too far in the dark

The day is gone, that's the sum of it. The day has left and there is nothing to be done. I just hang out at the edge of the shadow, listen for some singing of the precipice. I just think of you in graphic detail, moving slowly through the breathless corners of my desires. I think of you when the distance feels the worst. I think of you as close as kisses, and I know what life is for.

I get lost along the instant, I wander too far in the dark. My heart resigns itself to the road that is left, my mind casts its usual foolish spells. The weight of the very firmament, the lonesome crush of haunted stars, time and distance only names for the limits of this skin. This dream of you an imposition of my closest calls and dreary decline. The wish of a fool to be a king.

The years stroll by as the world unwinds, an idle mind grows wanton and wild all alone. The roads grow few and narrow, always winding their way through some familiar mystery, all thoughts so typical and strange. All the stars and bars of gray, the sliver of that too soon moon. The silhouette of a cat climbing up the roof changes shadows. Old songs and generic regrets, and this unwieldy want for you. The music staggers and changes, all this life a press against the absence of a wished for world.

threads left

Are there ashes in my beard, are there embers still with-in my eyes? The words trail off like the twilight horizon, first there's sun, then so many long lost stars. There are never enough to cover the spread, little left to go around. The mind settles on its earthly mirror, chance always seen as destiny in the histories of the survived. The prophecies only stir the ashes, wishes set in stone, prayer a matter of habit and grammar.

I kiss each breath, I court each stone. The sky is all stripes and stars as I move slowly in the dark. Once the way was just to find the path, the wisdom was only to keep the fire burning.  The wheels slip and trawl, they spin and spin. The world takes its tribute and makes its claims, however the story chosen goes. I find each morsel, I savor each bite, clinging to the map like smoke. I clear my throat and speak aloud, no-one to hear me but the trees and the heavens.

I am of an age where I feel each weakness, where the light dims and the shadows swell. The world just the threads left hanging, these crowded lines just the limits of our reach. The rags of habit, the gleam of bones, the voices haunt the empty home. The clocks defends, the clock confesses, honesty another kind of worn down. I do not think I cling to anything of matter when I grace the ghostly precipice. The burden of encoding these last aches and wants linger on my tongue and breath. The words will fail like anything, a thrilling spill, a gentle fade. You are that mark that remains. I can only know you as a blessing, the way you are so much I want. I can only know it as a fire that wants to find me in its glow.

encroachment

I come calling wrapped in shadows. I come calling tangled in shaved light. Staring at your open window, or out the window just following the moon. Wherever the mood might find you. Whenever the planets might align. Whether it is the first seen star to affix your wishes, or that latest one to fall to take your wager. Whether the words we find will fill in all the blanks. Whatever the weather, wherever I am, I look to you as the sun fades away.

The season is a voice on the radio. The season is a flavor in the night. The shadows sweep in through the windows, painting the walls, grating the light. Always that drift along any easy axis, the lonesome elliptical and the static we bask in beneath these distant stars. Breath billowing in careless clouds, the world turns its shoulder and we are always waving goodbye.  Goodbye to these purple dusks and golden dawns. Goodbye to the wings of providence and the slow warmth that awakens the flesh. These wounds so grave that we see them in everything that is.

I press against the weight of light spilled through windows. I am echoed in the subtle gray of the glass. My breath somehow always drawn like straws, my hands everywhere like leaves. The barely whispered blur and hum of a mosquito the dusk makes manifest. The ancient songs that stir at the faintest scratching of your skin. The words a flood spilling from this fever, this touch that place you always have to go. The missing tooth always remembered most, the tongue takes its shape and takes another turn. I am as warm beside you as any wish. I cling to you with the tenacity of breath, all this urgency then extinction. Always clasped so close all that is left of me is you.

the sticks and the stones

The light hesitates, the skins pause, slick with the seethe of shadows in that exhausted moment, a single breath and then all the baggage of this shine. The sky is tossed and tumbled, clotted with wispy clouds and gray paint, the sun so close to kissing the rim of this spilled horizon. I go swaddled in my usual rags and attachments, old aches and lost arguments tucked into all this disappointing flesh, the staggered step of another ghost that doesn't know it's gone. I swallow ink, I spit smoke, I shrug my shoulders when the chill sets in. The day doesn't linger upon want or need, it doesn't count lucky stars or shed tears and prayers. Things are seen, things are lost. I don't even pretend I make a difference. I don't even dream that all this material matters at all.

The days drag by with the slick sheen of steel chains trickling rain upon rough gravel, with the machine sibilance of heavy drops of water thudding onto tin sheets from some limb or leaf. An old bone lies in the glistening glamour of the intermittent drizzle, a pale exclamation from the stippled border of dark and shadow. These aches well and spill, the tide of the mind drawn along the skins of things, every word always almost tipping the tongue. I dance and limp along the lines of the song, the mystery best left to its own devices. The ritual of twitch and tic, the magic that the scales of habit allow, the rhythm there in this breath and the rain. The reach and lack and do not let go of this stray and lingering kiss.

All the greens go gray, all the lights go down. The curtain drawn, the winds run riot, these vivid spirits evident in the roil of this restless world. Gusts rend and tear at the flora and the firmament, the haunted atmosphere livid and inconsolable. Caught in the clutter of this wear and wound you witness the weight of causation press upon the emptiness of intent. I wind down the walls around me. I stare at the TV awash in electric light while dogs snore and windows rattle. All that's left just strung together, words and wishes and aches and charms. This is how strange the ancient work of missing you feels, stacked here amid the sticks and the stones. This is the magic of the spell left within you, this fleeting shimmer though I am long gone.

jackalope

You go down to the crossroads just like everybody says,  waiting for a stranger, looking for a sign. All there is is that much more traffic, passing fancies and marks on the road. Just the gravel and the grit, the wander and the weight. Your smile spackled with dust and soot, your words struggling to find their way free. Spit your rhymes and say your prayers, the answer is always the same. Lucky numbers or stolen portents, you call it what you want to and mark it no-one really knows.

You differ with each speaker, you recall each spin and surge. The line of tradition one long underscore for all these plaintive rages and animal urges. The story that you would have told if only everybody would simply play their parts. The shadow cast from a want of shape, the spilled dance of fire pushing against each furtive obstruction, such thunder the black after every flash. The puzzle always needing different pieces, all this screaming just practice for when the fear gets here. The mystery the only thing that stays.

The sound of wings disturbs the branches. Something shifts its position in the blind heavens, blessing a direction picked by stumbling in the dark. The moon is up and bright and begging for attention. Even the air seems aware that it is unsettled. Even the colors creep into variations of gray. Every prophecy a pastiche of fact and wish, the direction that has to follow if words are to be believed. You call it by its name, you call it as you see it. The portion just enough to choke on and still remain unknown.

dither

Maybe I am coming down with something, some seasonal affected ailment, some blood tight burden of a degraded middle age. All the smoke that I sent curling, all the names I have made to stain my breath, the cruel circle of simple maths. The quest always somehow half a fool, half the drag of half a heart. The path revealing every shade of lost, the wandering always some mistake of faith and navigation. The sediment settles over my last thought of getting up to fight again. The prophecy always shadowed in the telling, our stories always of a sort. Shadows fill in the bleak and blunt open spaces, somewhere there's probably a shining wanderer or a pointed star. Maybe it's the way I make it go, candle quick, then only darkness's deepening depths.

A pair of crows dawdle a top the brush-tips of two cypress trees, dark and sovereign marks of a vast and powerful hand. The strokes of light against the dirge-work feathers, the scrape and knuckle of that certain banished blue behind. The lovely sky a sudden all spurned lover, the laden weight of fade and walk away. As if the eye must always overcompensate when it does double shifts because of a haunted heart. All the empty carried through the burden of the workaday world, all the words that meant nothing as they were said. Language's greatest trick was letting us think we create it, like the stone thinking it made the river the water cut through its bones.

This is the heart of matter, the lilt of magic just reading the list aloud, the words only anything at all. The pop songs spill, the prayers flee our lips, kisses slipping over each and every flight of fancy or figured speech. The spell is the matter meeting its will, the work of burning always the scene change never the curtain call. The lights go out, the breathing quickens, every ashen invocation boiling in your seething mind. Faith a place you need to fall to find. The winds leap and the sun goes out, I am left with smoke and flesh. The magic only the husk unwinding, the coil of each breath a stitch in this ever diminishing return.

machine and ghost

How many more stars must fall this night between us? How many more lights must be left all alone? The smell of smoke choking out the season, the chill in the air and the spill of eager chimneys, November clinging to the very air. Another clumsy street emptied of all but intent. The sky a scuffed and haggard gray amid all this useless space. Every time its like some sweet and saddened song unwinds, out of the range of the senses all want cries out its tempo. I reach for you in all these spells and letters. I reach for you with every machine and ghost.

This is the stillness of small shabby rooms lit artificial. The slip and brush of fingers playing at your seams. The moment flush with skin and grace. The stretch of reach the natural analogue to these literal notations, the heart quick within this fever of flex and want. The words left pressed like kisses folded into palms. The emptiness and the busy mind. These plaintive calls and these crossed symbols. All human need and ache  left beneath the mat. This stirring of dust into water, of air into ash. The spirit spreading its wings with every breath.

Am I there when you read aloud this letter? Do you taste each mute and sharp of my present tense? There is that thrill left of incarnation, the rollick in the reek of this ruined meat, the limp and lilt of each staggered step alive. These kisses left for you to feel, drizzled amid sped breath. This wrap of love and limbs enfolded around all the broken and the lost, this taking of hope as a direction to aim this plunge, the why that out weighs all the righteous why nots. These words unbound from all their wounds and flags. The want that haunts all myth and matter, this love that may soar or shatter, this verse pressed slow and hard against your lips

ballast

The mosquitoes sink to find my skin, my blood that precious chemical that shifts the balance of their ballast, calling the feast down from this dimming shade of heaven. The branches reach out and hold their breath, night always a little strip of winter, the air all around in strange alarm. A distant train wails and roars, shaking the sediment about the air. Miles away the rumble nudges the soles of my feet. All blessing less than the slip of blood each mosquito gluts its guts  on, that least measure of the resonance of native will. I reach out across the gloom and wonder, your smile somehow imbued into every ache and awe. Shimmering wings hover just out of focus, the air only gathering its teeth.

There is a slurry of quick shadows. There comes the usual stretch and scratch as your senses choose your scars, the future another set of lazy prayers. There comes the early stars and planets, telling some fortune in some kind of doublespeak. The stranger on the corner, the branch of the road. The spill of some vast enchantment no better answer than your own. You wait along the broad spectacle, all tremble and fire as the world turns away. You wait at the ebb of heady traffic, these fierce bursts of strange entanglements, mood and geometry and earthly laws, the gravel hiss another named ghost someone worships first. The roads all swollen with darkness and spilling lives.

The night is alive with vicious kisses, the fall clamping down on my bones. The words all swarm and swap their skins, a tide of cherished impressions and worn out jokes, the mystery always a world away. I abide all the names and numbers, the swift whispers that swarm the wind at night. The roads tangle with these shifting alignments, the trees tense and then bow to the wilds and the bristles, a storm called down in homage to each turn of phrase. It is the onus of the atmosphere, the press of static inflames the flesh. I close my eyes and feel each breath spill. This wash of all and naught.

early dusk

You agree the dusk seems early though the sky hasn't even filled with dark. One by one your pleasures are tainted by a lingering stench of shit and piss. The world is always closing in on itself, the day always folding its hand. Slow and gray, and everything all the sudden full of the sort of problems only guitars could cure. Your eyes wide open, the sky just does what it does. The ease of these geared up absolutions, the wheels that turn on the flutter of one tongue. You could be anything you think if you stayed this low too long.

What of the blues that border blackness, what of the breath of these pines. The forest seen in a single tree clinging to the wonder of structures left unsaid. The blue becomes silty though the sky still seems free and bright. Growth and dissolution, the scales only ever weigh on the keys of the piano, the crow's call at once sounding like a sample buried clever in the mix. Each breath fills the bones, burns the blood of its latest offering, the river always changing worn skin tight. Tomorrow and tomorrow, the long slow spilling of each drab confession, the drizzled beauty of skillful tears. The reality beyond us makes us seem some fiction, belief always beating its brains out trying to lead us to the moon.

I watch the skies for its inevitable flocks and fleetings. I watch the sky as it surrenders its shine to the night. There are children shouting in the distance, reminders that I live too close to people. There is music playing saying much the same. The guttering of stalling engines, the vacant hearts of dogs barking their brains out, the fleeting feeding of nest bound humming birds sounding always like a gauntlet tossed to all comers. Life rushing past the distance, life filling in the gaps. The sad note of my location less than a pinpoint in all this rich proclamation. The bitter of my tongue just a turn from the sweetness of the song.

testify

Believe me, the truth will be sooner than you'd like. All our heights of exasperation, all our pretty, sticky little lies, these tales stretched and bent to fit our favor. They slip away while they still linger sweetly at our lips, they dissipate before the press of breath leaves the skin. All this ardent condensation duly informs the ghost, as these earnest words seem to you like wounds. The startled face of fall all at once filling the gutters. The way that winter can strip the flesh off a word, leaving these glistening bones to freeze.

The sun soon abandons its insistence, the old dead roots singing blind their unburden. The warmth on your back gives way to the biting breeze. All the colors return to their unlit frequencies, resonating this song of shape and shadow. Each slow stretch another ancient struggle, the structure there to show what these sayings wouldn't. The coils of smoke and dust that shimmer in these few last lit hours. My story all burned down, turned mounds and the smolder of these feeble motives. My life just eyes closed while the sun will still caress my face.

The head counts out its ultimatums, the heart beats out only it wills. The words I find, the words I follow some kind of painting on the skins of whim. Appetite and sensation, these stories we build to clothe our want. The truth only shrugs and tells it has nothing more to tell us. Make what you want of it, this is just you. I know how I long to cling to your motion, how much of my wishes are always sticking to you. What you mean to me doesn't need to mean anything to you. I await your revelation. You don't need me to testify.

art's sake

Because the days go on and on, because the mirror won't ask the right questions, because the door is open and the weather's cool I fill in the blanks as I go. The rise of tides, the gaps between, ache is an arrow already loosed. From those steely blue heavens to the rigorous portion of burning black hells, I always somehow miss the moment, I somehow always lose my cue. There is the sort of heart that goes with looking through drawers, the kind of eyes that are always gazing through the blinds. This is how I find my way, writing in the changing ice.

The mood persists though all else fails, the words run astray and the pictures play havoc with the mind. The bitter breath that slicks your tongue and leaves your lips, the blown kisses of yet another life. The grit in each smile, the bite in each offered balm. There is always something speaking to you, saying things you will not understand. There is always some straying wonder, some sense that falls upon you like the shadow that makes you prey. All these stars that weigh in when silence would serve much better. All these stars so far apart that you would be better served to wish on the distances between them.

I say how sad and lost I am, I speak to the loneliness that takes up most of my life. I see how a word will wear against another, the metaphor phrased so that the bridge between the meanings burns, the tongue extending its to shape and tame the feel. I speak aloud in these dim waning hours. I speak aloud to the clinging dust and spiders. It is written down because there must some scrap worth saving. It is written down because I just keep looking for the words. Art is the polish earned from pacing the floors down. Art is what's left from losing the whole of a life. The moment slowed down, the river frozen. The beauty left of all of this falling away.

insalience

Name me after any star you follow. Call me from whatever road may roam. The skies will bleed, the blood will,curdle, the cry that comes so quick too close. Our days unwind as gossamer wire. Some strange contagion meant to be carried aloft by the whim of the wind. The least tremble of startled flesh awakens this dissembling, the way you arrive at the mark on the map. The name pressed against that scintillating edge of perception threaded through the gaps. The way the match struck abandons every surface to the burn.

The sun finds my skin as the afternoon lingers. The pines stretch their dry extremities, touching heaven with so much kindling, each measure limb and needle and the unwavering will towards life. A crow falls from on high, its throat a loosed arrow, its call piercing the bright and the blue. It circles wide, looking for some morsel to appease some slice of empty, a meal or a mate or some ached for spark. We are here and we are gone. We  are driven by these hungers, we are lost upon the endlessly unfolding story of every enduring tide. The sun touches me, kin and sustenance and a story someone told at once. These things that inside that may only follow the light.

I am the branch pruned for the sake of the tree. I am the phantom limb, aching from this tome of never was. These words never to be written, these things that cannot be unsaid. Slowly all hope comes unraveled, each dream is undone. They find the stories that fill their blood and unburden their conscience, invisible whispers crackling in these mystery receivers, saying everything will be alright. This wind blows right through me, howling and hushing through my emptiness. We teem from these wounds we make with our legends, we swarm from the scars made from scratching the words straight upon the skins. Call by any name that happens on you. Whatever answers knows its place.