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.