So long, cool words

So basically I am a very depressed person with some literary pretensions I can't shake. The end.

curtains

Do I see the stars all aligned through broken branches? Do I know the distance to you as brushed by the wings of a crow? The days of sun unravel with winter still sniffing at the door, this dust and dust, and so much dreaming. The footprints danced into a circle, your story stitched into the spell like ink. Those dizzy tattoos everybody is lousy with, something always other must this flesh declare. It is enough to know I love you, whichever word or way.

I touch the warmth of electricity and metal, the smooth insistence of your charm. To flit and leap the whole word over. To spark and step and never know just how alone. It is digits on the television, seraph on the font. The weighty fruits of some diverse oblivion hanging heavy from every vine. These stubborn percussives, this gilt sibilance. You are the words as spoken, the hand as it must be played. You are the spell unbroken, a lavish idyll and the endless hush of rain.

The night alludes to its usual ghosts. The lamps all glow, the TV mumbles. I suspect that you are sleeping tangled in all your dreams and worries. I suspect that you are sleeping beneath those stippled constellations. You are so much closer, and so much farther than flight can say. The dance is always run in cycles, the reel goes 'round and 'round and 'round. My hours burn down, my hands are empty. I love you as you are swaddled in all your sweet tomorrows. It is enough to know I love you, whatever you may say.

hubris

Is it any better to think you will not fall so far because of your limitations, that because you aren't worth a second glance the gods will just let you slide? Why should the mighty suffer so when you can take spill after spill? Why should any slight be overlooked by such a touchy and heavy-handed heaven? Every success, every bright leap of love, every thrilling dream come true all owned by these jealous reckless ghosts. Why believe that you can ever be good enough when their disappointments will tear all the meat from your bones? The gods do not tell us but are contend to harvest, all our bounty already remiss.

The stars come out as imitations, the light that shine so weathered and true. I can taste the smoke of each conversation, the silken coil rising from the candle just snuffed out. The language of lamentation birthed from the bitter on the tongue. Expunged chances, murdered hopes. The fires alight in the crushed of broken bones. The fissures set down until the fevers release. We bow and scrape as way of explanation. A prowess to redress any given worth to pay this debt in blood. I lean against the cold worn down timbers, ice seeding splinters in my every touch.

This is not the only story. These words were never meant to be set just right. Only to seethe from these cracks and sadness, bitter remainders and ancient complaints. The grievous injury set against the splinters of fearful smiles, teeth another set of leavings, the way this life has at you. Knowing that your sins are never punished enough to free you. This press of omnipotent lips against blank brows, this hum of blood and plunder.  To hope to live without respite for every slip and misgiving. The foolish rise above the fray as if the stars would worry.

your heart just what it seems

Knowing words mean nothing, I took you at your's alone. The burdens come whole and unsorted, the prize a dream in a dream. Now the world wears slow against me, grinding away all of what I thought. Now hope is out the window, your heart just what it seems.

They fill the air like animals roused for a long delayed meal, these bright stars and last stars. The slick way these fictions have crept into each reckoning, stories that no living soul has witnessed passed down like any shared vacancy, a light left on for moths alone. The nation slides along these sick minds and slick tongues, every fool known by that comic look of sheer surprise. These hopes take wing so I will take the dive. I hit the mat harder, knowing the only holding I have by how fast I fall.

There is no trust in knowing the world. There are patient recitations in every place and way. You can only follow the line so far, and then it is always who knows. I took you as your story when all you ever told me was in your stay. Now I have again earned this sadness, to have believed so easily in things that could never be true.

the contrary

The wind jumps and sprints, cold breath against the warm shoulders of the dragging day. I wake slow, eyes skittering against the hard edges of dropped objects. The coffee steams unconvinced. Steel rims and ink dark skin, surface tension dancing with bled reflections and torrents of writhing vapor. The false mirror finds the sky meddling in my every dose. Each measure some small forfeit. Every day only evidence to the contrary.

The dogs are barking at each other around the corner, the remnants of some game gone astray, riot always ready to run. I cuddle my coffee in both hands, hunched over, blowing as if my breath will be the difference between just bitter or the burn. As if we were anything but appetite and ignition. The clock paints a picture, it sells its song. I write it down rather than sing along. When the day comes to settle, I will write it down as well.

The chill works its way through the soft ragged cloth, wandering wild over any shivering flesh. Shadows ghost and flirt against the wall. The world keeps slipping out from under the sun's steady affections, tumbling into all the stars and darkness. Spinning their way through this litany of days counted, worried like wooden beads meant to trace the course of your prayers. I type with cold fingers, words that will settle into the sediment, filling in each blank with the things left unsaid. The wind spills, and each word seems worn, spent through lifetimes of clarification and inference. These rocks and marker, meant to mean forever, left in piles and lines. Words chosen only to be swallowed by the wind.

a solitary brilliant spark

It is dark in the way dark is when it finds you, with tears and isolation hitting every beat. It is dark in the way you are lost when the lights go off and no-one will answer. It is dark in the way the night always falls hard against your stature, hard into your arms. The moon can't find us and the house wandered off awhile ago. The road is out there somewhere now that every shadow sticks.

The night won't love you because you knew it first. The night won't love you because you saw the hammer fall. You feel the dusk weigh down the springs, you feel her kiss move like a fib to the corner, just standing there with all it's down. Doors slam and wheels spin, gravel pocking against the windshield, love wheezing in some ditch. Steam huddles in the corner, steam steps stiffly out of the dark. It is heat you long to know.

You arrive as thoughts and whispers, as coiled smoke and nested shadows, the slow oil of your throat somehow always singing. You spread your self upon the cool floor in smoldering layers, your body all the sudden best told aloud its very direction. The spell cast by your wishes. your leanings always meant to precipitate this fall in fire. You arrive as choices, a friend to the stranger you look for in this dark and hush. You are ignition, the inferno born of a solitary brilliant spark.

operant

At times I see you as a structure, arms and limbs and sex run stray. I follow all your curves and paths, explorer to wild wilderness. Every craving spent on stretch or gap another blessing to you as stick and stone for the making, all this compassion driven to craft your form. All this bend and bow spilling into your every crevice, my skin just calls and calls, this looking still a symbol, this light the only way to revelation. All this show and tell entangling you as want and move, the vivid notion of you slows into devotions, the read out loud becomes the only road envisioned. Seduction becomes the making of maps, you become the terrain of all my longings.

At times you are a puzzle, to prod and move to solve. To untangle as a resolution between want and way. Between the clothes that serve as curtain calls, falling wished for and dashed upon the ground, and the long pause of flesh you suddenly unwind inside your mind. So then each saying matters, aloft in the heady dark of things. Were this troth, would it hold true? These old enemies mouthed in one breath, language all knot work and faith.  The riddle bound to be slipped and solved by the work of the nimble tongue alone. Saying makes it so we say to the song of the world uprooted.

At times you seem a system, like a ritual raised from holding a steel coffee cup for warmth. The way these fingers intertwine, holding you so certainly close. A process slowly enmeshing every sense, each action numbered and witnessed, your every chore adored. A ritual with order and flourish, the time of the day, the place of the sun in the sky. As if I could learn the pattern that would surrender you to my hands. As if all this asking was enough to wear down the road. The slow certain press of your lips against a letter. The way the ink dries line by line, the mistake I make again and again. Your name as if it contained some miracle. Your name as the action that will free the world.

of dusk

I have been lost too often in these tangles of soft shadows, I have tousled too much my words. The sun somehow always setting, the sky always setting down into dusk. Gone with all my reasons the words to any prayer, the odds to any chance. I wander these star spat nights in strings of lame exclamations always speaking as if I was dreaming of something. I scan these threadbare constellations as if I was looking for your heart.

The night falls just like in books. The night arrives like words that are supposed to make it so. My aches remain to be read aloud by any set of eyes. My hopes seem like wishes I feel too old to speak. Silly magic exclamations that care nothing for cause or cost. Vivid actions you can feel despite the empty, longed for moments thought out so careful that you can feel them fit your hands. The stars dream on in pulse and power, the dismal distances still having to give them their due. Impossibly brilliant across the almost unknowable void.

Funny how I worry that this is just a story. Strange how it wounds me to even think the words. If it were a story then I might have some tricks left. In a story I know I can always make my case. Spitting words through open windows, singing sweetly to you as you awake. Choice morsels in your mouth each morning. Stirrings inside you whenever you read my name. That I was stuck with some Midas touch, but instead of for gold, for truth alone. I would speak aloud to you so often. I would speak and you would follow in rapturous fascination, glad at my basest obsessions, lit alone by my clear intent. Instead I say it aloud as if only meant for you.

ashes to ashes

The day is cold and gray, a stray wind rushes to find me  outside, smoking away the minutes. The final collapse of any pretense, all these names and insignia collapse while I draw and fume. The lesson of transition as ember  turns to ashes, the fleeting fire always orphans anything left of the fuel. The lesson as submission as yet another addiction sheds my last pretense. The lesson of solitude, all my life spent learning to be alone. Smoke only rises when something is burning down.

How dull I am to miss the moment of winter where the birds start courting. What a fool I was to think one season ever holds more than a day. Love is here, love is gone, you wake from the dream forgetting. All the words are true, given the right address. Every moment spread out loud, from the bottom of the ocean to the edge of the declared atmosphere, something bound to land right. Something ought to ring true. An icy wind adjusts my thinking. I grow slow and bitter, shed of my last bright spark.

In the end I must stop counting. Every poem I write a promise broken. Every rise I climb a fresh look at the precipice. The lesson of attachment learned as the ligaments tear loose. The lesson of diminished returns returns again and again. In the end I must extinguish the last ember, no-one left here who will use this flame. The coil of smoke crawling through the dying sunlight, pine limbs swaying so slightly, biding these stories of snakes and fruit, these tales of moral order and courtly ardor. The lesson of fire only that you will burn.

falls and falls

The sun settles like embers, the night rises like smoke. These skies choke with frost and stars, all freeze and sparkle. Lights so bright they lie about the horizon. Lights so bright they crowd into every idea, making sport of the truth of distance. All things fuel when you are the flame, everything an ashtray when the fire is your life. Something burns down, and the day leaves you alone.

It is so cold my fingers are screaming. I write these letters like it was my only cause. To say such things out here alone, as if there was any other way. To speak such things out aloud, as if to risk them being real. The figments I desire hold such sway, the weather doesn't know how to keep them at bay. Dusk falls like everything else. Your light like hope, so distant. Your light like stars, maybe gone though I still see it.

It is such a sad sad story it has all but been extinguished. It is such a sad sad story you have all but lost the spark. Everything you've said and done, transformed in silence and gossamer ash. Everything you've said and done, exhaled darkly into the star leavened atmosphere. The moon melted down to an idiot grin. A life left, bereft of love and passion and hope. The fire so low it is only heat you see.