retrospect

And just like that the year is over. And just like that the day is done. Forget all that burned away into heaven. Forget those that lie humbled beneath the stones. The stories disarticulated with tricks of tongue and steel. The stars that fall though no-one's wishing. I sit beneath the cusp of shadows, I wade deep as the tide of night comes in. The singer sticks hard to the standards so the songs will run and writhe. All the words come home covered in other voices. All the words that were never yours come home.

Smoke curls from the parting of my lips, steam from my cup steps in for a kiss. All these aches and hungers alive just to rattle around my lungs. All my letters written to another place and time. The target calls with all its heart to the arrow aimed at truth. Each loosed answer aimed at questions that never were, the words all scuffed and bent from use. Every question some ghost of a world that never was. The poem the burrowing and the earth. The flight and the way of wings.

Fall down the steps of the latest rage, leave the temple with the bones of ragged prayer. Spill from one riot into the wanting arms of another. You are all the reason there can be. The cracked cement and the broken glass. The draught of laughter drifting through clouds of electric light. The struck match and the bruised mouth of cheap enchantment all the halo you ever need. All my heart these furies and hungers, the world without time or worry. Another year so far from you, these words scribbled on a calendar. This song always threaded with these wishes as lonesome and as distant as the thought of a star in the long wandered winter night.

like smoke

Cross one more off the calendar, wait in vain for the waning moon. The stars dust the needles of the broke back pine as the neighbor's dog just barks and barks. Check the locks on the constellations while all the planets wander just enough for them to earn their names.  Watch them to see if they acknowledge how far they are from might have been. The moment, then the moment passes. The candle, then the flame goes out.

I am the drag upon the bindle, the ease of breathless air. The arrow loosed into the heavens, the target's eye always wide with such surprise. The drawn flame through the kindling, the gossiped smoke of every breath. I wake each day with this puzzle of why the puzzle deserves to be solved. The clouds that break before they gather, the darkness no different until the dawn. I write the words with the skill of dropped breadcrumbs, all the wander in the world lost on me. The weight of witness in its passing. Each skin shed to save itself.

The days turn and tumble, the earth worn with walking, the key lost to the sky. Look towards the horizon as the world falls away. Watch the rising of the tides and the melt-away moon. The night awash with dissonant longings, shouts and laughter rippling through the wind. The sounds of ache and the sounds of traffic. Destination soon the only name. Out in the dark I kick up some small ruckus. This fire lost long before you see the smoke.

capitulate

The cat comes in soaked in chimney smoke, looking for a lap to lie in. The room is lit poor and laden with dust. From shadow to shadow, from ghost to ghost, the voices drift and fade. Webs strung along the ceiling, cracks whisper their way through the walls. The air is still, all hope is sinking. Words never know the way back. Words never carry the weight.

The sky reaches ever higher, the stars clotted in the greasy night. The world is lights and pavement, the world is asphalt and steel. The cracked sound of every hope as it leaves your lungs, the labor of breath as everything slips away. The words stick to every surface,  they clamber bitter from tooth and tongue. Sounds to spit into the emptiness that spills and spills from within. Noises to make when there is nothing left to say. Letting go a kind of impermeable grief, an icy wind where there once seemed to be a soul.

You can walk from street to street, you can wander from town to town. These wide fields and narrow passes, these hungry valleys and stoic mountains. Door to door, from sea to shining sea, until at last you realize there is nowhere left to go. This sick world just another mirror victimized by your barren eyes. All your grievances and your crimes evidence of the error that is all you are. Inside the confessional of your alien heart there is at last some small truth. Leaving this life the only road left to take.

rush

The dusk arrives in the usual vestments, the service quick, and the congregation either absent or unmoved. The sky is swaddled in the color of storms, the reaching sun and the huddled clouds. The wind slides a riot through leaf and limb, the trees all swaying along with the chorus, the cold a choir rising from the dirt and weeds. Eyes like spring and eyes like mud staring so hard, trying to see the reasons for heaven.

I arise on the wake of each falling, coarse with ache and the bruisings of a careless life. I cave into the rise of the sky and the spill of this world always tumbling down. I claim my ordination with scuffed steps and puffs of wicked smoke, the tremblings of error and of age a kind of rattled dance.The flicker in the ashes, the brief glimmer in the stars. These tides animate and obfuscate, each breath drawn across this fraught tangle of rags and roots, the bowed note so deep and true. These day wrecked with weight and dreams.

The wind grows cold as the lights go out, the world reduced to slips of bright windows and slabs of crawling walls. I am still save for curling smoke, my heart a stitch I make through the world, my eyes the seams along the broad periphery. I wait while the animals aggregate, arising as if by whim from the night. Each breath an escape, every word vain sacrifice. The world hurries on its way.

the ocean goes on forever

This might as well begin right here, the chill in the air, the sea on your knees. The way the sand below you sinks with every step. The way the shadows cast by the heaviest clouds press against you shoulders and your sight. You may as well be stripped bare, for the liberties you're treated to by the atmosphere. All across this continent we reach and crawl and grasp for you, but the night is cold and the night is dark, and warmth's so far away. All around the world there is nothing but the ache and the asking. Shining like some storybook star while the darkness takes its cut.

The day dwindles with the crows on high and the finches feeding from the tangled pines. The mobs and squads find their way in dissolution. All the dreams loosed the night before shift and search, ready for the roost. Muddy shoes and empty coats, the broom left beside the door. The melted moon rises before the sun even gets to say its goodbyes. All these words as the tide returns, salt sharp in your nostrils, beads against your breast. Wading from a place past the timeline. A picture old enough to be worn by fingers, a figure held in mind and hand at once.

It in early yet but the day grows dark. Shadows linger around my ankles, smoke curls from the corners of my lips. The moon unfurls another pretty bauble, a bright slab reveling in the depths of sight. Round the ring and turn the wheel, be nimble and oh so quick. I'm all alone in the voluminous flow of dark and dust, the sounds of cars and recorded music all the roads and borders. My breath, the breeze, and the voiceless ghosts. The corners all shabby with static because I can't count straight. You may as well tumble into my grasp, you linger so close and dear. You might as well be wrapped up in my arms, as all the lights are always going down and the ocean goes on forever.

magic

I trample down that brambled path, I am ridden out on rails, faith and feathers, words and tar. My gait is just an empty scuffle, the kata of worn joints and sore feet. I wind along the long stubborn stair well, I clamber up and down. I find my way amid the thorns and briar, the idle knots that living gives again and again.  The joke is always that the fool is never in on it. The joke is always that the fool couldn't care less. The cold air and thin light, the path is waiting for the right feet to find. Even shadows can learn to forget.

The ice finds the insides of your fingers, brittle crystals oblivious to the whispering of nerve and vein. Steam abounds from your every breath, these graven exhalations spilling visible from your tongue and lips. The cacophony of living the syncopation of motion and desire you strike all the hard notes at once, your spells the very breadth of certainty. A hank of hair, a drop of blood, the names of successive listless spirits. A song a poem a pride of aimless lions. The heart always wanting, the words simply strings to fret and pluck.

So I stalk and tumble, I grumble at the ancients and all their shiftless heirs. I trod through the darkness, half caution and half bluff, trailing smoke and steam. I watch my step and let the stars all fend for themselves.  I speak your name where only the trees can see me. I speak your name for only bird and beast to hear. The magic isn't in the act but in your name. I speak aloud this want, this ache that you inspire, and you hear my incantation. Through this darkened distance, through this frozen night, I stalk along the boundless absence spilling wishes. From the empty all or nothing, I call upon you now.

litigant

I watch my step around these words with the sun dimming down out here. There's no sense in falling in further than you want. The clutter of sticks and stones waiting to bring this abrupt dance straight to skin and bones. The chill tooth of winter raked along each fingertip. Tomorrow and tomorrow, the path is dark and hungry. You say what you want, wish what you may. These words are only here to stray.

I'm the least of the congregation, the telling truth in the habitual joke, the reason we all need that wolf in the fold. Ice has left me finger blind, my blood just muttered confessions and exasperations. I cough in the dust kicked up with the scuff and trip of my travels, I spit the bitter poems of mistaken lives. Steam spills out my offerings to the confounded firmament, the sky a wash of colors and stubborn stars. I never meet the mystery, but I seem to be on the list. I am all bark and blind-spot, my only grace the strange way I spook. The books aren't there to love you back.

The mistake is always faith in some flawed geometry, learning the wrong end of the lesson. The heart is an axis in the murky gear-work, a language of spark and smolder, an engine of every trembling touch. I lost my place in line once or twice, and I could never find the way back again. Instead I followed the words that call and cling, the older path before the burdens became the claim. The tongue clever when blight takes the mind, I walk where the stepping lets me. The spell all the unwinding of each line, the world just what you let slip when you supposed you were only going to say your name.

empty ever after

The dust settles and you know that there is nothing but this legacy of want and ache finally folding to a close. The turn of phrase at long last buried in the muddled history of this life long catch and release. The urgent journals and the breathless letters lost and forgotten, the statues on the altar huddled in their mysteries, their names and reasons all forgotten. This turmoil to be acknowledged a confession to the self. There will be no saving grace, no game changing act of contrition. The sickness in my flesh the failings in my soul. I leave behind some wounds and laughs, the empty of the echo, the aimlessness of words gathered on the line. The pointless press of fingers checking a corpse's pulse.

Today the pain presents as the weight and heat of molten lead, searing away at my unsettled guts. The chain of causality glistening and cruel, dragging each link through this fading flesh. No balm or medicine comes to mind, just the dull progression of human frailty camped out in these aching bones. Just the certainty of my errors piled by the door. My fanatic heart just weeps and rages, even the most ruined flesh still wanting what it wants. Everything is what it is becomes the canonical answer, a shrug and a shiver and winter on the way. The hour arrives, and no amount of staying will ever make me right. Settle your debts and find the door. Drink up and go, because you can't stay here.

Oh but the sky is lovely though the air is sharp and cold. Oh but the day was gorgeous though I am sick and without value. My pockets only ever full of hands, my fingers always fumbling without a find. A heart full of beasts and hesitations, storms and bones and mysteries knit into the tissue, grace and purpose never to be found. Always in love outside my numbers, always like some sermon read by lightning and written in the strange crawl towards life. Words let loose with no more matter than the readiness for the next breath. Fables wound around my ever fiber that I will never share. I have no words for the setting sun or the coming stars. Just the empty ever after. Just the day like all things ending.

lives of the saints

The spider in my mind waits, silently keeping time, weaving its way towards the fleeting words. Each capture a closing of questions, the exacting edge of appetite. Each notion a new enclosure, each culture bordered between certainties, the sticky silk of just like this drawing down the world. It weaves and gathers, aligning every participating star. Scheming towards a hunger so vast it is a tide. The thoughts roil and rollick, waiting to seem like something to say.

This is the way we dress the world up in our ghosts and shed skins. We adorn each thing with these feathers and relics, calling down the heavens, securing the intercession of the saints. We call on hearts and storms, we cleave each urge with the most noble of golden motives, clothing the shadows in our favorite hues. The ancient pulse of light that wanders at the speed of want mistaken for the things we want to see. The ancient tones and trembles waiting for the wish to catch up.

You serve until the sentence is over, I linger long enough to check the spell. Knowing that the shadows hold you in trust, the words finding you as they must. Awake in some shade of fickle attention, not feeling the press in you flesh, not a kindling more enflamed. The empty craft of hidden kisses, placed in the speaking ease of tongue and lip. That omen of knowing when the whisper leaves your mouth, those notions of ghosts and givens are all roads in the blind night. Reading these gentle spinnings a lovely incantation, each line another touching, some small faith in skilled fingers. A longing for this lasting grasp.

too far in the dark

The day is gone, that's the sum of it. The day has left and there is nothing to be done. I just hang out at the edge of the shadow, listen for some singing of the precipice. I just think of you in graphic detail, moving slowly through the breathless corners of my desires. I think of you when the distance feels the worst. I think of you as close as kisses, and I know what life is for.

I get lost along the instant, I wander too far in the dark. My heart resigns itself to the road that is left, my mind casts its usual foolish spells. The weight of the very firmament, the lonesome crush of haunted stars, time and distance only names for the limits of this skin. This dream of you an imposition of my closest calls and dreary decline. The wish of a fool to be a king.

The years stroll by as the world unwinds, an idle mind grows wanton and wild all alone. The roads grow few and narrow, always winding their way through some familiar mystery, all thoughts so typical and strange. All the stars and bars of gray, the sliver of that too soon moon. The silhouette of a cat climbing up the roof changes shadows. Old songs and generic regrets, and this unwieldy want for you. The music staggers and changes, all this life a press against the absence of a wished for world.

threads left

Are there ashes in my beard, are there embers still with-in my eyes? The words trail off like the twilight horizon, first there's sun, then so many long lost stars. There are never enough to cover the spread, little left to go around. The mind settles on its earthly mirror, chance always seen as destiny in the histories of the survived. The prophecies only stir the ashes, wishes set in stone, prayer a matter of habit and grammar.

I kiss each breath, I court each stone. The sky is all stripes and stars as I move slowly in the dark. Once the way was just to find the path, the wisdom was only to keep the fire burning.  The wheels slip and trawl, they spin and spin. The world takes its tribute and makes its claims, however the story chosen goes. I find each morsel, I savor each bite, clinging to the map like smoke. I clear my throat and speak aloud, no-one to hear me but the trees and the heavens.

I am of an age where I feel each weakness, where the light dims and the shadows swell. The world just the threads left hanging, these crowded lines just the limits of our reach. The rags of habit, the gleam of bones, the voices haunt the empty home. The clocks defends, the clock confesses, honesty another kind of worn down. I do not think I cling to anything of matter when I grace the ghostly precipice. The burden of encoding these last aches and wants linger on my tongue and breath. The words will fail like anything, a thrilling spill, a gentle fade. You are that mark that remains. I can only know you as a blessing, the way you are so much I want. I can only know it as a fire that wants to find me in its glow.

encroachment

I come calling wrapped in shadows. I come calling tangled in shaved light. Staring at your open window, or out the window just following the moon. Wherever the mood might find you. Whenever the planets might align. Whether it is the first seen star to affix your wishes, or that latest one to fall to take your wager. Whether the words we find will fill in all the blanks. Whatever the weather, wherever I am, I look to you as the sun fades away.

The season is a voice on the radio. The season is a flavor in the night. The shadows sweep in through the windows, painting the walls, grating the light. Always that drift along any easy axis, the lonesome elliptical and the static we bask in beneath these distant stars. Breath billowing in careless clouds, the world turns its shoulder and we are always waving goodbye.  Goodbye to these purple dusks and golden dawns. Goodbye to the wings of providence and the slow warmth that awakens the flesh. These wounds so grave that we see them in everything that is.

I press against the weight of light spilled through windows. I am echoed in the subtle gray of the glass. My breath somehow always drawn like straws, my hands everywhere like leaves. The barely whispered blur and hum of a mosquito the dusk makes manifest. The ancient songs that stir at the faintest scratching of your skin. The words a flood spilling from this fever, this touch that place you always have to go. The missing tooth always remembered most, the tongue takes its shape and takes another turn. I am as warm beside you as any wish. I cling to you with the tenacity of breath, all this urgency then extinction. Always clasped so close all that is left of me is you.

the sticks and the stones

The light hesitates, the skins pause, slick with the seethe of shadows in that exhausted moment, a single breath and then all the baggage of this shine. The sky is tossed and tumbled, clotted with wispy clouds and gray paint, the sun so close to kissing the rim of this spilled horizon. I go swaddled in my usual rags and attachments, old aches and lost arguments tucked into all this disappointing flesh, the staggered step of another ghost that doesn't know it's gone. I swallow ink, I spit smoke, I shrug my shoulders when the chill sets in. The day doesn't linger upon want or need, it doesn't count lucky stars or shed tears and prayers. Things are seen, things are lost. I don't even pretend I make a difference. I don't even dream that all this material matters at all.

The days drag by with the slick sheen of steel chains trickling rain upon rough gravel, with the machine sibilance of heavy drops of water thudding onto tin sheets from some limb or leaf. An old bone lies in the glistening glamour of the intermittent drizzle, a pale exclamation from the stippled border of dark and shadow. These aches well and spill, the tide of the mind drawn along the skins of things, every word always almost tipping the tongue. I dance and limp along the lines of the song, the mystery best left to its own devices. The ritual of twitch and tic, the magic that the scales of habit allow, the rhythm there in this breath and the rain. The reach and lack and do not let go of this stray and lingering kiss.

All the greens go gray, all the lights go down. The curtain drawn, the winds run riot, these vivid spirits evident in the roil of this restless world. Gusts rend and tear at the flora and the firmament, the haunted atmosphere livid and inconsolable. Caught in the clutter of this wear and wound you witness the weight of causation press upon the emptiness of intent. I wind down the walls around me. I stare at the TV awash in electric light while dogs snore and windows rattle. All that's left just strung together, words and wishes and aches and charms. This is how strange the ancient work of missing you feels, stacked here amid the sticks and the stones. This is the magic of the spell left within you, this fleeting shimmer though I am long gone.

jackalope

You go down to the crossroads just like everybody says,  waiting for a stranger, looking for a sign. All there is is that much more traffic, passing fancies and marks on the road. Just the gravel and the grit, the wander and the weight. Your smile spackled with dust and soot, your words struggling to find their way free. Spit your rhymes and say your prayers, the answer is always the same. Lucky numbers or stolen portents, you call it what you want to and mark it no-one really knows.

You differ with each speaker, you recall each spin and surge. The line of tradition one long underscore for all these plaintive rages and animal urges. The story that you would have told if only everybody would simply play their parts. The shadow cast from a want of shape, the spilled dance of fire pushing against each furtive obstruction, such thunder the black after every flash. The puzzle always needing different pieces, all this screaming just practice for when the fear gets here. The mystery the only thing that stays.

The sound of wings disturbs the branches. Something shifts its position in the blind heavens, blessing a direction picked by stumbling in the dark. The moon is up and bright and begging for attention. Even the air seems aware that it is unsettled. Even the colors creep into variations of gray. Every prophecy a pastiche of fact and wish, the direction that has to follow if words are to be believed. You call it by its name, you call it as you see it. The portion just enough to choke on and still remain unknown.

dither

Maybe I am coming down with something, some seasonal affected ailment, some blood tight burden of a degraded middle age. All the smoke that I sent curling, all the names I have made to stain my breath, the cruel circle of simple maths. The quest always somehow half a fool, half the drag of half a heart. The path revealing every shade of lost, the wandering always some mistake of faith and navigation. The sediment settles over my last thought of getting up to fight again. The prophecy always shadowed in the telling, our stories always of a sort. Shadows fill in the bleak and blunt open spaces, somewhere there's probably a shining wanderer or a pointed star. Maybe it's the way I make it go, candle quick, then only darkness's deepening depths.

A pair of crows dawdle a top the brush-tips of two cypress trees, dark and sovereign marks of a vast and powerful hand. The strokes of light against the dirge-work feathers, the scrape and knuckle of that certain banished blue behind. The lovely sky a sudden all spurned lover, the laden weight of fade and walk away. As if the eye must always overcompensate when it does double shifts because of a haunted heart. All the empty carried through the burden of the workaday world, all the words that meant nothing as they were said. Language's greatest trick was letting us think we create it, like the stone thinking it made the river the water cut through its bones.

This is the heart of matter, the lilt of magic just reading the list aloud, the words only anything at all. The pop songs spill, the prayers flee our lips, kisses slipping over each and every flight of fancy or figured speech. The spell is the matter meeting its will, the work of burning always the scene change never the curtain call. The lights go out, the breathing quickens, every ashen invocation boiling in your seething mind. Faith a place you need to fall to find. The winds leap and the sun goes out, I am left with smoke and flesh. The magic only the husk unwinding, the coil of each breath a stitch in this ever diminishing return.

machine and ghost

How many more stars must fall this night between us? How many more lights must be left all alone? The smell of smoke choking out the season, the chill in the air and the spill of eager chimneys, November clinging to the very air. Another clumsy street emptied of all but intent. The sky a scuffed and haggard gray amid all this useless space. Every time its like some sweet and saddened song unwinds, out of the range of the senses all want cries out its tempo. I reach for you in all these spells and letters. I reach for you with every machine and ghost.

This is the stillness of small shabby rooms lit artificial. The slip and brush of fingers playing at your seams. The moment flush with skin and grace. The stretch of reach the natural analogue to these literal notations, the heart quick within this fever of flex and want. The words left pressed like kisses folded into palms. The emptiness and the busy mind. These plaintive calls and these crossed symbols. All human need and ache  left beneath the mat. This stirring of dust into water, of air into ash. The spirit spreading its wings with every breath.

Am I there when you read aloud this letter? Do you taste each mute and sharp of my present tense? There is that thrill left of incarnation, the rollick in the reek of this ruined meat, the limp and lilt of each staggered step alive. These kisses left for you to feel, drizzled amid sped breath. This wrap of love and limbs enfolded around all the broken and the lost, this taking of hope as a direction to aim this plunge, the why that out weighs all the righteous why nots. These words unbound from all their wounds and flags. The want that haunts all myth and matter, this love that may soar or shatter, this verse pressed slow and hard against your lips

ballast

The mosquitoes sink to find my skin, my blood that precious chemical that shifts the balance of their ballast, calling the feast down from this dimming shade of heaven. The branches reach out and hold their breath, night always a little strip of winter, the air all around in strange alarm. A distant train wails and roars, shaking the sediment about the air. Miles away the rumble nudges the soles of my feet. All blessing less than the slip of blood each mosquito gluts its guts  on, that least measure of the resonance of native will. I reach out across the gloom and wonder, your smile somehow imbued into every ache and awe. Shimmering wings hover just out of focus, the air only gathering its teeth.

There is a slurry of quick shadows. There comes the usual stretch and scratch as your senses choose your scars, the future another set of lazy prayers. There comes the early stars and planets, telling some fortune in some kind of doublespeak. The stranger on the corner, the branch of the road. The spill of some vast enchantment no better answer than your own. You wait along the broad spectacle, all tremble and fire as the world turns away. You wait at the ebb of heady traffic, these fierce bursts of strange entanglements, mood and geometry and earthly laws, the gravel hiss another named ghost someone worships first. The roads all swollen with darkness and spilling lives.

The night is alive with vicious kisses, the fall clamping down on my bones. The words all swarm and swap their skins, a tide of cherished impressions and worn out jokes, the mystery always a world away. I abide all the names and numbers, the swift whispers that swarm the wind at night. The roads tangle with these shifting alignments, the trees tense and then bow to the wilds and the bristles, a storm called down in homage to each turn of phrase. It is the onus of the atmosphere, the press of static inflames the flesh. I close my eyes and feel each breath spill. This wash of all and naught.

early dusk

You agree the dusk seems early though the sky hasn't even filled with dark. One by one your pleasures are tainted by a lingering stench of shit and piss. The world is always closing in on itself, the day always folding its hand. Slow and gray, and everything all the sudden full of the sort of problems only guitars could cure. Your eyes wide open, the sky just does what it does. The ease of these geared up absolutions, the wheels that turn on the flutter of one tongue. You could be anything you think if you stayed this low too long.

What of the blues that border blackness, what of the breath of these pines. The forest seen in a single tree clinging to the wonder of structures left unsaid. The blue becomes silty though the sky still seems free and bright. Growth and dissolution, the scales only ever weigh on the keys of the piano, the crow's call at once sounding like a sample buried clever in the mix. Each breath fills the bones, burns the blood of its latest offering, the river always changing worn skin tight. Tomorrow and tomorrow, the long slow spilling of each drab confession, the drizzled beauty of skillful tears. The reality beyond us makes us seem some fiction, belief always beating its brains out trying to lead us to the moon.

I watch the skies for its inevitable flocks and fleetings. I watch the sky as it surrenders its shine to the night. There are children shouting in the distance, reminders that I live too close to people. There is music playing saying much the same. The guttering of stalling engines, the vacant hearts of dogs barking their brains out, the fleeting feeding of nest bound humming birds sounding always like a gauntlet tossed to all comers. Life rushing past the distance, life filling in the gaps. The sad note of my location less than a pinpoint in all this rich proclamation. The bitter of my tongue just a turn from the sweetness of the song.

testify

Believe me, the truth will be sooner than you'd like. All our heights of exasperation, all our pretty, sticky little lies, these tales stretched and bent to fit our favor. They slip away while they still linger sweetly at our lips, they dissipate before the press of breath leaves the skin. All this ardent condensation duly informs the ghost, as these earnest words seem to you like wounds. The startled face of fall all at once filling the gutters. The way that winter can strip the flesh off a word, leaving these glistening bones to freeze.

The sun soon abandons its insistence, the old dead roots singing blind their unburden. The warmth on your back gives way to the biting breeze. All the colors return to their unlit frequencies, resonating this song of shape and shadow. Each slow stretch another ancient struggle, the structure there to show what these sayings wouldn't. The coils of smoke and dust that shimmer in these few last lit hours. My story all burned down, turned mounds and the smolder of these feeble motives. My life just eyes closed while the sun will still caress my face.

The head counts out its ultimatums, the heart beats out only it wills. The words I find, the words I follow some kind of painting on the skins of whim. Appetite and sensation, these stories we build to clothe our want. The truth only shrugs and tells it has nothing more to tell us. Make what you want of it, this is just you. I know how I long to cling to your motion, how much of my wishes are always sticking to you. What you mean to me doesn't need to mean anything to you. I await your revelation. You don't need me to testify.

art's sake

Because the days go on and on, because the mirror won't ask the right questions, because the door is open and the weather's cool I fill in the blanks as I go. The rise of tides, the gaps between, ache is an arrow already loosed. From those steely blue heavens to the rigorous portion of burning black hells, I always somehow miss the moment, I somehow always lose my cue. There is the sort of heart that goes with looking through drawers, the kind of eyes that are always gazing through the blinds. This is how I find my way, writing in the changing ice.

The mood persists though all else fails, the words run astray and the pictures play havoc with the mind. The bitter breath that slicks your tongue and leaves your lips, the blown kisses of yet another life. The grit in each smile, the bite in each offered balm. There is always something speaking to you, saying things you will not understand. There is always some straying wonder, some sense that falls upon you like the shadow that makes you prey. All these stars that weigh in when silence would serve much better. All these stars so far apart that you would be better served to wish on the distances between them.

I say how sad and lost I am, I speak to the loneliness that takes up most of my life. I see how a word will wear against another, the metaphor phrased so that the bridge between the meanings burns, the tongue extending its to shape and tame the feel. I speak aloud in these dim waning hours. I speak aloud to the clinging dust and spiders. It is written down because there must some scrap worth saving. It is written down because I just keep looking for the words. Art is the polish earned from pacing the floors down. Art is what's left from losing the whole of a life. The moment slowed down, the river frozen. The beauty left of all of this falling away.

insalience

Name me after any star you follow. Call me from whatever road may roam. The skies will bleed, the blood will,curdle, the cry that comes so quick too close. Our days unwind as gossamer wire. Some strange contagion meant to be carried aloft by the whim of the wind. The least tremble of startled flesh awakens this dissembling, the way you arrive at the mark on the map. The name pressed against that scintillating edge of perception threaded through the gaps. The way the match struck abandons every surface to the burn.

The sun finds my skin as the afternoon lingers. The pines stretch their dry extremities, touching heaven with so much kindling, each measure limb and needle and the unwavering will towards life. A crow falls from on high, its throat a loosed arrow, its call piercing the bright and the blue. It circles wide, looking for some morsel to appease some slice of empty, a meal or a mate or some ached for spark. We are here and we are gone. We  are driven by these hungers, we are lost upon the endlessly unfolding story of every enduring tide. The sun touches me, kin and sustenance and a story someone told at once. These things that inside that may only follow the light.

I am the branch pruned for the sake of the tree. I am the phantom limb, aching from this tome of never was. These words never to be written, these things that cannot be unsaid. Slowly all hope comes unraveled, each dream is undone. They find the stories that fill their blood and unburden their conscience, invisible whispers crackling in these mystery receivers, saying everything will be alright. This wind blows right through me, howling and hushing through my emptiness. We teem from these wounds we make with our legends, we swarm from the scars made from scratching the words straight upon the skins. Call by any name that happens on you. Whatever answers knows its place.

prayer

It is the essence of this asking that our reasons should  be left out. These words that topple from our tongues exhaust already before they meet their meanings. There is a sense of want, some ached for purpose, some hard and hollow place in the heart. The brittle touch of the impending winter only known by bone and star. Idle light amid the ripples. This emptiness that knows no end.

I write the line though my vision's failing. I write it down though the darkness calls. The single bulb burning upon the dusty shelving. Books abandoned like all the friends who have moved passed reach, the weight of my own wonder buckling each wish. The world is only marvel and sad reminder. Abundant beauty and my own inadequacy all the bounty that I know. Ache and the pitch and yaw of this failing flight.

There are no relics left to scavenge. There is no soul left to barter for another change. The blood tells all in red and hungry whispers. Gods and ghosts and all manner of monsters to hunt and fear. The will another dull transmission, culture a costume put on a dog. No-one there and still we raise our voices. No-one there as we huddle in the dust. Another poem to phrase my adamant strangeness. The earth below, the sky above, all joy and woe the same.

intimate

It is this kiss that first leads us on the path of the unfamiliar, drawn by that tender promise, driven by all that ruthless blood. This press of passioned flesh, the mingling of skin and breath, this thriving wildness driven to find that spark. It whispers deepest secrets, promises all manner of matter and dream. The thrill imbues you with that rush of direction, drives you towards the stranger you will become. It is the one kind of losing longed for, the self you lose to love.

Passion speaks so clearly, adrift in slick intentions, the lost caution a cleared throat before the voice resonates through these skin. These thick condensations that clutch the heart and leave the tongue to labor against tooth and lip. The air all around swells as the breath speeds and the spirit envelops the act, you at last knowing the home of all your love and greed. The entanglement somehow freeing the senses of their tasks, this ladening of your will with the want for another, the magic only these moments know. Out loud you seem a stranger, yes the only answer you need.

We walk in separate selves, our ghosts always hidden from our daily face, always some restless other brushing against our thoughts. The way another shifts inside the clinging of clothes and glances, the tide of this arcane blood haunting our every step. A glimpse of skin, an electric reckoning of another's gaze, the pretense of language banished in the animal measure of press and bend. We lean in, at once stranger and accomplice, at once partnered and all on our own. We lean in, only our depths able to fathom how far this want will wander. Never knowing how long the wonder will last, we lean in to that kiss.

want

The heart is a hard road roamed, where hope is sent to loom and fade, where the word is sent to show the way. The heart is a bleak spell owned, the cracks left of your character, the shadows left of walls. The beat will stretch the skin awhile, the rhythm will hold the hallway open. Through bad dreams and drowsy pitch, these blind eyes urge you on. It unfolds like a fortune from a cookie. It tastes of the pastry ground down from so much must. The sensed hand just the weight of a drizzling rain.

The clock that once held me fast to the classroom now never seems to even want to meet my gaze, hands blur past the hard-count face on the wall, hours bleeding into the very air.  The dismal tic, the doleful tock, the aching mechanics of time as it abandons. The lights carve my shape from the darkness, my shadow clambering across the floors and up the walls. Each breath spent to wish and want, ambition another words for haunted, initiative either the hunt of hunger or the fear of being devoured. A spell cast like lines in the sea.

The heart paces the halls, the heart beats the boards. The show is still the show, whatever words you pin to its tail. All this want, all this wander, fingers feeling the brickwork and the rigor of the mortar. All the need that pulls and presses just the blind discovery of each joint and seam, our lives the simple texture of the surfaces we conspire. This meat so full of starlight and magic, the shine and spark collide in our sovereign flesh. This world of chain and asphalt binds us to our last rasping breath. Make a wish, snuff the candles. Make a wish, listen as the heart gutters and growls. The heart hungers and plods, the world always right here out of reach.

awaken

All at once your dreams scatter like minnows in the shallows and your shadow cluttered world awaits. You find your feet falling into step, these dark halls and scattered lights all around. The moon in the window has its say, casting spells and ghosts. Your haunted heart speeds beneath your steady breath. Your trying eyes sliding between sight and shade, between seeing and only seeming so. You awaken like any other collection of clockwork parts, lively as your springs and gears will make you, timely as any other suspect machine.

You move through the dark clutter of your life, uncertain but without bothering to find the light. It will all be clear soon enough, fingers clever and eyes learning to adjust to their limits. The light outside only reaching close enough to whisper its secrets, never shining loud enough to spill the beans. You meet a chair, you bump a table, the details of your travels told in scrapes and bruises, the price of knowing always paid in pain. It is too late or too early, yet you pace these traps and piles, feeling your way toward some reason. As if the act of waking alone told of some fated sign. As if the loss of dreams wasn't worry enough, you find your way through the dark. The door opens as it was bound to all along.

Outside the moon makes a marvel of the pines, tangled in the tall limbs, spilling cold fire through branch and needle. You clamber through the knots of root and shadow, stepping through the dust and dark. Your life all angles and bramble beside this breathless spread of light. The dreams you fled now find you, footfall and heartbeat, alive and awake in the early stirrings of the world. The slow drowned feel of the wind as it spills, the heat of your thoughts as they sprint and swarm. You open your hands and let the moon fill them. This life slipping through your fingers, this world with no use for walls. Your portion everything you can carry.

fair weather

I try to shrug the sunlight off my shoulder, mistaking it for leaf or feather, the mind stumbling over these slipped senses. The sun unmoved by any of my ministrations, it settles into shine. The colors confound me anyway, my eyes lacking cones or the cones poorly tuned for perception. The bright of the sun, the blue of the sky both trying so hard to persuade me the world still wants me. These tricks of heat and light always just holding back the fall.

We bristle and we banter, our thoughts always dancing like plumes on the water, our thoughts always flowing out to some forgetful sea. Belief a stone that breaks the surface briefly only to sink and settle below the rushing tide. The restless minds that lap and light with the senses smoothing the sunken stone that hold us against the relentless flow. These words we wear as though they mattered. These words always so close to folly or flight.

The dust swirls, the dust settles. These fingers close around another gentle day. The flesh leans into this fair weather, faith a full stomach and warm toes. Children shout and dogs start their ruckus, the autumn seeming just the summer with shirts and shoes. The things I feel I think I know the most, the things I think feeling like strangers on the road. I close my eyes and let the blessing linger. I close my eyes with the darkness coming on.

other words

At once again you are away, and I sink like any fool sun. The stars all scatter to find their constellations. The silent sky scuffs and gutters, all the fires out of eyes while my will idles like always. I miss you as my mood dissolves into blues and bitters. I miss you like the moon misses the restless sea. The old empty settles into this dull husk, my heart only beating for you.

There is an unsettled soul in every love letter. A plea or a promise or an open book. The oaths and troths eternal. The riddled kisses and the hungry spaces between the lines. The urgency to persuade seethes through every line, the need for the intended to move toward each intention burning in each word. I love you more than words and letters. Only you sustain my longing, you streak my skies and sustain my fire. You are the promise that all love letters long to be.

Midnight falls away like a dream, all the lights are out. This lonely skin feels the slow dissolve into want and whisper. Empty hands wandering across glass and plastic, the world without you just strangers and things. Far from here I hope you are sleeping, wrapped in every warmth and comfort you require. Outside is all dogs and traffic. I miss you like this dry earth misses rainfall. I miss you as this drought turns it all to dust. This empty a thing borne by bone and blood, this heartbeat the rhythm of my wanting you.

other worlds

You learn the life that is in your hands is not the one you've been saving, and the ragged roll of wrongs just seems to keep unfurling. This sympathy at first misplaced turns out to be mistaken, and the same old saw drones on and on in the movie in your mind. Your blood unspilled, just a little spatter. Your thoughts too real against this weight of matter. Here you are, bent back and sore bones and this story you created.

This misery only half mistakes, the rest bent towards the oblivion of spent wishes and missed flights. The road less traveled, the road untaken, all the pieces you mistook for puzzles crowded in this battered box. That life you supposed now inviolate despite the life you spent away, the things you should have seen, the things you should have said. The strange way the mirror makes our face never fit the photographs. The odd call other worlds hold on the clumsy meat inside your skull. These fictions and fantasies that only prove you unfit to hold your place in the world. The sadness of these imaginings destroys you in the end.

Your questions eventually name your mistakes, the world they see and you say drifting further and further apart.  The victories, the failures, the love, the loss. Soon it moves you from loser to lost. The closet full of coats you can't remember, the words that fill your pockets and your hat. Your life like some ancient constellation, hard to see from the shine of other brighter lives, indistinguishable from any other set of names and stars. Your life unrecognizable as described or by description.  The bitter drift of possibility, the despair of losing worlds that never were. Something someone said, returning to you as sleep wanders off unattended. Something that you never heard, giving away the ending.

blue ink

First there is that itch upon the page, some ache of intentionality, some utility inferred. The blank an asking in itself, a condition of inheritance, the comfort of impulse in the framework of the thought. The empty inside invents the metaphor and your heart just longs to spill. All the old songs and gypped feelings, all the spells of blood and want and tongue writhing with the desire to be told. The pen finds everything it lacks there upon the bared pulp of the page. This scratching is all the rest.

Oh how the heart wants when it is wanting, how the voice  so longs for a void. The letter always waiting in the skin of that blank page, the words lurking in these scratchings of blue ink. The breathless flow of the pen gliding in these tides of fervid blood and language. The dull palimpsest of the mind pressed against these wants and wishes, giving shape to what shadows will stretch into marks and symbols. These gaffed incantations of lust and love. The ache painted always in lacks and sighs, the letter so heavy it can scarcely take the crease.

Sometime all love leaves is embers. Sometimes all love leaves are seeds. Then there are these letters, etched onto paper but rooted in breath and blood. These castings left when language loses purchase, the change in the sky when the song turns wrong. Crisp and clipped in open hands, the bone dry cistern where this one voice flows, a moment pressed and folded, sudden wings aloft on your whispers. Evidence of a shaky hand and a changing light, love beating its tide upon this cribbed shore. The world as it unwinds, the trail of steam and smoke. Love as it burns and burns in these inky blacks and blues.

suspense

The cut always comes before I'm ready, my second measure  never complete. The words fall from breath to silence, from kisses listing and meanings gone astray. The words test the flesh like corpse flies, gathering to sup and flit upon the glistening pall of the meat. A sentence tensed, a tendon flexed, my story told in this need to tell. I never learned which words would ever be enough.

A fragment of the moon hung in the wide blue abandon of the autumn sky. All but dissolving in the empty air, settling like a ghost in the leaves of the swaying tree.  A bauble caught in a bright and ruthless tide, an object suspended like disbelief in the cool and errant firmament. Exposed and hidden, a secret whispered aloud in the bare blank sky. A stone slowly sinking, the tenor of this terrible faith.

All at once you wake and the night's wide open. You wake bathed in electric light, all the stars lost in the curtains. The words slip by, as if assembling their departure. The words surge on, as if taking to the wing.  I see the room, shine settling down like dust. The doors and walls, the floors and windows. The world right here, so loud and lonesome. Everything so evident, the words just want and want.

aloud

The questions go on, unspoken and unanswered, flies landing on the flesh not yet tainted with rot. Asking always invites perspective, perspective always shows somehow it is not enough. Always this want of understanding, these hints of a puzzle that can't be seen. Always this need to justify these words with still more words. Pressed against these tides of sensation, buffeted by the insistence of pattern after pattern. The words writhe and wriggle, bursting from these stillnesses left the blood.

It feels as if it's the mystery's tell, these devotions that whisper through the substance, these rituals that tidy the mind. It is never the silence that drives us to speak, it is the distaste to hear the rhythm broken, that conversation you always count off in your head. We learn the beat before we see it, the words all landing once we've pitched the roost. Matter all flush with candor, the ghosts we give when we stir the simulacra our nerves offer each touch, our hearts so laden as every sentiment renders our world. The words bear witness as if drawn from the wind or water. We speak the words, and the world shifts into place.

We drift amid these tides and spells, the words we spill, the notes we hold. All the lot of want and wonder, lovers' fingers and nature's bounty. All the breadth of human senses, strung out on the line. The bones dug up the alphabet of this latest phrasing, the shards and relics stories they told. We speak aloud to the pots and stones, the air filling with our worries. We sing along to the song in our heads, the sky and earth giving way to gods. The world always outside our answers, knowing only all.

invisible

Grant me first this raging fever, give me this searing in my blood. Fire rises, up through each root and stalk.  Each burn another little story. Another turn towards the urge to isolate. Grace is a glacial favor, so slow and deliberate as to seem unaware of the time. The work of the world is to bloom and reach. The work of this fire is to burn the world into embers.

The sky is alive with the seething of translucent wings, a sea of transitions alight upon the very air. The autumn sun falls like soul struck music, thick and insistent beyond the melody, that movement of feeling that always hints of meaning to the heart. The necessity of change glistening upon each skin, the curled leaf and sad-eyed depths of heaven. The words cling and sparkle while the world gives up all the implicit ghosts.

The story begins with the world on fire. The story begins with the ubiquity of days. Every dawn evinced evidence of the eternal nature of the enduring, proof that even change is a thing in passing, a facet glinting upon the long slow reveal of the wheel that is forever. I meet each day again extinguished, outside of reason or explanation. I meet each night with the dull certainty of every spent prayer and lost password. I am the dregs of these bouts of identity, the remnants of some lost translation. Some placeholder for a place that is gone, the proof of ghosts as the chains they drag and drag. I am cold and invisible, watching the world burn on without me.

the crows sing out

The sky is only clouds and motion, the afternoon so startled and bright. Shadows stuck sudden to the wall waving, so slow and certain of goodbye. Vultures glide on formal wings, their distant brushwork a deft suggestion at the depths above. You follow the map of the cracks in the plaster. You follow the argument loosed from the crows. The song of all want and abandon. The place where the language gets so tangled with the tongue. The sky is painted fresh with every wing.

This is the moment, as it always is. Measured in heaps and flora, counted in jags and spurts. How the sad sustain predicted, how the spent dance demurred. The blunt population and the bleeding hues. The story of beauty always told in changing lanes and missed connections. The story of beauty always mistaking discovery for invention, invention for a magic spell. The crow sounds, metallic and jagged and just unstrung. The crow reveals its instrument tumbling with the fray. The price seems so prescient you assume that your empty pockets mean you paid.

The sky shifts and stammers, like it just dodged a bullet. The neighbor's dog just won't stop its barking. This morning's rain scarcely a memory and the dust bears no witness to any but the wind. I pause between the reach of shadows, I slow beneath the clouds and pines. Flies flit and the wind walks a top the trees. The tide of breath, the flow of blood, the song of the sky, the rhythm of the heart. I speak aloud every prayer and spell, I loose the names, and shatter ancient chains. The crows sing out each sentence, every roost as near as dusk. Every day another raucous prison break scattered into gossip. Every day so doomed and bright.

All at once the day goes

All at once the day goes gray, though every ruckus stays the same. The drift of music, the dogs kicking gravel as they go. The air exchanges breath for breathing, the wheel just turns and turns. I save a portion for the Sky Kings, settle up with a little smoke left over for the wind. It is the endless idle of the changing tide, the moment after the covered cough, the sleeve left to embrace each indignity. I shrug and amend the sacrifice. I abandon my offer to the tumult calling up the embers. I burn a little for every god that's not.

The cats patrol, the scrub jay objects, and the dogs dance their dance of speed and circles. The winds all wild the day away. Rain is hinting of its coming, the taste and press of its kiss in the air, the cool gray draw of this idle afternoon. I miss the rain the way I miss you. I miss you in long pauses and breathless always, the words always a flurry when the meaning runs low. The shift of the sky, the shadows cast from sun. This sense of you as drizzle to drench. The strange sorcery of the ordinary in our every exchange.

I will never know just where your spell ends and this gap in the world begins. I will never see past the comedy of knowing just enough about my limits, enough about the world to know your every urgent sacrifice for love. This slow fade, this dense gaff of concentration, all the days and weeks of ache and want and wishing more and more. That cinematic arc where the cloud passes and the sun is all there is. The light behind your eyes when  they are lit by your smile. All these whispers that wind up wishes in the end.

count

It begins with how much I want you. It starts and stops with how much I love you. The way these trails of ink and breath still the sentiment. The way these words flicker and burn leaving your lips. This love note certainty somehow seeming sediment, weighed with familiar truths. This love letter rewritten again and again, a life of trying to get it right.

Words alone came back to haunt me. It was with words alone that I would feel the leaden weight left of matter. The burden that being leaves leaning against the fence. I thirst and hunger, my kisses like cracklins. The sense of the place where heat and life meet to settle the difference. The searing song flesh sings as the embers stir. I lean close and say I love you even though I am hardly even real. I kiss you slowly even though you are hardly ever here. I count each aching beaten breath, every word older than any ghost.

You wake swiftly and feel the dry air at your lips,  that sense of eyes absent in the dark. Your face still lovely drowned in shadows. Your voice so certain by strength of heart and faith, your blood a vivid song through your fevered night. I reach for you in the brushwork of these dreams. I touch you with your hands and fingers, whispers adrift skin tight. It ends with your name lingering on my tongue, your memory my only tomorrow. The count always coming down to you.

migration

I miss the call of the crows in the sky before the day even knows it's dawn. I miss the silk of your dazzling hair against my lips as I kiss you in your dreams. This odd magic, this old one-two, the stretch of want across the wastes. The feather slowly spirals down, broad and black as it flitters and floats. It falls to your feet in dull physics or deft reverence. Either way I miss the moment as you grace it. Either way I can't linger with the sun still slow between us.

Some worlds are made of want and hew, some are made of wish and wander. The thick tangle of these casual incantations that coil in the depths of all this press and ache. The days only there to measure the migration of shadows. The sky only there to guide our eyes. You are missing from everywhere but my every sense. You are hidden from everything but my heart. The hours stick to the teeth of the world between us, sweet and smokey and slow to dissolve. My hands just waiting there on my wrists, my fingers lingering in the disarray of the empty air.

Another day of passing shadows, another night of lonely beds. The gap and stretch of distance crawling on and on. The aggravating map of the discouraging lay of the land rolls out between us, mountains and rivers and desolate roads. Flags and boundaries make their dull complaints as our lives plod on in the singular. Tense and elocution line these lines of lost causes and lust. These echoes of things that are said again and again, these teeming feelings boiling over every single cell. The winds rise and the trees wave from the top on down. They wave and the black wings seem further. They wave and every feather shines in apt motion, oblivious to the clinging of my dreams.

press

The chances are you don't remember, my hand on your waist, your name on my lips. The chances are I never lingered longer than the smoke in the air or your scent on my fingers, everything written in lightning, everything so skipped and spent. I was there for a brief and fevered moment, then I was gone. This legacy of splendid flesh, this inheritance of lack and bitter tears. A kiss, a glance, a stray intention. All the words end up paired with was. All the days only stories told around some failing fire.

The day is all dressed up in blues and grays. The sky is scribbled with the scrapings of clouds and the scuffing of wings. The cat drowses on the rusted shed, the dogs doze on the dirt. Everything settles into schtick and splinters, the echoed shells and the old banjo. Everything settles into memory and schema, every sense a substitute for some fable I wrote in heartache or hope. All the blanks filled in with unquestioned answers. All my mistakes the most obvious form of faith.

The lesson isn't gather ye rosebuds. The lesson isn't that beauty fades. The truth is that the truth will never need you. The truth is beauty will watch you bleed away into myth and fiction. To endure is to remember as change takes it all away. These giddy blessings of flesh and feeling, these dull refrains that sing out of every sad romance. The glory and the thunder, the prophetic fall of blood and bone, the indulgent press of skin and hunger all stones skipped across the rippling depths. The world is once and will be in our words and wishes. The world is ever and always a spark extinguished the moment we feel its warmth and see its shine.

push

How the air shivers when we intend to part our lips, speaking aloud what once was only blood and pulse. Giving body to a notion the same way we shed breath. I lean in, as if to whisper. I move my body as though we were close. The wind spills in to sweep each tree of every shadow. I do not hesitate until I say your name. These wishes, these fleeting incantations. The way I whisper each and every kiss to your radiant skin. The wind rises and the words just melt away.

It is memory that tips the scales, eyes that glitter with enchantment and intent. The slow circles as each notion traipses and bundles down the blind stairs. This insulation between each spark and breath, the learned burnings glisten like fever in the insistent sweating of this self. The waves passing through you as you seethe and gel. This want this name the push of demanding hands. Always you are here, warm and as near as breath. Always these little whispers to come shimmying down the bones.

The rain falls in spatters and torrents, it falls in dashes and in dots. The sky leans in close until everything spills and spills. All the dust goes dancing, this vast unruly baptism lashing limb and reviving root, the old songs shaking loose from these mistaken lungs. I cough and cough, climate a kind of faith in weather, the body ever the river and the rollicking sea. It is so much nearer than the pain, so much closer than any jag of prayer. With a word the world sighs that name. The doused cinders sing and sing. How heavy the flavor lingers when it is down to the ashes. How long this taste is savored when even the spirit meets its flame.

dreamers

The skin of the day is nicked just so, peeled off all at once to reveal the glisten of the meat. Light dribbles down and pools just so, on this, the beginning of everything that's left. They always say their mouthful. They always speak their peace while the grease from the feast still shines upon their chins. The day always so ready for the skillet, the day just hanging from the vine. All the words swarm that exposed flesh, flitting from blood to blood, every appetite fed letters. Every hunger a sound sunk in symbols, waiting for the feast.

The blue of the sky spills in broad swaths and sullen oaths, bright and gliding above the trees. Birds float and insects flicker, the giddy torrent of fall and fly all that heaven will allow. Wings upon the wind, the light singing through each skin. The measure of the vast distance between touch and reach, our written kisses, our spoken grips. The shadows ring and peal, seeping from each limb, pouring from the stretch of every tree. It is the lighting bright enough to illuminate what it incinerates. It is the revelation that consumes the sway.

All the air rolls and scatters about you. All the stars shed their stray points and signs. The calculated laugh, the fretful smile, the scent of warm skin and dryer sheets. The ache that comes from such unrelenting reach. The slow labors of silk and cotton. The plain facts as they press and sigh. We cling to the kingdom of stumps and stones. The dreams entangled never the dreams we share, the lowing from the far fields and that beckon built from low hanging fruit. Hold tight as these arms will tremble. Dream on though it will all be abandoned once we wake.

psychoactive

I count the numbers, I learned the names, so the day must be different. I stalk the dust, I cast my shadows, I spill salt due to the usual dreams. It must be different though it all lies the same. I mind the fires  of some ancient spark. I drag the ashes with every staggered breath. The wind picks up and the ashes dance amid the shadows and the dust. I am still in this rising heat, slick with sweat and thought. I count the numbers, let them spell everything out.

Life is leaf and the brittle branches. Life is thirst and hunger and the old sharp shock. It is the spark that smolders, the cinders that warm with stirring. The genie loosed from the bottle, and all the King's men and horses can't fix the stopper again. The paw sets and unsettles, step by step as the prey is stalked. Wings spread and spill their shadows on down from the sterling sky. I sit in these scrambling shadows, the wind flickering light like a motion picture, known only by bird, bug and beast.

Everything so similar though the day is different. Everything in motion though I have stalled in my skin. The world falls into shadow, it climbs into light. Every breath spilled or spent, every arrow loosed flying and falling whatever the target. We seek the pattern, we crave the story. We draw the flame from the roots of our bones and blood. We offer up names, we claim the numbers, never knowing we are only ever making wishes on long gone stars. Never knowing when our sky must fall.

antiquities

I wake to the attention of flies, pure intention dirty on my failing face. Fairy wings buzzing in the window, as the heat drains from my wallowing heart. It is the same room, the same shadow, the same absence of skin in the game. Out of all I've lost I find my feet. I linger seated, staring at them on the grubby floor. Just one foot after another like that childhood Christmas special song. Steps like years, leading to the same sort of nowhere. I follow my resignation out the door.

There are maps made of paper, maps marked and creased with wear and work. There are photographs smudged with remembering and fingers that still could feel. Ships sunk full of Spanish gold, dreaming in old curses and false pride. Remnants of another age, antiquities spilled careless, folding into dust. This faith of blood and bounty. These words that no-one will ever find or feel. One wind, then once again. This tide of breath and sky.

I would say something,but you can't hear me. I speak in a rusted colloquy, in an obscure argot thick with fleas and fur. I cast my shadow towards you, but it cannot reach you until it reaches deep with the night. Then all my wounds and failings can mingle in the silence of your sleep, the blessing of not knowing a finger pressed against the lips of boorish fact and rigid matter. We can sleep on through the ruin, dreaming out this fantasy in the crush and press of these naive inspirations. We can keen and we can pray. All the stars gaze ambivalent,  while I lean outside my skin and wish for what will never be.

hit parade

I am out here wishing, though all the stars have fallen. I am out here waiting, though the sun has lost its way. The music rattles, the music hushes, scant cover for the  sound of lawnmowers and the insane screams of playing children. The shadows practice their brushwork with a seasoned absent hand, the wind sweeping life down from the sky. Something stirs as the songs keep coming. Something stirs in the dust as the wind all but dies.

Now every ache is suspect. The verses misunderstood all read by the TV light. Sore from the meat in my skull down to the sheen on my slick bones, the pulse on a dimmer switch, the hapless vector permeated with sick and sighs. The song echoes in the clumsy confines of my struggling heart. The song spills through me, as unfeeling and vicious as any virus. The fever holds the rudder however hard the oars rattle and strain. The legions have their way, and the words trickle through this spent and clammy flesh.

Sing out of your loves and longings. Sing out as the stars crackle and spark. The hot air chills to ice all the sudden. You dance amid these hieroglyphs, your chemistry leaps and roils. The broken chain of evidence reeling in your skin. Here the gods, here the demons, here the digits swarm and swarm. Your head swims in this skin of sky and earth, your every blink annihilation, your every breath the sea. I have my say in the sweeping drift of the swaying of the pines. I speak my peace like always, leaving silence all the same.

organic

You move the meat about so much you come to believe it's you, these bundled muscles and sloshing guts. Or you think somehow these storms that bear your voice are separate from matter, spirits waiting to be free, ghosts for every habit. You fly that flag that most comforts, you fly the flag that fits. Each of us a nation of symbiosis and happenstance, a million separate actions every second we call ourselves. Each of us a teeming conspiracy of boundless time and mortal stresses, believing we are the epitome of existence. Every mirror holding the face of creation.

I watch as the infection seeds my flesh with future scars. I watch as the illness slowly consumes this muddle I call my mind. The sizzle of the skillet, the static of the signal overwhelmed. Each moment a slow boil, the spark and scuff of wrecked synapse and clotted thought. A few bones, some blood, countless bacter. The dull clabber of culture congealing in all this useless tissue and want. Most of my needs and wishes well with-in the curve typical to my species, gender, and geopolitical distribution. The few outliers the signal decay inherent in the chemistry. The singular expression of a failed species that thinks it is winning.

You watch as the sky darkens, you sit as the plate is filled. The words come well after all the wanting, the reasons tacked on well after you commit your crimes. The stories pour forth, a thing of seething blood and ritual insistence. You cross your heart and hope to die, swearing on whatever truth suits you. Wounds will open, wounds will weep. Mostly it will heal or it will kill you, accounting for the creep of accumulated distortion and various notions of entropy. All the songs of breath and birth, the deliberate echo of every antecedent walking inside your frame, time and continuity the litany of the lives you share in your trembling frame. We sing out the praises of the incalculable ancients in each incarnation of our dumb existence. Our most enduring legacy the viscosity of tears.

cling

The world falls down in familiar colors, flashes of blue amid the midnight black. The watches are all wound too tight. Bent springs and tiny gear plates, these anachronistic thoughts of machinery at work in my obsolete mind and staggered heart. I weep a little now and again as if to prove I can. My clockwork though is running down, and I fear it won't be long. My flesh in such disrepair, my thoughts a slaughterhouse-- my life dwindles as the self seeps into the soil. Too much fails and the ghost considers burning down this haunted house.

I lived life as a fool and a coward, of no importance and little use. Now as I lose both mind and matter there is nowhere left to turn. I fiddle while the city burned down around my ears, and can only hold myself to blame for choking on all this smoke and tears. My bones and blood are turned to dust, my mind lost in the labyrinth of my busted brain, each day ever a little less. No medicine or doctor seem to be with-in my fading grasp. Suicide seems all that is prescribed to contain the damage of the farce inside my frame.

It is late, and the winds are on the rise. The streetlights drone on, flickering in the distance, the modern constellations of these bled out lives. All the stars forgot me before I was ever born, reaching out with their unfathomably ancient lights. I linger out beneath the leaning pines and indistinct reasons, my riotous mood at last nearly spent. I am the spark of extinguished fires, the unspoken conversations scratched  out in glyph and sign. The sigil of failed punctuation, the borderline where language becomes mistake. Death another door with optimistic locks, not one thing is mine. Everything taken all at once, not even my life my own.

volatile

I need no stick to stir the ashes. I need no spark to burn and burn. The dusk slides along every surface, the dusk sticks to every skin. Every breath mingling smoke and wind, the volatile kinship between fire, air and earth. Every thought skipping along that long slow groove. The song plays all hush and pop, that certain same old tune. Lost between the ocean and that devilish moon.

It isn't as though there wasn't a warning. I knew what words were like long before you ever used them on me. They linger on the lips, some goodbye kiss before rising  on the restless tide of that yonder blue. They bind to our wishes even though the world won't agree, they sink into the potholes, they fill in all the gaps. You speak, and suddenly there are reasons. You speak, and I fall and fall.

The sky huddles up above, the earth unfurls below. The shadows paint the cracked and dirty walls with tree limbs and the unleavened sun. We crawl and we clamber, our ancient blood and deadfall bones. The dread ending always waiting in the wings as we tromp and bleat upon the boards. These dreams the only warnings, these words another kind of bind. Hold my hand, as if you never thought any different. Hold my hand, as if heaven was ours to waste.

ossify

My dreams all live too far away, my days are nearing dust. The world just falls and falls, shadows painting the walls. The bones all woven into place, as if a sign to mark this waste. Read aloud into the ruins, all ambitions ring so false and frail. The gravid breath, the grievous exhalation. The words spill, useless pebbles cast as spells as hearts harden into stone.

The rationale seeps into the tableau, the roots are sated with this sickness. The moon spills out onto the naked pavement, mouths all a-gibber with prayers and curses. All the poems, all the promise saturating the rigid strictures. Structure spelled out in trained tree limbs. Was once never means forever more.

This heart clings to superstition. This heart hopes for the magic implicit in your every touch.  The life inside  congeals in its suspension, the world walks its beat. Dusk comes, humble and weary of all these lovely sights.  I don't speak aloud, so fearful of being heard. I don't ever ask, so certain of your reply. Everything pretends to the rictus of these dull descriptions. I may never speak again.

parity

I can't name the constellations huddled above the house. I can't call down the storm clouds when the weather is a mess. I sift through the wreckage of thought and image, rolling the pieces in whatever words are loose. I stitch  together some story that even I know isn't true, satisfied with the words that stick. I bind the song to its stays, and make up all the rest. It is a marker, and it is a measure, and the distance proves itself all over.

Come plaintive arrangement, come lolling saxophone. The heat spills unhinged across the landscape, melting into the crumbling architecture. The scenery lingers a little too long, the dialogue all trails towards dust. The story pools and seeps. All your spells and recipes bared  all line and light. All your campaign promises, all your starry nights teeth loosed from a bleeding smile. The made up god blesses and the made up muses all rejoice. The story only rocks stacked beside the road.

I can't sort out all your secrets. I can't read the drift from the lightning in your eyes. I work through all the forensic evidence, I trust the figures in the proof. It isn't so much the thing believed but the belief itself I need, a rumor or a reason. A star to hang my wishes on, a trail of sparks to feel out the fire. That flash of eye, that smoke split flint that smolders in your smile. There you are, and all the rest is roads.

hourglass

All things being equal, still you spill your sands, time measured only by what it does without. That shape in waiting shifts its shadows, shrugs its shoulders, and begins the dream. The days given up to dreaming, the sands surrendered to the tide, you unburden the shift and sway with the lilt of your hips. You pace the dissolution to the acuity of your heart, slip off skin and shadow until only bones are left to shine and shout. Grain by grain, shape by shape, you reckon and you reign.

You blaze and burn, all grace and glory while I crave the flutter of your kisses, the glisten of your skin. The insistence of your hip beneath my fingers, the shimmer of your golden soul electric to my touch. The breathless stretch, the furtive glance that beckons on and on. Lips drizzled down throat and limb, kisses trickling down your belly, kisses drizzling down your thighs. I am bound to you by means past conceiving, but I cling to your every leap and twist, flesh and bone and blood glowing with its flow. Your spirit moves me towards your touch, the shape you shift with mood and want. This hourglass only safe in my hungry embrace.

It is the shape of transition, the wheel in all its turnings. You bide your time in seas and stars, the skins that stretch over all this wishing. You count your blessings and shrug off your burdens, the tide of your steady breath, the rollicking of your heart. The sands fleck and spatter, the gathered constellations of this grand lapse. You will weather, you will wander, you will ever shine. I will measure my dwindling days by your architecture, your shape and substance my only calendar, the time you give me my only clock.

little piggies

The last little pig never knew the wolf, only the burials and the brickwork. The last little pig made his house from words, and was never found again. The black and white gave the lay of the land, the stretch and strut of wave after wave of breathless words condensed against these quaking conceptions. The fervid urgency he made in these long braids of telling, the spell of want and the spell of will, wall after wall found by baffled back and bruised shoulder, the cool quiet floor a respite for heel and knee. The last little pig explained away the world, speaking just enough to give the gist. The wolf huffed and puffed another world away.

The story always returns to the tongue, the names live slyly alongside the heart. The hopeless must of this daylight dreaming, the dredge and flash of these wishes Left to roam. The words all stick to circumstance, the hunger so big and bad. It prowls the halls of each reflection, wears the mirrors of ancient angles. The aim somehow held aloft by stripes of breath and shadow. The target always some drift of heart.

The wolf still will huff and puff, blow down those foolish doors. The dreams will stretch in disarray as I stumble and I grope. The meaning so far from the road we wandered so far down. The piggies always being counted as the soul of appetite, the fed always still food. The way the words bend and break, threading roses through our bones. We pass in the sing song way of lullabies, we lean into the fray. The dull retort of plaintive kisses goodnight, such weight as breath can breathe to wishes. The lonely hearth so far from danger, flickering in the shadows of another long goodbye.

unlined

It is a nation without fear if all the t-shirts know what they are talking about, colored up so as to ring true and never run. It is a world so beautiful and cast that I do not deserve it, a life wadded up in a corner waiting for disposal. I see the science, I see the breadth, I know the weight of my illness bends my thoughts astray. I know this, yet I cannot change the way this darkness floods. Tomorrow is only make-believe, and tonight is long and sharp.

I have no money and I have no honor. I have no skills to sell or peace to speak. The heart just goes on battered, worthless and without faith. My brain is weak and my body fails me. I am prone to impulsive actions, mood swings, and violence. Every day I let down someone. A new love beckons, and I know already I am not enough of a man to answer true. Suicide is the obvious answer, yet  I owe too much to do what is best. Instead I write, and continue being wrong.

The winds blow strong as the flag unravel. The winds blow hard as the words flutter and flee. My moods change and sunder, my voice cracks and crumbles. The days each leave their mark, the world will tend to its wounds. My loss is a drop in the ocean, my failure another mote of dust. We spin while the sun just sits there staring. We rise and fall while the sun spews and fumes. Stars and clouds and dirt and ruin. The writing is sprawling and unruled, the book smudged, every page as innocent as a child, clean and unlined. Tomorrow is the act of faith that will break me. Today just another wound.

missing

These hands need something, so I smoke for a while. I scatter my ashes into the wind, I follow my footsteps in small circles, everything caught up in the dance that is missing. Everything counting on the song that went missing long before I woke. The branches flail and lash,  the dust stands upon its hind legs and does another jig.  The shadows flood and gush, every tide another moment awaiting retreat. I take a picture, as if that was how long it lasts.

The world sheds its skin, the words come rushing in. The old tricks sticking to the tenor of the air, the rush of thunder and the crush of atmosphere. Tomorrow and tomorrow and that host of ghosts and specters. My empty hands and a hole in me that will never close. This romance already straining at the seams, written kisses left for careless lips. This life of mistakes and the mistaken thought that this broken vessel can hold the solution to itself. The winds go wild-- I wonder in blood and bone.

These hands are idle, though the devil gets the day off. The sky boils and rages, the weather my only witness, the weather my only guide. I sift through the words I use and the words that use me, never finding blanks, always using the margins of some other conversation. I speak aloud to the beasts and the birds, singing my father's song of lonesome days and empty glasses. There is no mark, there is no measure. Your softened sentiments a symptom, my sharpened blade a sickness. I take a picture, because that is how quick it goes.

press

You leave your celebration skin on so long you begin to believe each scar. The old romance of just being you hot and fissile bubbling from another mouth. The world sags and stretches, the world sparks and gutters. There is the glow of a wishful candle in that kiss. There are all the alarm and report of what you thought were metaphors, all the storm and sweep of this fervid discovery. Every sense a-clutter with those whispered kisses, your halls suddenly all haunted with her every gasp and reach. You pressed against, the whole world as heaven.

The clock casts its shadows through the windows of your life, time an itch always demanding a scratch. How easily are these skins shrugged, set fresh and a-glisten for each languid mystery, every patient kiss. Your lips parted and pressed against that urgent ache, her name melting in your breath. The heat of each speaking the whole work of your universe, your love in lavish doses, her's the only name for love. The old poetry clinging to your shoulders like hunger clings to ribs. The old prayers bleeding out into the dry and aching wind.

You cling to her in smoke and salt, you stick to her in patina and glisten. You speak to the stretch and blush of her essence, the words running slick and hot. These gushings and this promise, the gleaning that comes with all this liquid abstraction, a shape set with tooth and tongue. The old poems rooted right through you, every word a kiss drizzled down her. The reverential as it exhausted relents. You glow with the heat and impact, being the exclamation made in her witness. You shine in skins stitched together from the light in her smile, burn in the slaughter of her love.

author

The world works in detail and broad strokes, the wasps scraping at the dangling leaves, the wind stirring the dust and heat. The dogs stretch and pant all the editorial you'd ever need. Here in the tall shade beside the press of passing traffic. Here beneath the broad branches and the dull reaching of smoke. I write it down in weeds and ashes. I write it down in scar and stone. The ants pitch in like there was a fire burning somewhere. The ants work at it when everything else is broke.

I have my habits, I have my reasons. What does it matter if they are often the same? I scuff the dirt, I close the circle. I write it down when the words run rampant, I write it down when the words are gone. The winds arise, the winds relent. The summer sprawls across the block. The mocking birds fight their endless battles. The hummingbird notes each location and every change, the soloist always scratching at the score. The poor joke of it is written always missing the point. It is always about what the author bothers to miss.

The sun beats down, the mocking bird scolds, the children provide scads of yelps and shouts. I am guarded in this rapt condensation, sweat beaded on arm and neck.  There are these collisions with memory, the star bursts waiting in every stretch. I say everything that I am thinking whenever I don't know what to think. Without acknowledging that you draw down the distances, without saying I call to you in every sense, the inscription loses meaning. Somewhere the world will find you reading this kiss meant to break upon your lips, every sentence breathed and bent. My love always a notation of your direction, the author and text of all these burning wishes.

sentience

I leave my mark in spilled coffee and scuffed up shoes, the imagined stations of self suspiciously abandoned, the ship long since lost at sea. I am the munitions of another time, the technique provided by the gaps and spaces between these worlds. The words conspire upon each line. The words breathe out their emptiness. The world is the press of shadows inside my ribcage. The world is the sound of water to the drowned.

Do these stains and scar remark upon discovery? Do they long to tell their tales and field their reasons? The love letter addresses you from some point in the past, the story of these origins, the shine arriving from some long lost star. Always something better measured by the cup, always some wishes aching to pose your bones. The point on that map of time, where they draw all the monsters and dragons. The heart and hush of some want of  other, this revelation only alight in your eyes.

I have come to the age of shadows. I have reached the end of my halls. There may be a smile, there might be a candle. Some small urgency shared, some stir of hip and tongue. There may be nothing but unpacked boxes. Entreaties no-one would bother to send. A name I learned to listen for, so there was nothing left to hear. A call I knew would never come before I learned it was all I wanted. The slow dissolution of arisen awareness, the knowing that mostly you were mistaken, the weight of every moment spent wrong. I say I love you as if I mattered. I say I love you as if you could know.

star bright

The days turn to dust, our lives these bright passages read aloud, these celebrated excerpts of unremarkable texts. The sky so blue because of a preponderance of water, the world so green from a trick of chemistry. Every word so aptly misspoken, each moment holding its own shine. Each thought arrives cloaked in gray, unfounded and unfolded as if the message mattered. The old fashioned sound of an envelope, aching to be torn open.

I saw you off on your way towards heaven. I saw you line up for your turn in the sky. A light up there in the blue, a star ever shining so bright. You pay for my passage back into my own lonesome, the boatman and the tolls. I pay in the pieces that leave me to be with you each time we part. These languid hours, these whispered kisses. The difference in your absence in the weight of the whole wide world.

It is like how songs stay put in our hearts even as the times and places change. It is like the way we remember ourselves in some past incarnation so completely that sometimes the mirror is a sudden cause for alarm. I feel  the feelings, I say the words, however unsuited, however inappropriate. The letters scrawl, the letters dry, folded clumsy and meant for keeping close. I write the words the way they come, though the world has turned and turned. The blue in the sky, the star burning bright. This lovely coincidence, this beautiful brief existence.

preternatural

The story unwinds as the day unravels, the road before you and the sky high tomorrow. I ride out the twitch and twine of my ragged nerves cutting back the shrubs and reasoning the deadfall into piles. This passive spell of thoughts unspoken, the sand in my honey, the bitter in my sweet. The words that well with-in my heart, despite all the chips you have anted, despite all the skin you put into the game. The strange feeling at you are some prayer answered, though I don't think that there is anyone on the line. The odd notion that our entanglement is fated, though I don't particularly believe in fate.

And so the rush of proselytizers, the hocus pocus omen huggers to attribute deeds to their incomprehensible mystery wizards. So comes the claims the claims for invisible intercessors, spirits, and all-gods. The meaning gleaned from the winning streak. The divine seen  in favor granted or enemy's demise. The hordes of statistics, the hives of numbers busted open and a-swarm. The way incidents branch and peel as we cast our gaze back towards beginnings. The way the truth seems obvious when you are so certain it has been revealed. I can look to the sky and be certain that there are things there I can not see. But there is no proof inherent in my lack of sight.

Still, as you travel towards me in this space and time, it feels as though we are. meant to be together. As you come to me in all your beauty and your glory, as you come to me despite my failures and my flaws, there is a magic of blood and want and coincidence that I must honor even as I think I know better. While the winds run wild and the dust kicks and swirls, I feel my heart seethe with wishes. All these silly stories I want for my very own. I offer you every indulgence, each bite and every morsel of this yearning meat I am. I offer you all my tomorrows, knowing full well the doom at most likely entails. Knowing that my words ring hollow even towards your heart, I sing out my empty prayers, though I must most likely answer them on my own.