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.