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.