ideation

There is the day, there are the words, there are the systems and the senses. The vacant school field dripping with sprinklers, the mocking birds scolding the cat in the grapes. The feel and the phrasing and the world always so much the same, yet the sickness grows. Blue skies and fair weather, yet my mood is in the wind. The old call to violence over these fresh new failings, the urge towards self slaughter forever in the wings. My whole life an inability to reconcile my wants with reality. This dull relentless longing for a bullet to baptize the wall with my brains.

There is dust on my tongue, there are stains upon the smile I seldom find, there is all the sorrow and this rage. The tales I tell all leading nowhere but into the thickness of language, this seeping from all the wounds in the world. I can feel the press and lift of the atmosphere as the air sails and stumbles, I can hear the lilt and the hesitation of limb and leaf. Music plays beneath all this struggle and sway, my campaign the cracked voice and the closed throat. The song in my heart drowning in all this blood, the tears on my face trails in the dirt. My legacy only ache and confusion, my inheritance wreck and ruin.

The day is slow, the clock is plodding. My skin dissolves at the least provocation. I close my eyes and feel the press of steel. I close my eyes and I am in the sealed garage with the engine idling. I crave the abandon of bones cracking beneath this desolate fury, all this hollow prattle another balloon loosed in a room. The terror of this vivid, daily decomposition always a flicker behind my eyes. The sadness of my lack clinging cruelly to my heart. Each day feels like the day I need to end it, the promise I made to still my hand stuck like a splintered bone in my throat. The burden of this broken brain, the tension of this unbidden flesh, the tatters of my every least intention shredded before my eyes. I don't know how much longer I can hold on. My grail beyond my grasp, my life in scraps and shreds. Every day a blessing I want to end.

some brand new now

The wind threads the lapse between sky and earth, kicking its heels up in the dust. Every day another two stitches, another one cut. Each day the bright reminder of so much left undone, the ruin that declaims your way. Sketch to sketch, skin to skin. The hollows gape before us, each deed drowning in the past, every word the ghost of ten thousand others. The stretch of credulity, the seamless transition from light to light, the dense text of deep abandon. One name, then another. The words just plod and plod.

Like it or not, the evidence suggests that there are other minds at work. They seethe through the bones and the brittle synapses, they leap the gaps and mark the paths and claim some road for the virtue of the spill. They build the towers and steal the treasure and foment all sorts of gods and ghosts in the cracks and the seams. They mistake the tangle for the tenor, and happenstance becomes destiny. They mistake their loss and their limitations for a mystery beyond their noisy meat, heaven proven by the reach of trees, the tumbling world the prize to spurn for a kingdom made of wishes and jokes. The world, for its part, takes no notice.

Now the dog hunts a horsefly, its transgressions answered with gnashing teeth and swift jaws. The sun stipples the long lean of the pine. One thing, and so another, then yet another. The stories just go and go. The porch-light on in the tumbling afternoon, the cigar butt smoldering above the gathering of ash, the clock on the wall always naming some brand new now. Life as a journey, life as a burden, life as a poem discovered. Everything said just so, everything treading water and spilling breath, the poetry another symptom of seeing. Ashes on my belly, smoke threading my every breath. The dust dances with the wind, every origin story an ending alluded. All the words written, orphaned on the page.