going gone

I remain an empty vessel— if I’m shattered, then so be it. Nothing like fragments to prove my point. I stagger ever falling forward, crumbling along the way. A star still a star, the moon is broken. Strangers tap their cant with wood and asphalt, the train another song of ever on. I turn and stretch beneath a teeming sea of ache and beast. The voice echoing is not my own. 

So the dream fades over the day to day. So by the by the moon reminds. The truth be told I’m trending towards forgetting. The altar of the blazing bug light sizzle. The shine of a screen left on. Sleep always so becoming. The lean of the feel coming on.

Home a tumble and a tantrum. The mundane of the sisyphean. A shave and a shower and a good as new. The delusion that fuels endurance. The ghost long gone, yet it sings along. Curls of smoke and infuriated embers. The dance holding out its hands. 

worlds turn

Two in the morning and the words won’t do, lying in bed, mapping the stars on the ceiling. All ache and opinion, all blue moods and broken song. Looking for the legend but the scales gone wrong. The wretched flesh and the precious distance intertwined in the unmedicated mind. The wind rises and falls, it slips through where it fits. A bare bulb bears a halo of aluminum and dust. Almost every trace of grace is gone.

Pain is placement. Pain is existence. Bad days and lesser evils, books abandoned unread, friends turning into strangers overnight. The organism no longer up to snuff, heart staggered and hope shook off. Infernal compacts written in the blood and grown from meat and bone build these obligations from hints and ghosts. The untoward ticking counting down until the next set of duties, the sad drag of dawn and these ill sated appetites. Pain the record and the rule.

There is no medicine for the mystery. Worlds turn and stories change and we glitch and start and spew. Comfort is where it is gathered, crumbled on the floor or folded in our arms. A thought spun just so in the right light. Some charm or dream or vapid habit. A box in the closet, a picture in a frame. The song half sung, the one with the words you never quite get right. That wish never spoken, barely even known, there before the dreaming gets started. The breathless unsaid that lets sleep come.

bright swath

It’s a water color sky and the bright swath of a winter sunset, sunlight winking between fence slats, treetops swaying softly in the mild wind as I stare into the direction of the break in my heart. The mild day dazzled with a sudden onslaught of shimmery gossamer wings as the season of resurrection skips a few steps. Blood hungry broods of mosquitoes and ascendant clouds of gnats gleam and stot against the lit firmament. Off in the schoolyard, children still shout and play. Air brakes squeal and sigh amid the clamor of afternoon traffic. I tell my troubles to the wind.

The earth breathes deep, rousing nymph and maggot, shaking strange carapaced being out of their pupal drowse, yes anding each arrival. Calling forth the swarms and hordes of the nameless faith of life. Green things stretch and reach, bursts of leaf and bud abound. I am still beside my sad songs and haunted longings while the world just turns and turns. The dusk comes on, exchanging silhouettes and abstractions for life and limb. The dusk comes on, and the world seethes and simmers.

It’s no secret that there’s nothing to me. All ache and infamy, the shook head of circumstance, the red hands of guilt. A burned card as the fresh deck turns over. A relic of the last millennium left idling in a locked garage. I don’t matter, and it doesn’t matter that I don’t. I linger among the number that carry the burden of the bright rejoinder, the whole bleeding pantheon keeping the light shining and the flames going. From the altar of desolation I offer up the help I’ve been handed, tooth, blood and bone given to the continuity. I breathe deep with tainted lungs. The wind takes its time on by. 

plural pronouns

The thing is, no matter whether you’re wanted or not, whether you have a place to be or someone to be once you’re there, you’re stuck with it. You have to be someplace, even when there isn’t a place to be. If you’re sufficiently entangled with friends and family, with work or calling, that can carry you on through the horrible unfolding of the days. You can mix tears over tragedies, you can spend your words for other words, observed and described again and again. Nowadays you can even do all this online, finding your fellow travelers well outside your standard orbit. Still, some of us don’t fit, and can’t make the ill fit work. We are missing pieces that we can’t see. 

I am out past the openings, past the invitations. I only have conversations that I start, only have events that I claim myself. Age gives a little, and it takes a lot. The doors keep disappearing as the days dig down, people gone before I knew they were going as the neighbors jeer and spit. The last absence was a surprise, but it shouldn’t have been. Whatever I bring to the table, people seem pretty anxious to be rid of. Now that I know, I know. 

It feels a lot like it did in 6th grade, when a group of my classmates all got together to see a movie on Saturday night. After we were seated, I went to the lobby to buy snacks, and upon returning, everyone had ditched me having moved to the other side of the theater. I could feel my face flushed with hot embarrassment, realizing no one really wanted me there, that my friends weren’t my friends at all. I sat in a daze of revelation as the movie plodded on, this one lesson that life keeps teaching me. I don’t have a set, don’t belong in a group, and am excluded from all but the most ragged and beset of company. That “us” and “we” does not include me.

beddy-bye

The signs were there from the start, the line wrapped around the block, the shot in the dark. The too too solid, and the sadness of the melt. Meet me where the wards waver and the faith gutters and chokes. Find me in that odd instrumental that feels like foreshadowing, but is really the busy forest of your mind. I’ve gone unkind, though only in slips and shades. I’ve turned cruel with the claim of the growing trend. No one wants to hear it, least of all from me. No one wants to go there on their way to bed.

Give up the diversions and the grandiose, offer up your yip yap to the dreaming. You’ve bullied the pulpit long enough at the church of too little too late. The songs still play and your lovers are all waiting in line. The dreams will tell you what you’re taking. Your shining crown, the sickle sharp moon. The tide is there, the tide is gone, the machine breathing little pieces of you to life. Breathe in, breathe out, let my folly fuel your flame. Climb in bed with this fonder absence. Call it a day.

The night climbs the ladder, the moon on the steps. My bed is unmade and burdened by beasts unbidden, strewn with best wishes and undetonated blessings, lousy with all these days  rued. Sleep is a derelict and a rake, always teasing the mark. I abide the rising hours, the weeping and the woe. Muttering bedtime stories and vamping lullabies, I goodnight the windows, I goodnight the walls, I goodnight all my lost and my left. All my goodnight kisses long ago kissed goodbye.

requiem

There is a way light lies

when all the seeing is done,

a sight spent of trick and treat

the umbrage of existence filled

as the shadows let loose, 

freeing the stays of form and 

the familiar, letting the dark

insist. The sunken tone

dusk remits carrying from

mouth to mind, the words

cracked open between 

the grit and grin of yellowed

teeth and troubled tongues. 

The dreams ooze and writhe, 

every name and open grave,

every bone and blot revealed.

The dead keep dying, waiting on

their stories to drain out,

waiting on the honor mentioned 

to be loosed as dust and sighs.

The losing light giving way, 

breath slow and shallow, 

eyes drowning in silt and wishes,

every promise a stone sinking in the sea.

lifelong

Life is a span of hands and the measure of the time without. It’s seeing the sky for the trees. Basking in shades of black and blue, burning through this stubborn flesh, stutter stepping down the stairs in the dark. Curses and caveats and endless bouts of sorrow. Reaching in pockets as things are spilling free. The terse resistance of the pavement, the giving of the ground. 

Someone is always blessing bread and the rain is always going. Smoke curling like crisis from the bricks. Always aches and dreams swapped like hostages, the clockwork of the long count out. The dwindling cast of characters, the surrendering of sight. The gathers of dusk, and all at once, the night. 

It’s not the words, it’s not the way of saying so. It’s the call of the drum, the fire in the night. The bell by being there reminding you of ringing as yet unheard. The tide of the tongue in the air around us. This lonesome bawling in the distance of dark. The truth that you touch at once. 

new moon

The window is always open. The night is always on its way. Bones that were wrecked before their reckoning bloom anew. The drag and draw of the patient furious earth, the tip toe touch of the unseen tide, the fabric woven fresh through the shabby shape that burns bright below your dreams. Your confetti kisses and wry unyielding eyes, the rollick in the way you wear your self. The clock always counting. The sun kissing shade to root.

The night carries on, all wrack and rattle. A banging from the backyard, the rasp of this blue bias sight. I can’t tell which storm to weather. I don’t know which cat to call. The oldest wounds ache on and on. The endless stare of the the occluded goddess bending the boughs to their knees, as the winds schemes and clouds goggle. Trees sigh with a cracking like that of bones, a wooden shifting from root to crown, the sway of contrition sweeping the eaves.

I am ever the unspent letter, the composition of the never said. Moaning from moment to moment. Limping from score to score, I am the stain of clumsy strings and guileless song. The page a blind prophecy, hurtling on and on across the expansion. The lyric skies and the joyous soil. Spiraling further away down the night. 

sorry, Horatio

The shadows fill in the fence as the sun strolls up the gray blue grade, winter a residue of cool nights and calendar names. The light lashed to crack and crevice, sweat beads slightly before being wicked away by the dry boned sky. Over the fence, children are playing in the schoolyard, screams and bells and the mad laughter of recess ringing out across the block. The morning is soft and clasps the last still moments as noon edges near. Everything happens at once.

I worry away at the frayed corners of consciousness, words always a sorry excuse for perception. Being at the best of times always boiling over, suchness and thusness and the dance of opposites. Something someone once said, fable and allegory clotted in the blood of existence, sparrow and nuthatch and the other mainstays of this mush mouthed augury. Every glistening wing and delicate victory of triumphant survival awaiting its pin. Every careless breath, every heart fraught syllable meant to add to the collection. The moment preserved, the authoritative this is so. 

It’s not that I don’t want to know, it’s just that your story isn’t the story that you know to tell. The this and that of this augmented gossip, telephone for the shriveled soul, can’t contain the truth. Just another agreed on game. Just the latest trend of the tongue. I’m sitting here with the music playing loud. I’m out here waiting for the coffee to kick in. This tall ship creak of bone and ligament, the rasp and sputter of this burdensome breath. I don’t trust the words, I don’t trust my senses, the directions always heading off. The bright sun of a California winter sitting in a tree, k i s s i n me. The truth abandoned long ago, and faith not in my skill set. 

heir apparent

We come to the end of all the lying. The fairy stories of god and money and civilization. The long con that just keeps going on, the pathetic emperor with his dick hanging out. The be yourselfs all part of the misdirection for those of us unwanted and without place, the frills and thrills just there to distract you from the butcher’s blade. Look to your left, look to your right. Whatever’s there shouldn’t be.

Cold hands and come to Jesuses. The greed older than gold, the ill paced fire of the changing states of matter all we’re heir to, the platitudes that spill from our foul flapping yaps that ought to earn us each a bullet in the brain printed up on anything that’ll take the words. The legacy of the liar apes. Sound and fury and the which-a-way wind. 

Have nots and never weres. Trains that never leave the station. Plans made just to make God laugh. The bubble begging to burst. Keep lying to yourself. It’s that, and meat and murder— the crowded table, the empty larder, and the contents of the cup that runneth over. 

dusking

The blue bends gray, the stays of the cool blue day at last loosed, the sun settling for the other side, my fingers cold despite the gloves. I peer over my reading glasses, now years since I possessed a pair of prescription specs, squinting a little to focus my astigmatic left eye, watching the dogs browse the mud and shrubs as traffic passes and the light leaves me. Just like everything else I think, too typically me, true enough despite the dismal lensing, the dark filling up the creases and corners, cobwebs hanging ragged from the peeling eaves. Another day down, another night to do. Bob Dylan transitions to Erykah Badu, I scratch a dog’s ears absent of intention. I am mostly unscratched itches myself.

I catch a glimpse of a white pickup speeding by too briefly to get the make. Yet another of the long list of not my strong suits, I probably couldn’t have IDed it even if I had been gawping at it taking notes. The stretch of headlights now swabbing at the corners of my distracted gaze, I still don’t have a clue. My ignorance grows more willful with each year. What I don’t know a going concern.

Still on the front porch, the night now fastened tight, I do my thing. Thumbs tapping away at the smudged screen, I fill in a little of the blanks, my lonesome now confined to this awful blog. I contract as my world cools and dissipates, ain’t misbehaving a technicality rather than a romance, an outcast dusking away his dismal days. Lit by the bare lamp of the porch light the dark closes in, my shadow skewing left, my heart a fucking fugue. This vacancy brimming over, the long night hungering on. 

never never

The rain came to leave, as is the way of things. The temporary ever tempered with the sense that you’ve seen it, deja vu the true meter of our being. The gutters swell much like other swollen gutters, the heart turns blue from all those bad beats. The sky strains and spits, the pitter patter spatter on the patio roof keeps time. Sadness of what is blends with sadness of what will be, colored by the hue of that which will never be. Only this brutal mood sustains.

We become what we do or don’t, we become the cruel truths and the catcalls, we become who we keep and what we lose. This destitution of place and self and station, the black and blue of used to be, the cycle of breath and gut and thought all gone awry by the laws of humanity and causality beset. A self inflicted wound is still a wound. Nowhere welcome is close enough to nowhere to go once all the inside empties out. In life the losing just won’t stop.

I get why they all get going. I get why the gone stay gone. Still, the wished for world has its say. The absence rings out, the hallowed hope hollows, the horizon keeps its own counsel. So I fill in the blanks, time wasted on the fly, the word after worthless word of my hateful head and hopeless heart. I hold my loathsome orbit because I cannot change my course, this bitter circling all I know. No joy, no hope, just waiting around to die. The rain is gone, the well’s gone dry, and hell is what you make of it.

knell

The greatest trick God ever pulled was blaming his malarkey on the devil. Passing the buck and dodging responsibilities being yet another benefit of omnipotence. From the bullshit in Eden to heckling poor Job, I Am proves the alpha and omega unworthy of worship, a creator blaming his creation for his own crummy, reckless work. The gospel of ‘cause I say so continues to be a popular one, however wrongheaded and immoral they might be. Blame the victim, blame your lackeys, blame the devil and the deep blue sea: claim the glory, nothing more. Power is still a coward’s game.

The compass is busted, the law a dice toss, evil the primary attribute of our finest institutions. The lies have become their only creed, spreading very literally like a cancer. Authority the last refuge of a scoundrel, we are beset by gunhands, brutes, and predators in sets and uniforms. We haven’t come close to seeing the worst of it yet. A criminal conspiracy continues to burn the earth beneath us. The skies are thick with ready death. Doom is nigh, and it’s on the clock.

Myself, I’m past my expiration date. An old man already in middle age, the years are not kind to the crazies, at least not the poor ones. My foolishness and behavioral disorders are my likely executioners, my own hand in some mood swing horror, or the looming consequences of compulsion and bad choices. Now, though, my murder seems more likely than it has since I was a kid taking chances. Whether it will be from uniformed lawless flunkies enforcing some edict, or from the chaos generated by money grubbing nihilists destroying civilization, murder is crackling through the atmosphere of late. You can watch the combo platter of vile criminality and cowardly dishonor end the world in real time tomorrow, defending the indefensible, all to avoid ever paying the bill.  Hand on the Bible while the devil collects his due. 

this is a wilderness

Don’t let the cover fool you. Don’t let the words work their spells. The truth never sticks to the telling. The world is always more than you can know. Maps and legends and scaled down wholes. The road is only a coincidence when you’re driving in the dark. This is the heart of the story, all salt and woe. This is a wilderness.

A life is meant to be read aloud, all the living left on, lips tongue and tooth eager and aware. The words fall flat, and the slow circling begins. Days gone gray, nights grown cruel, age only an inevitable effect. No belle of the ball, no cock of the walk, no respite or earthly blessing. Just fate’s heavy right hand and fanned out electromagnetism, the soul lost in the depths of the lie. 

The fool loses before the game’s begun. The fool falls down as if in play. When the way of the fool becomes the way of the world, oblivion takes the day. Save your shitheel plans and your idiot prayers. This is a wilderness: you will be devoured. 

portmanteau

I don’t know what name to call you: I’ve used up quite a few. I don’t know which words I used that decided you your that’s that. The once in a while strays for a stretch, and it’s strangers by default. I reach and I pause, the words wait, tongue tipped. I breathe in until something breaks, then I breathe out again. I say the name that I new first, the oldest memories dug in deep. A sped pulse, the pull of bone and root. The silent hymns of stone.

A crossed bridge, a burnt offering. The softest and most stern. This claim of light and heat. Met upon the this or that, some clearing at crossroads. Old claims of bruise and blame laid bare upon the altar. The curtain only sudden from one side. 

There’s no word enough to touch you. There’s no word enough to revelate your grace. You radiate in the evermore, kin to moon and star. Your formidable devotion, your unyielding love. You pace blameless save for blessings in my dreams, the firmament still ablaze with your distant flame. You linger in the daily bread and I finally gave up the goat, There was a table set for never, a scraping of the barrel, where love spends just like time. 

once the dreams are it

Let it go, leave it lie, the blessings may yet come around again. You light a candle, whisper a wish, think “how soft” as the smoke curls silk and shadow. Somehow the falling is still hard. The porch light’s on in case someone is looking or lost, the music is low, the night yet undecided. Only this much, taking it breath to breath. Always so much missed.

The snoring dog, the dusty glow, the way memory bends the eye. A weary moan as the walls weigh down. The mold in the walls sing the ancient hymns, the path and the lessons. The blues is cued, the wolf of storied wax, the story never leaving you alone. 

Make no mistake, these little miseries will too be missed. There’s always more low to go. These days of warm bed and full belly will be sorely missed in the dark soon to be. All the heartaches and beat downs long ago burned for warmth, left in deleted accounts and careless envelopes, something to dream on once the dreams are it. The candles burning down, the ending in the work. 

rainbows

They come at me to cut me down, painted wings and taped on crowns, cartoon hearts to conceal the funerary mood. Love letters sent for the paper cuts, the blood hunger never far from the fire, the always eyes watching from outside the glow. I cough rasps and flecks, not a clear breath in the bullpen, and the sipped auspices say nothing good. Dumb, dull death always cluttering up the wings. 

The room is lit with shrill ubiquity, the bare light and naked mirrors dash the shadows silly, soft shades and and uncertain shapes scattered all about. The fan overhead drones on and on, vision flickers and fades. Half a moon away from no moon at all, all guardians gone on, old brass blows an ancient blues, a kiss waking the new world from all its curses. The lonely day dashed into the howling mad night.

The stars pass by without my mark or measure. The days groan on without my help at all. I happen upon relics and artifacts, devil’s bargains and fiend’s curses sew tumors in my future flesh. I dissolve into embers, moments strung together smoke to smoke, lights left on though the room is empty save the light. Prism split along the this and that, word after word trying to at last elude the past tense. I watch the clock, waiting for last call.

smoking in bed

The trouble comes once the day is over. The blinds drawn down, the doors all locked. The animals indoors and the rain on the way. Stripped down and lullabied, I stare at the ceiling, smoke slowly filling the shade of the overhead light. The night finds me right where it left me, and it finds me wanting.

All these restless stirrings, this mirror of mind troubling on. The old aches and fresh affronts, the hungers and the heartbreaks, the alarmed sun and the wreck of the Hesperus. The stretch from gull to ghost, the star strewn stagger of the years, the devil’s due come scratching at the door. The path from mistaken to mistook. 

I am start of the story, I am the tip of the tongue. The tripping telling, the tired out trope. As the animal lusts and dulls, lungs clouded with the gathered grays and coming dones, the culture coils through each twitch and word. I reckon shore and sea and the sky becoming. From glutted dusk and gaunt dawn, these circles spun. I am the translation of blood to alibi, of dust to smoke. 

crowd stature

I guess I was listening to the Rolling Stones, though it’s more like that was the band that was playing. The song comes on, and the world trades in time and skins, all at once lost in a memory too vivid and close to be touched by word one. All the life spent since, a skip and a scratch. I guess we always are strangers longer, though it’s more that we never know. Your long shadow, my dissipation.

It’s in the blood, it’s in the numbers. It’s the misgivings of the moon and the vagaries of the weather. There when they all ascended, Gabriel’s horn and klaxon call. Hollowed out and heeling to, there where the day misplaced me. The last to know, the so and so.

There’s a rock by a trail head. There’s ravens in the sky. Wild Horses playing in my head. The blue on the bridge back home. There when the traffic slows up. The ache that took me there, the empty on the way. 

fealty

It’s another stretch of the blue and bitters, chewing hell and spitting pitch. The chores left hanging, the sun up and undone, the chill in the tall pale morning nibbling at any featured flesh. The dogs are lost in their devastations, the rats tucked in up under the eaves. The toothache beauties and the daily graces have all gone their way. It’s coffee after coffee, and not a clue in sight.

The day again falls off the map, the dragons rising up to meet the gathering clouds, dusk a brief and listless fling before night arrives in a mood. Trash cans clatter their way to the gutters, offerings to the next morning’s machines. The ashtray smolders, the coffee cup steams. Rain falls like a hush.

Offer up the thankful feelings, give yourself over to the snips and slivers. The briefest of respites, the most insistent of memories. I lean into the long ache, the cold dark calling of tomorrows running low. I feel the drag in my gait, the spectacle of the fool’s errand, the consequences nipping near. These gods that won’t have us. These arms that never hold. 

wishing

It’s the cards stuck in the spokes, these dead end grays, these almost blues. Breaking moons and straying stars, the weighing of suits, the harrying of the deck. Put in a word for prophecy, waste your breath in prayer. You can’t help but take a peek, giddy for a glimpse. You can’t help but make a wish, seeing that set to star. 

It’s not as if it wasn’t kindness. It’s not as if it wasn’t love. A picture taken in an awkward garden. A painting striped with drying tears. All the steps out of line were mine. 

We never know how long we have. We never know how fast we’ll fade. Here I was grasping at straws when I should have been digging graves. All the dead we carry, all the dying that we are. All the wishes for this life that never was, the dreams aimed for before the mark was missed. We can see how we diminish, shrinking from the witness of the world. How long we flicker until only memory remains. How a home is slowly overgrown, then empties out entirely.