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.