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.