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.