard follows the touch of my stiff fingers without question or hesitance. It allows all my petty prejudices and wanton whim to vine through the tangle of words I spill. It allows all my delusion and my contempt to run wild, codified in this scrambling rush, woven into these broad particulars and sad manifestations. I flow into amber, I press between each page. Some parasite, some desiccant. Some clinging of the moment, some ringing of the woods. I write words in careless handfuls as the rain fills each day.

toil

Days of rain and soon so much water conspires with all manner of remembering. Languid nights and brutal wanderings, from warm embrace to bone chilling lonesome, every feeling is loosed amid all this green and gray and ways lost. Those electric first kisses that feel so distant the may as well be myths, stories told about how the world was born so familiar, so livid in the blood. Those hard defeats and fateful lapses that explain so many scars and wounds. The rain falls and pools. I pause, mortal and alive.

Worms writhe, drowning on the slick pavement. The gutters spatter and plume. Cars drive past, bright and quick and fuming, their ersatz fury only a momentary stirring of the surface of this abiding tide. I smoke and stare, another ragged aspect of this momentous disarray. The sky is a lesson in fluidics, everything aloft and adrift. The rain comes in fits and sighs, unmoved by bounty or hardship. However wrecked or broken, the world is always working on something.

My beard is tangled, my fingers cold. Every inch of me smells of smoke. I seem a survivor of some terrible conflagration in my dull indolence, some ragged refugee arisen from some fresh assault. Some soul having endured something much worse than an unrelenting self. I fill in the blank spaces with all these flattened out words, reckoning direction from tailing of smoldering ash and the latest whim of the wind. I follow the words as they trail down the page, all reason escaping into the gray traces. All meaning an afterthought as the world toils away.

vertebrae

It is first that tension, the beads on a string, the spattering of prayers. The seeds of that moment, the baseline dripping along this old song. How like a love letter, how like pure rebuke, this constant discovery of the betrayal of self. You know yourself, that truth that feels like fable, you the punch-line for this aged joke. When the inevitable happens, you still seem surprised. All the terrible rest somehow relief at last.

I come undone, my dark doors open, the spooked horse heart of me stampeding into the night. I tighten and I grind until some hasp is left open, some spring release reveals me. I crackle and pop, I stretch beyond reasons reach. I keep this fire, so sometimes I can only burn.

There must be a wish for so much rubble. There must be something lovely in the light from all those bridges burning. I drove home in the morning rain, unsure of anything nearing why. The brunt of such need and contempt, all actions averaging out to nothing. A perverse vacillation between murderous distinctions, expletives spilling down my chin. Everything in pieces, I find myself at home.

the unmade bed

You hang around one place long enough, you ought to see something new. So I train my eyes on the shadows on the ceiling, on the wavering of the light. So I watch the corners gathering ends and grime. I keep an eye open when I can. There is no telling all the things I missed. There is no counting all the ways I am wrong.

I tell myself stories. I sing breathless tunes. The hours just drawl on by. I am all wander, I am all wait. It is the patience of capacious atoms. This verve so sweet and true it can only be vinyl. There is that sense of nearly remembering the stories behind the constellations. That moment where star and myth part ways, so awake and weary. That instant when the rain begins.

I arrived just when all the words were waiting. I awoke awash in this rising tide. That early morning with the house still sleeping. The snoring dogs and the creaking floor. This name I found to the name you gave me. The burden of prayer and the talking television, voices pulled and pressed. This poverty of wanting nothing. The dim room, the unmade bed.

the answer

It is what it is. You wake in darkness, forever short on sleep. The alarm clock and the coffee maker have their say, and you stumble on. Nothing before you but another broken day, nothing to long for save the next too short night of sleep. Your reasons are simple, as far as reasons go. Life abides all manner of insults and demotions, life endures the epic fail and the daily grind. You continue to perpetrate all your most glaring errors. You continue, despite every evidence to the contrary.

Things are what they are. Most of the moon is out there now, shining its stupid shine. Most of the stars are hidden behind a crushed glass haze that hangs about heaven. There is nothing to do about it, supposing that you could. It is just the night time sky and a sudden turn in the weather. The days of rain with a hole worn through. The warming trend billowing away through a break in the storm. The proof seeps in through every lapse and gap.

What is there to wait for? What is there worth the want? These paper trails and kangaroo courts. These slabs of steel and pads of plastic. You break your skin without even a flicker of notice. You bleed red into the hushed air and wasted light. You are another accumulation of accidents. You are that last sign just before the road ends at the missing bridge and the harrowing precipice. A marker before that last fall. The answer to these days of emptying clouds and bitter dreams.

pinch

It is that least pressure, a flicker in the eye-lid, a cloudiness in the situation on the ground, leading to this vast remembering. The press of fingertips weighing on your lips. It is that pallid language, all steam and sigh here upon the precipice of all conceit. Following the leaf and litter, the wet foot prints and the startling appetites of snails. That clear recognition of these weary links between the warm blood and the frozen ghost.

Speaking now out of turn, nearing another day lost, I watch the clock and shed all grace. These words of want and binding, fresh upon your breath, spoken and so the opposite of what was thought and meant. These poems of itch and bite, the broken skin and the writhing of the night. I forgot the path I aimed for, and lost myself finding my way. It seems that now you have left a light on, your porch amid all mysteries of forest, sea and fog. I reach out like any other bug or beast, willing a reason to abide your shine.

I am thirsty and I am tired. Again I have squandered the luxury of time. I have burnished something just saying it wasn't so. The sheer weight of this exhausted stare, watching all the glamor give out. Another dazzling day shorn of wonder and thick with wings, a sky gray with spattering rain. Sleep feels like a prayer anxious for an answer. Sleep feels like a story held too tight, its limbs held with raw intent. My fingers tapping plastic, trying to find the will.

right in the head

There is a sea of wayward dreams, where that ship that has sailed finally sinks into oblivion. Where the moon spills into the tide, shattered constellations and the breakers foaming at the mouth. Where every flicker forgets its claims to your affections, where every glimmer runs like a fever over your name. I float upon that surface, those waves of myth and memory. There is a history hidden in every measure of water. There is a moment where we all must wake.

Electric light prowls the grim carpets, pools upon corners and presses against your gaze. There is rain against the window, the tolling bounds of glass. This rhythm so like a heart beat lost to the night. This music hung upon branch and bone. You sing in this stillness, boundless upon the precipice of vivid sleep. You bask in all the light that finds your eyes.

I feel the dull shove of my bulk collapsing towards the earth, learning the tensile strength of relieved intention. This weary mass colliding with the office chair, creaking with exhausted surrender. Sleep such a distant country, my eyes heavy, my vision blurred. There are shores unlit except by stars, seen only when all hope recedes. There is this night, so long and worn with greed.

purchase

The street settles on the gray of slate, painted with the sunken light and spattered rain. I swallow the cooling coffee, tasting ash and metal. The day stretches onwards, strangling whatever sunlight can slide past the clouds. I think that I should leave a marker, set a stone. Place some sort of reminder for this tangle of mismatched moments, the afternoon when the last reserve of romance was at long last spent. An X marked on a calendar, a dot on a timeline kept only in my head. Empty resounds among the clutter of ideas and symbols. Empty is the body eternity wears in these brief cages and dour measures.

I keep company with the drift of days and weather. I keep time to the calls of feeding birds and the vagaries of the rain. Flower pots either drowned or dry, full of water and dirt and the failed roots of blossom long dead and gone. These trials of failed organism and failed person, the niche believed in now only clipped ribbons and saved letters. These trails of salt and promise leavened to extinction by sunlight and time. There is no end to the writhing of words when we mistake writing for speech. The infection is all but endless amid all these squalid limitations. This sickness the only cherished thing left.

This is the blessing of this bitter endurance, the standard won of taking the brutal and the fragile as they come. Outlive the living and the telling, witness every name boil away on tooth and breath. Feel the ache of poor technique and cut corners, the pain of surviving such pointless chimes of loss. Every task a fool's errand, every word either theft or imposition. This is the furtive resonance of bone, pealing brightly into the firmament. This is the collection of residue, the gathering of all this waste and grandeur. This life, stolen and blasphemed. This life, losing purchase along the edge of dusk.

clockwork

There is a cast to the darkness that can only imitate your absence. A warmth of a wound, the boundless burn of a lack of flesh. In these shadows I hear music, that soft retort of blood and breath. That strange shifting of weight just out of reach, that sumptuous arrangement of tenses, past and present, insoluble on the tongue. The shifting of pipes a kind of local thunder so constant in the night. The crackling of bones sounding in my ears.

Your skin finds a kind poverty in this light, as if you carried lit candles flickering in your depths. As if there was a confession the world could only offer you. As if you were the bearer of all lost prayers. All the poetry of forlorn hope there in your shift and shimmer. All the shades drawn and shadows left for imagining.

Outside dogs bark and sirens sound. The television drones on and on. Hours painted in dust and vermin, the sounds of glass and ice. Tomorrow crosses some unknown border, littered with secrets, buoyed by the chiming. These fingers drift through keys and minutes. All these words left trailing in your wake.

aftershock

It must be that fragment of the moon, loitering in the treetops. It must be that brushed steel taste of the winter longing to leave, seeping through my teeth. Some spell of dusk and sweat, some weaving of mistake with truth. You suddenly so close I smile at the stretch and pry of you. Those bones so deft and solemn, your back bare to the shifting of the evening. Your flesh dense and electric, so warm and pressed to my touch. A dream quickly cleared from my throat, the air so crisp and wanting.

The world shifts in its skirts, working the ocean into a gallop, its teeth frothing at the bit. We awake lost, our allotted tragedy interrupted by some feat of thunder. All these border skirmishes and murder cults diminished by the ambivalence of the earth. The abstract shadows we mistook for gods now gone beneath the source of the casting. A moment too bright to remember. Light and my gaze enveloping your skin. Even your shine a changed station once this tide returns.

Even the clear sky weighs and wearies. Even the cold water scratches at the catch in your throat. A kiss or acrimony? The devil so very deep and blue. These tremblings reach steady and strong, along the white painted line. The dense greased air of the dullness of every day, glass and the long unwind of the drive alone. The sea lingers in the unlit streets, drawing down bricks and corpses. And still somewhere the question touches you. This blessing of the numbers. This awakening of the words.

the goat

The stretch of day, the pause of darkness. The vetted prayers, the hollow heart. It doesn't matter, that dry click is always there. That fateful plunge into the rollicking tide. That razor whetted smooth and thin. All the worn through remembrances that always call, waiting for the wind to shift. Awaiting all the weight to break.

The eyes can not close, the dreams can not relent. All the choicest epithets slip so easily into the air, yet root so steady in the blood. The sickness is tethered, this self ever the goat, always the offering. It all winds down with the dwindling gray, the too cute blue. Streets slick with rain, steaming in the sun.

There is that name that memory cannot catch, a quickness beset with terror and praise. The weight of the machine impressed upon the soul, the sacrifice undone by the lesson that must be learned again and again. Something has to give. The conflagration of heaven as it devours the world, artless dance of fire and greasy smoke. The empty tomb and the broken slab. This flesh, so livid and ready to rot.

creep

It's an arms race scenario, the weather gone missing, spring just around the corner. The hours all add up, the accumulation of word problems. The sickness becomes embedded and the poison trickles thicker into every dream. This is where you wake, a few words past winter. This is where you are, with rain upon your breath.

The shadows stick and the clock keeps ticking. Someone is responsible for keeping things of track. The cylinder spins without a wish for an empty chamber. The hammer falls, never casting smoke and peace. Another night bleeding out the doors and windows. Another night spilling from the mirror.

Whatever is hidden, I will not find it. Whatever is in there, just keep it to yourself. That dull arithmetic of space and spells and letters. The secret code kept sequestered in the spiral prison again and again. There is something in the air, a drift of wings, a smile of a moon. There is something in the air, a storm left unwinding in the sky. Whisper to me, before sleep assails you. I will save your place while the reasons in your blood abandon you to this sharp border of the night.

that darkness down the hall

You have to step off the porch to get an unobstructed view, the street seemingly asleep, the night barely begun. The porch lights dazzle, the headlights push shadows down the street. Lit windows disguise all manner of crime and passion. The sidewalks nearly shine despite all the dirt. The thrill of footsteps just out of view. Some huddle of a stranger steams around a corner, at a pace half resignation and half escape.

There is nothing to see here. Just amounts and calculations, collected works and the aggregates of peculiar indolence. The trees shift, blown like kisses, blown like smoke. The stars shimmer and disappear behind clouds silking past. Just me in electric light and natural shadow. Just me in all my infirmity and cunning, leaning hard against a dwindling season, clinging clumsily to the husk of another night.

I linger in this house, another weary remaindered commodity without a shelf. I wait out the hours, watching ghosts and spiders gather and crawl. The words build up and run over the edges. The words swell until they are bound to burst. I await the hour of the unmade bed and the television lullaby. I await the moment of dreams loosed and sleep sustained, measured in ragged breaths and dazed awakenings. These walls counted down without numbers, waiting without measure. Waiting on that darkness down the hall.

midnight to stevens

The words were all dissolved in wax, those fitful whispers, that crisp descent. The sound of cement and glass bottles, the sound of rain pruning the leaves from the trees. The old analog hush just out of earshot, the needle fitting the secrets of every groove. The taste of moonlight, the tongue cast in sand. That sadness of a song filling the air like a crypt sweet with decay. That sadness of a soul wrecked on some lost shore, watching the sky turn away.

I staggered in the sunlight, something wrong running rampant in my blood. The day too bold and bright, lashing out at my pale winter flesh and my eyes best left to words on paper or pictures on a screen. An anchor sinking in the heat of a foundry, a last breath trapped beneath the sealed kiss of ice. Dizzy despite the stillness, weary despite the hour. I would have remembered all your tricks and angels had your halo left me some kind of blind. I would have had a leg to stand on had your rising never ruined the earth.

That early hour, that face in the window. The details all clamoring at the surface, the reasons all drowned long ago. This day, this night, tomorrow and all its kin. A litany of feasts and observations. A lighting of so many candles, the knelling of a handful of bells. It is that the song took decades to sink through this dissolution. It is that there is never a witness to one thing that is true. These dead troubadours, these moldering poets. The secret revealed just as all eyes are hidden. The longing only there to linger on.

imperative

The rain arrived, though I wasn't there to witness it. The world mostly works this way, without consent or agreement. Things show up, things disappear. There is nothing to be done about it. I just sit and smoke, reading whatever I happen to be reading. The rain just falls and falls, a gentle sheen, a streaking of the view. I see whatever I happen to see.

Now it is coffee and laundry, scratched bifocals and the insistence of ash. The boredom one-eyed dog, and the hostility of the nervous cat. Music jangles in the background, machine noises and analogue hush. The human voice replicated again and again, our ghosts pressed deep into the skin and bone of our every artifice. Human feeling portrayed with a deft heart, human need manufactured into every commodity created. The shock is not in all the ways we become strangers to one another. We are so alike the shock is that we manage to not become the enemy of every other being we see.

It isn't so much all this want or all this need. It is the feeling of disarticulation that this dissonance between all these feelings and what the world allows that weighs. The freedom to demolish does not hold a corollary freedom to thrive. There are back roads and dead ends and lives without second acts native to every nation on earth. Time only runs downhill. You miss the rain when it begins, there is no going back. The heart flows in any direction it pleases, whatever the pain or weather. The rain will fall where it will.

begin

The road is so long, this traveling too far to remember where it was you began. The broad savannah, the fiery wastes, the dark forests clotted with fog and snow. The press of clay, the burgeoning flood, the wide mirror of the sea all seem so close that the words drizzle along every skin you witness. All these names for things left in the distance of the journey. All this blood flowing upon the altar and weeping in the dust.

Now each crowd seems so familiar, every stranger some kinship just slipping beneath the secrets you keep upon the tip of your tongue. The very closeness somehow pressing these vast traces that much nearer to your heart. Is it in the weather or in the season? The rollicking swoon of the greenery or the shameless flirtation of the stars? There is little that you know any longer. The words flavored with labor and earth.

The surprise passed from failure long before this story began. You miss though your aim is flawless. You disappear despite your unerring fire. So forgotten and sharp and true that there is nothing but the burning, nothing but the abiding smoke and the spark you carry. You linger in the wilds, cling to the gutters and the temples, ring in every song they spit and ruin. We want and want and will not learn. You burn along each wasted breath, almost close enough to hear your name begin.

the optimist

Nothing is distinguished with such a little light. Nothing is recognized in this fretful clutter. Magazines and lit machines, socks and dirt and spiders. Waking up in the dead of night, staggering to find a footing. The dark room shuffled with spark and shadow, the sound of a clock, the soundlessness of empty night. Animals snore and sputter, dense breathings and deep sleep. Find a way by almost touch alone. Find a door and fill another exit, so entranced by ache and residual sleep. Nothing known but the map and the dark.

It takes awhile for my name to find me, waking too early for another day I dread. The morning still dense and dark, the bed still warm and charmed with the logistics of dreams. The coffee sputters and the alarm sounds. I am this wreck, I am this stranger. Somehow landed again in this life. Somehow stranded downstream from this identity, the watch, the wallet, the set of keys. Debts and obligations, scars and just a spattering of blood.

A plastic cup is half full with water, and not an optimist in sight. Sitting upon the cheap shelf, before an avalanche of wasted books. The thick conspiracies of words that I have learned to mistake for language. The dull alphabet and the harsh considerations. I swallow some water, I find some clothes. Lights are switched on, locks are undone. The mirror has its say, as does the hour. Somewhere traffic is waiting, all the colors of plastic and steel. Somewhere out there I will join the world.

wishful thinking

The cement eases the light into the night, shines just a little, holds on for awhile. That pale glow that endures in the eye, entangles the memory, every thing seeming root and leaf. Don't bother trying to find the horizon. Don't bother trying to scan the stars. The wings we are left with too overwhelming to spread. The heights we will rise to always on some other shoulders, on a trust built only of dust and words.

So I see you to your bones, I see the pressure you exert against the weight of so much world. You are all wait and wary, all tooth and bite. You glide through these sullen ribbings, a voice so slow and sweet. You are that promise of promises, these speakings against the grain of the night. I see you so lush in stillness, so clever when you dash. You stride through all webbing, losing each connection.

There is a light behind the closed door. There is a dream wailing in the dark. The shamblings of unseen chance, shuffling in the night. Once I would have told you what to do. The trick of the maze, the knotting of the riddle. Once the words were that near, always one whisper apart. The door is opened, the blindness comes inside.

shine a light

The storm whispers on in, the slenderest thread of breath and threat. Just a little something in the air, wind through the fingers and rain slipped across lips. Just another pressing of a hushing finger, before the world again is undone. A train sounds on this new moon night. Ghosts all lingering just below the skin.

So goes this life of waiting for rain and thunder. So go these nights of television and steam. The change of tense, the strengthened intention. That picture we never quite find with our eyes. The words that we spend again and again. I follow the trails of years and fingers. These symbols that weep days and drops of blood.

Right there I stopped, then I stopped again. You inhabit this flesh as you inhabit a house, different rooms as differing stations. Doors and windows and lights left on. The sun so sunken, the words all lost. The hope for storms another haunting, the past always shining just beyond the horizon.