shake

I scuff my measure along tile and carpet, this tread the soil beneath the field, the shuffle of the story plodding on in the dark. The crack of ice resounds down this idling spine, the work of the world entangled in cobweb and dust. Every step a shift and a continuity, all the proof of this wide open universe the stubbed toe and the bumped head. I search the wall with spread fingers, the desperate reach towards the salvation of the switch. I find the light and let it be.

I sleep close to disputed borders, dream and dissolution, mutterings beneath the breath. The clock and creation. The time and the tell. I stretch and turn, slipping in and out of this thin narrative, clotted shadow and the lingering insistence of cream. I fold the pillow, feel the crease and heat of this clipped connection. Hour to hour, I sink and wake. Hour to hour the reasons all come clean.

Somehow I have lost you, the dark windows, the locked box. Somehow I have exchanged you for these slips and tenders of tooth and tongue. The ache in my stride, the mottled flesh of time as it arrives, lit by memory. It struck just like a mystery, it plays out like a dream. Your eyes intent, your face swept by just the least breath of shadow. The heat of you against my kiss. No questions left. Only the lightning flash. Just the countdown calling out thunder.

certain

The ocean is only the beaded water on your skin, the sand just the pressed insistence of your thighs. The air is a rollick , drowned in spray and thunder. The day the glaze of greedy light upon your flesh. All these blessed definition awaken with you. All these flames and markers strewn without.

It is like the lie of constellations, irresistible once it is engaged. It is like that feeling of waking to the sun upon your face. The music that enchants and the day as it breaks. It is the collapse of perception that means the vision will persist. The line once crossed that erases the very meaning of retreat. This witness seems to begin the world, these reflections of your path.

I do not pretend to conceive the possibilities. I do not mistake all this wish and prejudice for the world. This way is adrift upon the open seas. Lost or fated, I cross off road and rail. This way is all I know. The hour slows and these longings wander. You are all the direction there can be.

what the light confides

From my front porch I see that the hills are burning. A burning crown and a flag of drowsy smoke. The sun so long ago swept away into the deepening east. It is a condition of the season here. Another dangerous sign particular to the time.

We cannot help but read into these things. We cannot help but to invent a bending towards our ends. We trade away an intensity of perception for a breadth of vision. We are the stubborn and pliant lenses of the language where we grew. The telescope and the dictionary. The documentary and the dream.

You can't help but blaze away in my thinking. You can't help but make the world in your wake. Mine just another of the ten thousand longings that cling to your skin. My huddled fantasies only proof of your shine. The weight of the world a measure of how quickly it burns out. We are only what the light confides.

dispossessed

It climbs through the cracks in the hours, hours breaking in waves and sparks. It creeps through the broken laughter of distant voices, falling from the trees and stars. It slips into your skin, mild as an idle shiver. Simple as goose-flesh from a breeze. It is all of your thinking when your thoughts grow wild. It is every empty sky and vacant lot untroubled by the dark.

We shift skins and walk with our bones on fire, inventions left scaling the flames that rise and rise. The soot we scatter and the dust we shed, foot steps trailing into the unseen night. Every breath feels a little fever, every guilty symptom a tear. Having walked so far from the fire that we have learned to live always alight. Having wandered long enough to feel it in the stars.

Speak this first, before shedding another breath. Speak this soft, before all restraint is lost. The sky is cluttered with all these threadbare constellations. The night is spread gentle and deep. This is the way of all wounds and treasures. This is the way of all theft and awkward truths. Say it to the brigand dawn or the traitor dusk. There is no place that is not home. This is where I am.

lassitude

The clotted feel of the sky is lifted at once, the sun goes out and everything is lit again. The pitch of the horizon line, the submerged clarity of the sky left above the sun. My blunted eyes see better at dusk, the change of palette favoring my limits, which I continue to accrue even as my abilities diminish. The day is in the details, the night knits from remainders. The continuity comes from the lingering indistinctions.

The day to come will bleed into the day just lost. Night nodding against the spheres in their orbits, the machinery grinds on. The shadows drain and deepen, the clockwork enmeshed in this cold stone and dizzy flesh. I follow the trails gouged by heel and hoof, the rails driven by ice and water. I follow the path of smoke and steam. I wear each skin I shed, I wear the mantle of a name filled with empty air.

Sweat beads and words flee, the room always so warm and vacant. I follow my fingers along these trails of keystrokes, picking letters by proximity. Every sentence finished ends feeling served. All meaning left is nestled in the margins. All the moments noticed bled and dried. Night and day, hollowed of their Porter phrasings. Night and day words left out to dry on the line.

remembered

The dusk comes, shining in the substance of your gaze. The sun sets, and in its passing leaves its essence in your flesh. It is the story stuck to the earth and sky. It is the myth that is mingled with the rush of blood. You in the subtleties of dust and memory. You in the shining only revealed with the arrival of the night.

The night it yawns, the night it stretches. The night settles into its drafts and strictures. Moments before moonrise, and there are scraps of constellations lingering just to the side of language. All these partial pictures, bereft of the weight of their telling. Something loosened near the knotted roots of gravity. Something caught between each instance and the depths of recollection.

It is in the way waking finds me. It is in the way sleep leaves me lost. The dreaming that seeps through the seams of each laden day, the enchanted and the remembered. You are the core of all that I regret, the soul of all the feeling in the flesh. Sunlight changed forever because it once touched your skin. The stars forever tangled in the mystery of your gaze.

get back

Enough with asking the night why. Enough with wishing for that faraway sky. The moth beats wings against the glass of the porch light burning shadows far into the yard. The owl shrieks so near and dead above. The cat it clambers and the dogs chase the dust. The star only speaks in distance. The heart only speaks of floods. Every breath reaching after the last. Every bit of bright claimed in singed synapse, thinking of your smile.

The bitten tongue still blunders on, clipped phrases and rapt catechism. The stunted work of this head always immersed in sand or fog. The fluent lack of blood calling this ghost. Some sweet song lingers, your voice carrying far into the dark of these apostle thoughts. The green longing, the gray traces. The skin ridden with itches. The sky only so many words away.

The brain brays on, unbidden. The language sliding down the walls, the language trailing web and unsated appetite, a spider always just missing the fly. Old music, weary thoughts, the musty years of slow riposte and quick defeat. Mirrors made of midnight windows, doors made of dirty glass. One thought diminishing any other. One thought claiming what's left of my life.

in legions

The dusk settles into the rocks and dust, a silhouette dragonfly feeding on sleepy-headed flies as the sky burns down. The shadows expand, swallowing everything feet first. The sun light leaves behind a moonscape in the ragged yard, dogs bounding and racing despite the lapsed atmosphere. I idle, smoke and sweat and constellations yet uncounted. I idle, hot skin and a cool breeze, the whole world on the wing.

The cigar burns slow, taking air, thieving breath. The blue-tint of smoke creeping into the maze of tree limb and faded sky. Flecks of ash dance in the air and in the dust, the breeze granting life to flame and ember. Time settles in the dirt and the breeze. Time curls away in spirals of smoke and light.

Night after night, day after day, change is the only constant. The similarity clings to the idling mind, placing sameness over these differing skins. The world known through give and resistance, through the stick and reach of the imponderable language of the atom. The world known through breadth of shimmer and the resonance of spectra. Touch and touch, shine and shine. Even the ethereal presses the flesh. Even the finite counted in legions.

cat and fiddle

Everyday memory ends up only the way we say it. This luckless day, that loveless night. Only these sentences crumpled against our teeth, only this light bent with-in the lens. Words only leant to the mystery and the wind. The riddles fiddled out in scratchy breaths and purring neglect. The puzzle only known for the pieces. The little dog yapping though there is every reason to laugh.

There are secrets pressed against every shadow. There are strangers waiting at every intersection of the endless road. Our bones write down each note and lilt, the song composed before our births. Chance and partings, the falling cow and the misplaced moon. The sky denied all levity, the music entangled as the words unwind. Meaning stuck in the corners, meaning caught in dust.

The stories began before they were stories, the words only breath and bite. They circle the fire, they nestle in the sparks. They touch each star in restless exodus, they burrow beneath those runaway utensils. We carry them into moonlight and sleepwalk. We rub them against our teeth, we swaddle them in our arms. Every day a sentiment left in a dark hallway cluttered with trash and ghosts.

any lost star

I burn for all that is beyond me, consumed by the many amplitudes of that which I am not. From blue sky to black sky to every shade and color in between, the mood swings and sways while the outcome remains the same. Those greener pastures and neighbors' outpacings, those wicked covetings and windows that ache for shades. It is a simple sickness, a typical course so much more common than my native tongue. I spark and smolder, distant and dumb as any lost star.

So the shine of that light left waiting, so the glow of that candle kept alight through the night. The smell of smoke and the taste of dust, pine trees casting shadows, travelers burning daylight away. I watch as sunshine is filtered through a redwood fence. I watch as starlight stipples the sprawling tree-limbs. It is the lay of the land as summer fog clings to the ardor of green hills. It is the stretch of the road as it opens to the day. Pace is kept close to the cusp of land and sky. Even the lost and the strays found in place.

Dusk grows, straddled by bird and bat and mosquito bite. Night falls, weighed down with the lonely stars and this tumbling earth. A bitter flavor stuck to my teeth, a sheen of perspiration carried over from the tail-end of the day. Another turn of phrase, another whispered word caught in the wind. I cannot turn back the clock, I cannot change the day. You are beyond the gleam of this horizon. You are beyond smoke and signal, as far as any star.

ancestor

Wave after wave of day and night, the rolling tide of rotation and light crashes down into these depths of shadows. Ragged tree limbs painted across star and dusky sky, dust dancing into the restless air. This earth is a stretch of thirst and rough touches, things separating in huddled crowds of food and feeding, shambling masses of fuel and burn. This earth a trail of endless loss and stunned wonder.

These walls are cluttered with breath and hush. These rooms lit with those treasured fevers and sacred clocks. The heat so soft the flesh surrenders. The air so thick it sticks in the teeth. This roof above the church of squandered glances. This floor below these sunken ships and buried treasures. Every motion just outside the reach of reason.

We wait beneath the watermark. We slow below the precipice. In the caves and beneath the tree tops we arrive at the foundation of all these remains. Here in the dust and humus, in the slender touch of shadow and earth, we come along these branches of stubborn intent. This day, this night, this history, this hope. These small offerings of blood and ash, these little gifts of sweet collision.

intentionality

The moon was already high in the apostate sky when the day bled away. Dusk sang out, full-throated and ready to devour the world. Stars awoke along their farther axis, sifted through the slippery atmosphere. Sweat and smoke and the scent of pine needles. The night another aroma carried on the breeze.

There is a crispness in the water, a bite to the ice. The tall plastic glass perspires, clouted by the heat of the room, summoning the very moisture from the air. I think of fogged mirrors, the density of breath against glass. Train windows and steamed glasses, seasons of gathered life and varied temperature. The transition from climate control to climate. I swallow cold water, living the difference between heat and chill.

It is the world allowed rather than the world won. The distinctions we create weighed over those we deny, strata incurred through abandoning sight for vision, nature for conceit. Word after word, philosophy after philosophy, we explain ourselves away. Hunger and thirst, work and respite, love and endurance. Our lives so clean and cluttered. Our lives caught on the breeze.

indifferent

The words won't wait for the wizened tongue, the moment always about to dissolve into sweet and bitter, the day already half remembered wrong. Something said, something put away for later, always the tabled topic and that elephant in the room. The curtains sink and billow, the air so still and dense. The favored ones all seasoned with shadow and distance, fondness drawn long, burning ignorance and wishes as one. The sickness is the tale and the tide. Everything either choked down or spilling out at once.

The flesh quivers and goes damp, some unsettled shock feathering through these indifferent levels of life. Sweat beading on a cool forehead, the room somehow swimming despite the still and the dry of the air. Each breath goes beating through the blood, each heart-beat the lock step of this inevitable peeling away. It is the little things that add up to the impossible. It is the tiny distinctions that obliterate all sense.

The tired poems and the lipstick traces, the wilting blossoms and the faded favors. The lonely walls and the distant constellations. All the wanting and the waiting blending with the wide open empty, all the feel and fever spent on the hole in the sky. Wishes made on meteors, promises made to the imaginary and the dead. A whole romance of contingent phrases left in the box. These distinctions of composite improbables all gathered on the line, reminding me of all the reasons some things are only make-believe. For once in agreement with the world, all of us wanting you mostly in vain.

the same

I couldn't find it with all the stars shining for me. I wouldn't know it if I saw it glide by, an owl hunting along the low tide of sky. The world is a mystery beyond my faculties and skills. This is the trouble with prayer, the silt in that river of wishes. Always an asking melting under my tongue, always a wanting bending the direction of my senses. I speak aloud just the same, given to endless guessing. Without knowing, I repeat your name.

Knowledge is terror when there are consequences waiting in the dark. Certainty that least dependable of sensations. Angles of exposure and the settled bet of a wide and open field. Dangers of omission and the structures of luck. There is always that next step, fool's errand or leap of faith. There is always that final debt to come due. What we do not know can end any debate.

The winds pounce and rollick, the trees all swing and sway. Voices fly about, loose leaf and shed breath, carrying on another kind of conversation. Smoke coils and bolts, spilling through the seems of the air. Silent wings slide by above, always preaching the lessons of the hunt. I am another obscure location, sprawled in the bug bite dusk. I am another vague intention, lost in the indistinctions of the night.

occurence

The daylight stasis is released into the rolling tide of dusk, bee-line reasons and blood sugar debates. The shine sticking to the wild leaf and the wicked bottle fly, the last moments of daylight spread between the tall trees and the wide horizon. Wed to one thing, then shed of another. The sweat beaded on burnt flesh cools in the rising wind.

There is no denying it. The words can be bled, the meanings blended. Explanation and excuse can dance arm and arm in the busty street. The things said can not be undone. It is the nature of how nature unwinds between happenstance and mind. Every day sows some future reaping of regret. Every day ends unrequited.

I wash my hands, feeling dry despite the deluge falling into the basin. I dry them, feeling like I am wearing gloves of paper. Energy conserved for the long downhill slide. Inertia impacting both the stillness and the ride. Again the dose of plastic letters. Again the trembling of hands very nearly at rest. Everything happening just in time for the restless night.

escape

Give me your gaze that I might disappoint and dissipate. Give me your eyes that I may melt away before them. This is the cue to count all those blessings. This is the call to wish the moon away. These words stray and fade, scattered all about the room. This breath peals and wavers, the air so slick and fleeting. All the world has gone away again.

So your spirit breaks, ice clattering from the tray. So your flesh fails, beaded with salt and sweat. The reasons were never there to begin with. The reasons came latest, so never worry their loss. All these spells and lullabies cling to your curtains. All these dreams scratched into your itchy skin. The magic is all but gone, only the residue sticking to your trail. Only evidence of the compulsion to remember.

We are the remainders of a faded age, the creation of some vaguely fabled age. We are the scribbles in the margins, the rules always crossed out and then written once again. Such insistent ink that no eyes can abide us. Such tethered hopes that no grace can escape these bonds. Once entangled, there was never a chance for our escape. The mistake and the measure. The wayward fool and the undying sun.

spectrum

Dragonflies dart over the trickling rivers of traffic, metallic over metal, sheen over shine. Sweat drizzles down my face, sweat soaks my shirt. All the colors are still cooking, bent towards the bandwidth of this color blindness, the blended measures and fitful resonance my sight allows. All the colors revealing the comity between light and matter. The collaborative dirge of existence settling on the unchangeable stripe and the unseemly trope.

We erase our mistakes when we tell these stories, or repurpose the facts to fit the fables we endorse. It is always that best of all possible fib, that notion that even our wrongs are right. So we claim the virtue seat despite all our bile and venom. So we cling to a righteousness we can not know despite our vicious hearts. Invisible kings, and golden rules we would sooner break than follow. We color it all in greens and golds despite the darkness of our hearts.

I am only a series of dismal efforts and crass oaths. I am only the motion of the season and the sickness, the propriety of the probable. The sky is an easy boundless blue, the day warm and slow. The world teams with its flocks and swarms, a trillion appetites whetted and loosed. Light seethes, timeless and mostly true. Awash in the spectrum of the seen and unseen. Aglow in the aimless tailings of the day.