world of wonder

The night comes hard softly, the weight upon you all at once, a limit learned by doing. All the moments left unstolen, all mistaken appraisals and summary judgments, the key broken off within the lock while the mechanism stammers and sighs. The somebody you wanted to be no one you’ll ever know. The ledger the red of debt, each breath the red of blood. You fell off the ride so hard so long ago, there’s not so much as a thought of getting back on. The horse made its choice, and there’s a whole world of falling yet to beat back the flesh from your bones. Debt, pain, and squalor your steadfast retinue, the night bumps the hardest once you’re down.

Time moves quickly among the orbits and contraptions, slipping around the rotations, counting on the eyes being fixed on the clock and the minarets. It walks with your ghosts, seeps in your bones with the cold, hides behind the mirror and inside your eyes. It plays with the numbers and delivers the medicine you don’t want to take. It takes everything, but it takes it from everything to keep it honest. It is the fire to your fuse, the boiling pot to your frog. It runs you down to rims, then it leaves you there. The road goes on without you.

Now it’s the long toothed hour, dead nerves and bad joints. The growing list of afflictions, the empty roster of kith and kindreds. The wishes still exist, but mostly as the curling smoke of snuffed candles, the stars so impossibly far that their burning might be over, the lover who never loved you, and never will. The bad art and self important raging. The cold hands of the earth, the deaf ears of the world. Before the meal is over, we will all be meat. The world of wonder devours as it shines. 

agency

The eyes feast

open before the leavings of

the light, the sensing 

ever bearing the brand,

the here I am

staring into the world

while the mind makes

mischief of the map.

The magic of the focus,

the framing and the lens.

So the sky goes, so

the flesh seethes,

this road from face to

ache, from the fence

line to the far horizon. 

Wishes and antecedents, 

the twilight the escape of

your warm name from

out my mouth. 

The wind always swooping in.

I anticipate your unfurling, 

the bent of bone

as if a wing embracing 

flight, all the tethers of

tongue and troth. 

Eyes open upon 

your skin and shine

the draw of want pressed

against the story

left beneath this kiss.

husk

There’s no reason now that the rhyme has curdled, blood rush indemnity and the sudden death of the day. It’s all answers now that the asking is done. The coffee sulks and steams in the ritual steel, bitter and so near to burning. There is a breeze in the back of the throat of night, tickling the stubborn heat from the air, my flesh stippled with hunger and hapless sweat. I am the perpetuity of intermittence. I am thick with ink and time.

Call out to me like there’s no tomorrow. Add my name to your list. Whether the settled bet or the diligence due, we’re all waiting for our cue. The sky shifts and night descends. The dead street and the parlance of cars. I will not return.

Brake light glow and the clamor of children. A flash of headlights leave their watermark in the eyes, sigils blazed into the brain. The nested promises, buried in the retinue of act and instance, stir slowly: the dawdling, sorry story of the journey from A to B. The algorithm nestling in the atrophied alchemy of the scuffing and the self. The melodious stories and the tenderness of the abandoned animal. I flip a switch. The lie of light fills the husk.

portraiture

I am now, and have always been, a disaster. Impulsive, volatile, undependable. Selfish, loutish, brimming with unyielding rage. I’ve never been able to hold a job or sustain a relationship, seldom grateful for a blessing, quick to hold a grudge in the petty vise of my heart. Thirteen years ago this October my father died, a few months after my mother broke her hip and was stuck on the floor of her house for ten hours before she was able to drag herself to the door to let help in. After a few months of commuting back and forth, I moved back to my childhood home in a town I despised and had left happily behind, ostensibly to “help” my mother. I was 41 then, I’m 53 now. The last twelve years have been a steady descent into deepening depression and madness, punctuated by a few daily routines and occasional chores. No one who knows me speaks to me without anticipating some sort of outburst of rage and vitriol, and no one who loved me hasn’t learned to regret it. I am a deficit now, as I have always been.

None of this is new. I haven’t had a good time since my early thirties. My mental illness and personality defects have remained largely untreated, self medication and unhinged furies taking the place of therapy and medicine, and other than a patch of group home work where my stubborn ability to hold the line and ability to take a punch proved assets, I have been an unmitigated burden upon the world. I lack direction, talent, and ambition. My long term plans usually end in suicide, and almost every time I awake I am saddened that I am still at it, even though we all know my particular jig is up. As the nations of the world race to extinguish life on earth, I’m here wishing I had something to smoke while all you jolly partisans burn your houses down from the inside.

I think I had a mild cardiac event earlier this evening, overcome with nausea, vertigo, and a cold clammy sweat. I haven’t dropped dead, unless I’m continuing my streak of crummy narcissism and gaudy verbiage into some baffling afterlife, but I feel poorly enough to be hopeful. As I write this, I’m sitting on the toilet thumbing the keys on this iPad, ignoring the little pains in my chest and left arm, planning on a shower before I crawl back into bed. All my aspirations are dead, no romance, no written legacy, no cabin in the woods. I am a fat, bald, diabetic without the illusions necessary to sustain the momentum of a life. I close in a cold sweat, dropping a note for some posterity that never asked to hear from me. I doubt I’m dead yet, but it feels like I have a shot at being gone. It’s not the sort of assurance I hope for, but it seems a turn for the worse on this long awful downhill slide. It’s no bullet to the head, but for the moment it is the feathered thing I am holding tight.

slump

It is the busted blue weight of this sky too early for all the other starlights, the long shadows and ghost town gutters, the shoulders slung so broke and old. It is the screams shook loose by the humdrum bass line and the fizzle jangle of the feedback guitar, earbuds boarding up the building. The weary reportage from a place torn by the wars to come, the high hill above the bent of time where the roads offer up their journeys, a bitter mouthful of smoke and oaths. The backbone backs down, and the high point shrinks into the rear view mirror, this listless passage gutting the husk. The day ends in smug punctuation and the scent of burning flesh. The coffee is still warm and goes down strong and slow. The calendar says there’s no more homes to go to.

The wind skates the pavement, slips the brickwork, fills every crevice with its long restless broke tooth tongue as it sweeps and swaddles, a lavish passing and a spill of flies. Traffic glides by as the day grows old, the hint of mingled means and seasons as the summer leans on the leaves. Hunched over this trash heap with bug skittered skin, all reason given only to sweat and ache. Dull in the clabbered atmosphere, the perceiver a slow sinking, the story of drowning as told by the fathomless depths. Despair in a shady patch, an anatomy of all ending. Clothes stick and billow, depending on the position and the breeze. A flag knows no direction save the way its blown. No clever name, no fitful description, just the beaten in your bones.

Maybe there is a letter, maybe there is a meal. Maybe you line up with the world according to your wants and local topography, the day breaks and you know what to do. The daily trespass and the old soft shoe might do, there’s no telling what people might be. What is there worth the telling, what is there that makes you stay. The tautology of the bilious palaver, the countdown of the hit parade. The nothing always has its fill, the grip a slipping rictus, the fall a long slow draw. Too much and not enough. The walk of shame, the dwindling of the light. The same old song breaking like a neck.

just this much

The day fills in the places where our expectations failed, the real deal versus the best laid plan, the span of sky that seals us in. Spring comes with all its blues and greens, the press of sun commanding skin. Spring comes with all its birds and engines. There is a space where the curtains loll open, a stripe of light against the wall. A sharpness there to bite the eye as I cower and cry, the unlit room forever closing in. The weeping a leaking of the heart, a place where the mind leaks out. All the brightness upon the palette dries to occlude the truth.

The seasons peel off, one after another, the years barely linger. All the chances are gone. Just words that no one reads, and words never written. The flutter and the rumble of passing engines, everyone so hungry and so excited, rushing around to fill in the blanks of their future conversations. The reasons always turning over as the cognitive dissonance becomes the zeitgeist. The zaftig explanations spilling despair over the unaware as the world sinks beneath the final horizon.

I feel it in my heart as if I was dying, but I feel it every day, so it’s an everyday sort of dying. The beat downs and bitten offs add up, and we die in our insistent repetitions, flies on the windowsill, moths to the flame. The striving lives choke out the broken and the slowed, the wheel turns, and the traveling company becomes the Broadway cast. The old ensemble disassembles, and even the words give way. The roles dwindle and the offers all dry out. Eventually even the scraps you’ll take become too much to ask for. Just this much, just this one day, just this moment. As if.

flower count

It’s right there in front of you, staring straight into your dead dumb eyes. The sharp pop between the teeth, the warm ubiquity of blood on the tongue, these words rooted in the sooth of your soil. All the true worlds lay hidden in the weave, so featured from foundation to firmament that they fill the fishbowl. We float surrounded by the spectrum that we sing, the long talk, the old story. A world of constant warning and meticulous wonder turning on the tip of the telling. The universe can’t get away from us fast enough.

An endless repast, a constant parting, the passage and the reel. We are among the recent verses, a few choice words spoken sharply and a little too loud for the room. Here it’s spring, now is then, the road can only open. The days barely graze, the words go on and on. Bleeding out with the world in bloom. Dissolving with the straying attention. It’s a tough life, deep into the epilogue. The going only ever gets gone.

The weather is turning by the bay. The ocean rocks away to the west, letting loose a lullaby, a sheen of rain set to the natal greens of the rolling hills along the coast. The voice of the forecast somehow calling down bridge and highway, through wood and weld some once dear ghost, a lost love or beat poet as memory gives way to myth. Blackout mornings fumbling with the keys, the stairs a hollow half step, voices down the hallway, TV through the door. All the ancient derelictions, skipping school and stealing books, the random cackling vandals and the line gone dead. The strange winds that left me bent and friendless now remind me of the flower count in itch and reddened eyes. It is what it is until it’s something else, and then it’s all that and the night before too.

unbidden

Looking back, it’s in fragments. Go nowhere stories, and tacked on motivations. It got me this far we all blurt and yap. It’s the way that made me, like that’s any excuse. For those left to the scrapyard of human existence, we tend to accumulate a lot of conditionals. All these if thens that broke bad. All those clauses that ended contradicted. The day to day fending off predators and petty criminals, getting taken down one heart break at a time.

It’s there by the hour, the push of light, the blot of wall. The pieced together play by play, poor rewards and meager features. This blur and beleaguer, trust paid in IOUs, the language torn limb from limb by reckless dissemblers and live by liars. Measured by the silence that attends each entrance, the stillness of every countenance as the say is had. All us outsiders bearing their unseen sigils. All us sacrifices waiting for the cull.

There is the room, the books and letters. There is the room, crowded with dogs and dust. Even the occupant knows this isn’t his story. All the keepsakes and tchotchkes, mementos and souvenirs, the photographs and memories with the Jim Croce cue— every treasure window dressing waiting for the curtain to fall. The terrible truth plods on while pictures are painted and alibis sold, words piled high as the empty takes each day. Words busy with their business as the graves go unmarked. The words keep on unbidden.

goner

I am sick of betrayal. I am sick of words. There’s no coming back.

touched

It’s the blemish that makes the beauty they say, and then they get a look up close. Apostasy the way of things, the words go overboard. Always quick with cross and crown, the linger of the lash, the contempt wins the day. They twist the knife while speaking sweetly. The poison is in the blood. The words abate, the mark made, the culling begun at birth. Each day is too much.

So bide the night and cup the sky inside. The bones bind the vessel to breath and digestion, the wild grasping entanglement like a tide of weeping and tooth hurt. Pain always a partner through the long corridor, I am sore from joists to organs, the velocity of the fall from flight and the drag of all that’s lost. You so far despite your best intentions. The so good long since gone.

The die is cast, the arrow loosed. There’s no going back as the karma accumulates, the swallow soon provident, the begets are bespoke in these here parts of the world. One act to free catastrophe, one kiss to awaken you for good. The break there from the beginning, the world burning at both ends of time, cold read and thunderstruck in the echoes of your eyes. Touched once and left to tend to the pieces.

true sky

We have settled a few miles
up the shore, bent on
meeting the sea at its level,
crane and egret sweeping
between marsh and estuary,
a Peregrine falcon plucking
some luckless passerine,
littering the yard and sidewalks,
spreading feather, gristle and bone
the glistening reminders that
the world is not our world.

A curl of uncivil smoke rises
amid the cypress, palms and pines
that sway above the school field
riddled with flock and scream, some
stubborn fire within legacy brick and
boards beneath the true sky blue,
fire trucks sirens sounding their
daily report of the unseen forces
bearing down and rumbling through
this landscape strewn with
the consequences of killing gods,

asphalt painted with gasoline and
sacrifice, fevered hands full of
death and pleasures shuffling our
last fresh deck. The world braced and
abutted by our monkey barrel insolence,
crows unfolded as the traffic meets
the abandoned offering, all souls
signed away with the mineral rights,
mountains rising blind to our flags and
statues as the sea keeps the beat,
heaven beset with fire and flailing wings.

punctuate

It wasn’t just the odds against, it was the shot that there never was. The all in I’d rain down to the little I ask, there wasn’t any there to be had. The fiction that I am ever in on the fix, they only ask you in to feed the empty. All the big hopes died off early in the anthropocene, all the little ones murdered one by one, the gray of the day through the dark of the imminent dawn. Wishes all these bullets that never grant me peace. A place to keep your creases.

screen time

I was a name, I was
a hand, I was a night
lit with candles and
braided by the rain—
now a chair, now a lamp,
now a number circled
on a calendar, a number
on the face of a clock—
there’s no point in asking
what comes next.
Things never are better

for long. The truth is
there and that’s a fact,
the drawn card, the eventual
settle of the tumbling dice,
the number that tells you
your number’s up.
The test results or
the unyielding tree
you’re wrapped around,
the tenses eventually stuck
in reverse, life another love

that left, now an old man
smoking on the porch as
the train wails by, now
the worn through soles
years of slow circles,
grinding out the ghost
given up so long ago
the words aren’t left and
the music got lost in
transcription. The night
another stranger closing in.

finite

There’s no question that I’ve made mistakes. Falling in love with a riddle is questionable to say the least. Knowing that, and the soul of wit, I tend to go on and on. It’s the mountains that we make, how we add to the heap, all our belabored myths and molehills. The trick of the pyramids, the gimmicks in the real estate. Plaques and names and epitaphs, the genius revealed long after the artist bit the dust. The promise of perpetuity always selling something. The web clotted porch light and the careless kiss of the wind. Heaven can’t wait to make you guess.

Bug bit and screen lit, I smoke in the hollow hunger of an unsettled night sky, swathes of bright cloud and boundless black reveal star and helicopter while I curse constellation and wanderer alike. The wail and ruckus of a train rattling through town stirs each chirp and echo with the dispatch of its there and gone. Such relentless momentum, such blundering certain thunder so fills the air, then this hush that rushes in as the atmosphere settles in. Like love, too big and loud to take a measured measure of. It’s absence, the world at once without. I cough and cough, spattering the unfathomable empty left.

If I had my druthers, I’d favor the faint praise sort of damnation. As it is, I take my lumps. The brutal years and aching days, the inevitable spiral down spinning ever faster, the world speeding past and slipping away. The worst sort of hackneyed vaudeville act, the prelude to a ghost, the engine spins the organism. The clockwork yoke of some fool god’s doubled down abomination, these thrift store motions, this roadshow full of adepts and relics. This worthless witness, a way with not one damn thing.

onto the inevitable

If tomorrow’s coming, I sure can’t see it from where I sit and smoke. The setting sun tangled in the shrubbery as it goes all westward and wagons ho, the day does its little dance. Dogs bark and crows call, and the beating of helicopter blades slips between the fence boards and each sentence. The yard is all canines, cats, and deadfall, winter mud and California sun. A wind slips in, more west than northerly, and it sets a small chill upon my shoulders. For now, the only future I see involves maybe putting on a hoodie if this wind really means it. Eternity hasn’t made it out here yet.

The sun sets slow, and I watch it, just in case it tries something funny. I stare at sky and treetop, watching what the wind stars to swaying. Some plug church, some clipped idiom, and yet the west is somehow always you. Your old tricks and the tricks of my mind, the dusk engulfs and the counter keeps turning over. All this wishing on words and special teams, the night comes slow, bone blue horizon and the pounding hours’ cold bite. All alone despite the directions.

The body knows it’s over before the spirit gets the gist. The mind alone won’t know, the wheel drawing all the water that it’s got. The cold sits in my lap, playing with my beard, kissing at my face and fingers. I stare in your direction despite its lack of your inhabitance, as you weave the world anew, and I bear this flame. I shiver and dwindle as the night presses on, cold concessions and failings on repeat. A receding memory of a world that never was, mumbling its litany while you get to the job at hand.

automatic for no people

Sometimes the writing on the wall is so clear and bold that it doesn’t need to be written at all. It makes the voyage from hunch to grudge, crosses the hinterlands between the big wild world and the mayhem of the map in your mind. All it once it joins the story that you carry. It becomes part of the passed along. Everyone reads it though it isn’t really there. This is how the story goes, when it goes like that.

The night rolls right off the rails, the stars still so impossibly far, the racket as the moon retreats. The words accumulate as the entity burns, this unfathomable candle, this flame adjacent abundance. It spits and gibbers these disgorged coordinates, the ten thousand expirations and the exaltations of the flesh. I have played my hand and had my shot. Now I’m left with time and the misbegot. Now I’m the sound of the stylus at the end of the disc. Wires cross, I throw sparks and crackle static. The story keeps going even after it’s over.

We are lost in the shine of the lonely lamp. We are weeping orphans drowned out by the drone of the bathroom fan. I hack and heave until the spirit leaves. Each breath a rasp, a wound in the tide, the clutch of the blood slipping a little looser every day. The sky and earth as their children tumble down the pit. The words left as evidence to this terrible conflagration, a too long life wasted writing on the walls of this endless maze. All our pretty pictures painted looking to escape the cage.

past tense

Your long and labored days, your slow impassioned nights,  your set tos and work arounds and heart’s true and fondest all fall into the unbeknownst. The pause before a mirror, the sigh that shakes your shoulders, the fleeting smile or tear remain the refrains of habitual fictions. The dollhouse reverse engineered from words and lore and living, the irresistible fantasies that fill in the gaps. Detective work and first impressions, the unlovable forever vulnerable to the far fetched yarns of improbable romance. The things I have to tell myself. The things I never do.

The art left long ago, it ran away with my anima. Now I root around with my homemade thorny crown and my breath bitter and sharp. I beat the bandstand with my pots and pans, I paint the sky with grim curse and blasphemous epitaph. I scrape and stumble and call the clouds. I am adrift upon a tide of smoke and indolence, still fixated upon your flesh. The sort of gaze that won’t relent. The sort of love best left.

I think about you as the night fills the window. I think of you as I turn and tangle in the dark. Words whispered to my pillow. Dreams spoken aloud to the room. The days turn and glare, I go nowhere, dark altar prayers shudder and gasp. A rubber band, an earring, the necklace with the broken clasp. Afternoons adrift and the past on pause. The heart a horror, these limbs restless and lonesome, I spill spells and weave wonders. Your name, your name, into the silence.  Your path occluded and unknowable. My part all past tense.

rain and ruin

If they sang it out, it didn’t help. The rain came anyway, like a number on the calendar or a phase of the moon. Tomorrow is just a tick and a tock— a trick of the tongue, a mark on the page— not a time on the clock. The one who waits waited too long— sorry for the L, Sun Tzu. Now it’s only the empty of the hour, where the coming up blank meets the blank page. The words always want the work. Use them till they’re worn clean through, the rain won’t even notice.

It all falls into place, the chittering of sparrows in the pine, the rhythm of the rain on the roof, the long low wail of a distant train. Prelude to the heartbreak of sundown, love swept out to sea. The story always that there was no story. Words strewn all about, no use in giving them a second glance. This, then that, then something else altogether. A multitude of possibilities that always break the same. Something eating at the eyes and liver. The boulder as doubtless as the day.

The count goes on, of graves and babies, of sports and seasons, of loves and losses and all the rituals of the calendar and the lash. The fool falls again and again, baffled by the laughter and the little dog. The dead horse beaten to a pulp, the heart staggers to a halt. Oblivious of mark or folly, as lost as any wilderness, landing like a joke. So the show must go.

free

Spring is loosed, all birdsong and
greening, a toll sounded in
crickets and upturned bud,
the broad alarum of kids and cars,
the tone poem atmospherics
painted in stark California.
The cool breeze and bare limbs,
sundown forever on its way.

We age into our equivocations,
the long smoke of straw men and
old flames, the slow dusk of grays
and the inevitable betrayals
built into the instrument.
The sun comes out,
the cold still clinging to
the music behind your mind.

These small rooms full of
hours and dust and the words
unspoken, a remaindered
language moldering away,
boxed away behind the mind.
The unseen moon free of
this clumsy undoing,
awaiting the next breath.

one thing

There’s the place you pause as the day does its shtick. Then the night either doesn’t like the look of you, or it gives you a pass, and the shadows weigh in. There’s no telling what we’re not telling. How much is only there because they say, how much rushes in once the words have their way. There’s no telling who goes next. One way or another, we all do what we are told.

As it is we move through a world full of no there theres, all questionable foundations and hand me down Santa Clauses. We learn to abide the lies we line up behind, to rest like babes with our heads resting on the block. We die all at once, in droves or alone. Giving it all up to get to the ghost.

So I loiter and despoil along this long last stand, making a mountain from routine of resentments,  sore of body and of headedness. The bed you make is the grave you dig, the fresh hells and what have yous. I’m staggering towards the count, down to the last few threads, and that one thing that keeps me. I write it down, wrong to the very last word.

service

There are moments where I want to sound it out, where at once I think these words should be together. That’s all that’s left of all it is. A feeling fast upon me, or a sadness for the way they say it. The reason remains, the rhyme’s there too, but if it came with other words, it wouldn’t be it. That’s the story that keeps the time. The story that never needs known.

Once a touch, twice a skill, now some clinging vestigial from back in the long before. The voice from the edge of perception. The sudden grip of the spell. All the tells shown, dwindled down to wait and want. This stumbling call and response, a fortune told in spent fortunes, the strange epigenetics of will and word. The preternatural sameness speaking through your spine.

Even now the wave is breaking. The now always leaving or losing its name, until almost every where becomes a when. This thin seam where we are together passing. The swell shared for a few short breaths, then you are left just you and yours. This is all I am. The way the words land, and leave you out to sea.

the burner

Maybe we will meet one day, some funny bumping into, some meeting of the minds. Maybe I will greet you with a wave. A flailing to flag down your focus. A combination of luck and etiquette, just to make a place for me to be. An exchange of names, a flurry of intermingled hands and hi how are yas, identities narrowed down and suspicions confirmed. It looks like we’re really getting somewhere, should the whenever ever arrives. Until then, these are the flowers meant for the unmarked. All the days that never find us. All the worlds that go without.

The words go on, by virtue of their virulence. They clot up the conversation because they make you say them. Live forever by being the seeds of senselessness, tethered deep in the abstraction and all those slippery slopes borne of ten thousand antecedent tales scratching at the back of ancestral skulls. The magic we spit and preach, the gibbering geysers of belief pointing at doors that everyone has to knock on. The words want to take your mind by the mouthful. And the words don’t know the meaning of the word.

Messages in bottles filled with emoji thought balloons. Declarations and demands, pretty ribbons and rib cage petitions. The lullabied and the how far the mooned. The literature isn’t looking and the dull and drear I love you dears only exist if the circuits don’t short. The clutches loose and the kindling’s spent. All these at best epitaphs, tossed on top of all the play and sell. All the prayers and fan fictions left to posterity, when posterity hasn’t done a thing for anyone at all.

let it down

The pavement is between paintings of rain, still glistening and lithe with mirrored light. The gray takes the sky, covers moon and star in fecund condensation, the rolling gait of the storm filling heaven’s bowl. The clock sticks and speaks its toc tics, this providential sparrow’s fall ready to spill and seethe. A kiss in the middle of the forehead of this fevered night. Beaded upon your brow, the providence of pressed lips. Only roads, and ways running through.

Blue lit windows, and porch light stars. Headphones to keep the noise in, rooms that want to run and hide. Dark matter and slaughtered gods, the rattle of ruin deep in your lungs. The surface only glitter and stickers. The surface only painted on. Words shared in separate aches, slabs and mortal blows. Frogs outside the dusty blinds waiting for the show. The book of names, with a line struck through every one. Flesh and fire and the long sundown.

Hit me with your miracle, weigh me down with your grace. Settle upon a stone and throw your bones to the fire. The night rife with spit and glisten reaching through your features. The whispered words without a doubt. This trembling, and the faithful fall.

room service

One plus one in a million somehow adds up the same. Who knows who’s counting who, the camera’s always on and the meter’s running. Another day gone and tomorrow nowhere nearer. The words stack up, and we spill and spill. The poems gather in the margins. The poems seep in through the seams. I speak out loud because no one’s listening. I talk to myself because the madness makes my day.

Vision dims and the shadows swell. The living room light is swallowed by the hallway. The smoke sticks to everything. The ghosts beat their bones against their last flecks and sparks, so long ago they lost the sense they were buried with. Reason sits in a corner, hands in pockets. Barking and braying, yet the world tumbles on.

We climb the narrow stairway. We shuffle down the corridors. Muffled voices and muted music. Wet coughs and numbered doors. All the strangers too familiar. The dark ahead, the day behind. Your story told in spoilers, burned out bulbs and the smell of enclosed air. All these walls, and one more door to go through. All these exits, and the door that closes behind.

and then again

I’m never here, just smoke
and blood and bones,
coasting along on
context clues and
the myth of free will.
Late night occlusions,
bookmark letters,
the folded through
sparks gone cold.
The night is always
this way and tomorrow’s
in on the joke.

Wan light and brittle screens,
these sign from distant shore,
symbols set in symbols,
moon and finger plucked
among the multitudes,
a number to pick
a magic hat—
the rabbit only shows up
because it was never there.
So I walk circles
on the earth
skipping every lesson.

the script

The words wash in all a tumble
the tongue greedy to start
its saying sos, the breath slick,
spit shined bright and pretty
the meaning always ready
to give way. They arrive

hard-eyed and soft hearted,
the cold release of so much sky
in their last gasp descents,
both shot and shell,
show and tell cinematics
while the art drowses,

your artist’s heart
the stones’ own reckoning,
the language washing away
past your battle scars and
animal habits, spoken in
the order of impact.

eve

The floors creak and the attic skitters,
the rats all scratch and gnaw.
Emergencies are always cresting,
the night so slow and cold.
Crisp cement all the way around,
lights like the bones of ghosts.
Tackled outside the infirmary,
limbs tangled in the other side
of the sweep of the sun.

Hands held to warm the moment,
hands clasped to heal the touch.
The tree of knowledge knows
no fruit in the stillest seasons,
only the succor of suspension,
the blushing idyll swinging
careless, all bite and blameless flesh.
The stars unimpressed by the gods’ vast
appetites stare as limbs reach and
hang, the serpent says
“Wake up.”