fidelity

The dusk finally turns off the burners and we are at last arrived at night. Locked doors and drawn blinds, the juice in the rind, dripping glasses of ice and pulp. The hallways narrow and gape, as the lights go out. The scorch marks and the context clues, sodden with shadows, all blacks and blues. We stretch into the solemnity of the padded phrase, saying our part as if pleaded. Giving the words away. 

The hours crawl to beat the clock. The moment makes itself known. The hiccup in the rhythm section, the bending of the bars. The applause hip and hesitant, the next track another trip in the old wayback machine, Beatle prophecy proselytizers and the next age gurus. Time always a cold accounting, time always running out. The chorus in a loop and the sky tumbling down. 

There’s an orchestral arrangement if you can read the sheets. There’s an a cappella version if everyone forgets their part. There’s always a song waiting somewhere. There’s always singing in the mix. The way the feathers pause as they gather up the wind. The way we are given to fall. 

good turn

I guess I’m always on the clock despite my expansive indolence and the drift of my every mission. I guess I’m always counting down to something. The phase of the moon, the current favored turn of phrase, the time until the next time. The numerals waiting in turn, the names playing duck duck goose, the music playing whether there are chairs. A song from the heart, the ring tripped ‘round. One good turn, as it begets. 

Outside, the gray morning rings with birdsong and dog tromp, the ritual of sparrows and squirrels. Smoke spills and pine limbs sway, the cool breeze seeping slow through the morning. You can read it how you want. You can go on the way you thought. Sometimes the urgencies are over lapping. Sometimes it’s a four way red blinking at a lonesome intersection where you only slow for etiquette. This is not the hour, this is not the day, though there are worries outside the gates. Above it all, the sky takes its time.

I’m with the dogs when the professionals drop in. I don’t mix it up too much with the plot. Everyday is a new alarm. Every day another fresh hell disclaimer. There used to be a story before it wore down to the joke. There used to be poetry until it was whittled down to one bare poem. The words suggesting you look back, you look further, you look within. The words just there to make you look. There between mirrors, the way the notice is served. 

rain song

The worst of it’s the leaf blower, and that by a hefty margin. This is me here, so there’re always issues. The lawn care subset being a particular rubber towards my wrong, with the whine of an air compressor idling tailing like a comet on down. Then the copper chopper doing some backyard patrol whups on past, trailing a perspective setting roar. None of it does me much good, my many barely masked agitations clearly on display. All the stressors set and ready to go, another Sunday running down.

So I swallow the burn and the bitter. So I say my peace to the directions on hand. The smoke and incense flying to the tune of the wind. Lana Del Rey takes the speakers and has her say. Listing all she missed. The clouds part and I sing along.

You hold the course you focus your attention the sparrows gather and burble away. Somehow we missed the signal. Something distant voices say, just outside of earshot, as the clouds sweep on by. You say the words as you meet them, you hold the blazing and the glow, singing so deep no one would know. This slow shore of the wear away world. The singing so the rain might stay.

shipwrecked

It’s in the things they’ve got you seeing. It’s in the words suddenly on every tongue. The trick in the telling, the switch at the gate. The heat of this sudden conversation spurred by each word weighed. The pretty please and contradictions, the old catch and release. The devils once fed by spoonful all run riot in a rush. All the options you abandoned by the way you held your peace. 

It’s the speed of blood just spent of breath, the options you lost by the way you spoke. The old incantations and the languid all at once, saying as you seem. The direction of the stitching, the strength of each thread. Isn’t it the way things happen? The magic does its thing.

We awake on the shore of consequence, after the repercussions and the ricochets, and the tide of time and chance. Driven on through the fleet years and the obdurate days, always knowing where you’re going, never knowing why you went. Swept along with skin and song, driving through the mind of night. The rain as it reaches between us, the smell of the earth, the singing frogs.

steel cup

This is the chill air of a bright spring morning. This is blue skies and fingers aching and numb. The morning given over to squirrel and sparrow. The dogs patrolling with their teeth and toys. Bundled with the swaying trees and the blinding heavens, this day strung along on the icy wind, the songs in your skull cross the songs on your list. The coffee cooling steams ferociously, busting down the doors to change states. Evening out with the atmosphere, the black coffee going from hot to luke between sips, a bitter kiss for unloved lips.

The bent of the day all glass and plastic, the hour unfurls as forecast. The Delphi of global satellites and monkeying with the magnetosphere calls it again. Now the dapple of summer bloom and tree shadow, now the scintillation of leaf and breeze. This Kinetoscope feel of the stuttering reel projected on the redwood fence suggesting an ambling animation, a flip book take on time painting place. You make a few fists between sentences, the dull senses and sharp thoughts ringing out with every breath. Just because you’re done doesn’t mean you’re dead yet.

The words keep coming whether full or spent. The words are only ever passing through, flowing through the meat mind, dribbling down your chin. Their need is there, but it is only for some approximate you, some similar selves. The multiplicity of the individual, the mathematics that serve the ravenous symbols, slipping into every available being. So you sip cold coffee, so you hug yourself tight, the continuity in need of a vessel to spill. The day bold and broken, tainted by the gun barrel breath, the steel of a tomorrow that will never come.

spurn

If there was a gift, I never received it. If I had one wish it wouldn’t be this. Slumped over strings of meaningless words, dumb songs plugged into my ears. Clock and calendar and no relief in sight. Days on end with no meaningful respite. The stories come to me, of loves and deeds and children and lives entangled in plans and prospects. The tales I hear of the world I barely knew, even before the well ran dry. I hold onto hopes that will never touch me, root for dreamers that couldn’t give two shits about my chosen course. The sort of mistakes that sound good on paper. Followed hearts and honored debts, taking hits and caring for kin. The night has no concern for bright ideals and good intentions. Even less for the bitter ends earned by empirical losers like me. It passes how it passes, and leaves the chatter to those that think it matters.

In a way it is like a wish: if you say it out loud, it might not come true. Instead I gnaw away at the scenery, I tromp back and forth across the boards. I play to the cheap seats of my vast imaginings, break the fourth wall after kicking the shit out of walls one through three. I revile the days and dread the nights, the show going on and on. You may never know your value, but you know what they will pay. Worth is unlikely to show up save in love and filled seats. Sweating under the lights in an empty theater, you give your all. Whether it mattered is up to the notices and the trades.

Anytime along the way it could have changed course. One of a dozen not sos switching sides, the dice roll hitting that save, a word or two when words still mattered. Maybe a day will come where I’m different enough to say okay, I can live with this.  But change is slow and I am dull and steady as it goes. I’ve lived too long in the stranger’s skin, so long that friends have fled, and my family treats me like the abomination it seems I’ve always been. The nights are full of the scoffs and sneers of long gone loves and pretenders to my heart, all the words crumpled and full of second meanings. The aches of old wounds, the rewards for notions of duty and service where everyone is waiting to get over on you, the unseen ladders that everyone seems to climb. The day comes, and the sunshine isn’t waiting for permission. The light only a blessing if you can receive it. I spurn the charity.

all the bridges

What of the dawn when there is still the west before us? What of the day when the east is a wall at our backs? The hands go cold and the keys release their characters grudgingly, every letter getting its money’s worth. How strange the shadows cast off the long ladders and crumbling trellis, the porch light pushing the shadows off the shapes, stretching strange game boards and ill fitted hints. The coffee steams, another strain borne by silence. The stars shine, though through no fault of our own. The whole morning is missing you.

There was a roadside attraction, a vague space giving off gallery vibes, feeling like a natural history museum with a curator changing displays out of frame. It was that sort of dream, some exchange of sudden pleasantries as the path gave way to a sun slung wood, an access ramp into the building, an elk from another time lazing in a meadow just beyond a hinted window. The conversation turned from bright to burdensome as I aired grievances and you turned restless. The never said stayed unspoken, but that brief bright moment lingered even as the dreaming gave way to a gasping for air. Suddenly my room with the music playing, alone save for scattered animals and the lingering curse of being me.

Incense burns in absence of prayer, all the bridges used up years ago. My glasses go gray with steam, my lips pressed in slow sips against the steel. Pain paints me true and bitter, alone in the early chill, my bones old and easily robbed of warmth. Strangers sing your praises and make their passes. Who can blame them? I sing your praises too. The stories told out of school, the threadbare offhand alibis, the patchwork peace kept with the chimera of your tale, I have left them behind. But still, in the cold early air I stare towards your horizon, breathing blessings and spitting verse. I tread the slumber of earth and the steam of being, always in the broad periphery, mingling with each word that comes out of your mouth. Gone, gone save for the dreaming. A dream spent on waking, a gift left out by the curb. There are no words, only hours, and stars that fade before I remember they were there. 

difference

As it turns out I missed the rain. By the time I dotted and crossed all the letters left to my afternoon routine the storm had come and gone. I look forward to sitting outside and smoking as the rain falls, but as I have no smokes anyway, it probably would have wound up feeling just as sad. Seems I’m always missing something. 

Now I’m sitting out on the back porch, music on shuffle, letting the wind have its way. A gang of sparrows voice their intentions and objections all at once. The clouds act as both gobos and gels, shifting the lighting on the stage. I watch as the sky changes its mind, light and shadow, shape and radiance. The sparrows carry on, as only the true souls do. I sit and mope, like the useless dope I am. No one seems to know the difference.

I was always the last one picked, always the first one fired. I’ve never made it easy for anyone, especially myself. I know my friends did their best. I know my loves did their damnedest. I know I’m the reason no one speaks to me without being spoken to. I can see the fear in every face. But the wind blows through and the storm moves on and the days take wing in droves. A few stray droplets fall, silver beads backlit by the westering sun. One moment, then the next, with little to hold or show. A time lapse life, the fox in the forest rippling with hungry mouths. Streaks of drizzled droplets cast out of heaven.

document

As this blog only serves to document my ongoing deterioration on the way to my inevitable suicide, and I have nothing but obligations to cling to, I will no longer necessarily be making daily entries. The coming month or so will be particularly brutal and I will be beating myself up enough without recording any more of it. I expect to be through with living before my next birthday, depending on supply chains and circumstance. Thanks to my few readers for their indulgence. Sorry I didn’t do better by you.

Thanks, Murray

residual

The sun bears west, gifting halos to every silhouette, revealing form and swarm. Incense burns for unclear reasons, scribbling silken lines into the sky. A mourning dove does its part somewhere out of sight, intoning its plain sight mysteries into the firmament. Font and fume, each inhabits and exudes, trees slowing their breath down while us animals pant away. The earth is confident in its turning while the heavens spill over all blue and gold. The touchscreen is vibrant with residual fingers, glistening with constant bother and human grease. From the greatest to the least, the moment blesses each and every one.

It goes quick, this day unladened by direction or consequence. Wake up one moment, fall down the next. The attrition and our ambitions the only traction we have as it all slips by. One minute all sorts of potential, the next back to dust. This is the way of all of us, no amount of care or investment can mitigate this mortal course. Every trick and each treat follows this sparrow’s course. Like the man said so long ago, let be.

Maybe it feels like a movie. Maybe there’s a story that seems it is time to tell. Why and why not weigh the same as the dice toss tumbles. The numbers hold no secrets. The numbers wear no names. We are the flowers of spent stars, we are the earth rolling over as it dreams. The lesson we miss always the lesson we needed. The mark only there to miss. The dreams of love and family, the ache of surviving as your compañeros drop off the map, the wishes for simple pleasures or plain necessities that remain unfulfilled. It’s all part of the bargain, the blanks filled in, the papers signed. We stow our portions in jars and pockets, we squirrel away our luck and swag in our little beaten hearts. The sun sets slow upon the names we wore out, and we steel ourselves for the next measure. Wondering who we will be now that the night is falling and the magic is gone.

system

Sunlight spills through the shrubs and pines like a circus spotlight waiting for a clown. The birds chirr and whistle as the flies work on their equations, lit like chitinous angels, silvery apparitions circling and racing across the derelict day. Squirrels loiter and leap, through the trees and off the fence, foraging beneath the feeders and gnawing on the beams. The neighbors’ children scream and scream. Another day in passing. Another day in place.

I’m on the back porch drinking coffee and listening to music, missing cannabis and tobacco like the only lovers I have left. The volume is up due to the yowling toddlers and my low tolerance for leaf blowers and their kin. I am as sad and as aching as ever, this heavy clutching my heart my lifelong normal. No one notices, or if they do, no one tells me about it, because no one tells me anything. I’m described as moody and difficult, and those are among the kindlier descriptors. Not pleasant for sure, but I learned long ago to listen to my critics, and, more importantly, to distrust any fan that comes along. People that hate me usually have a reason. People that praise me are typically up to no good. As you may have gathered it’s not a system built for personal comfort or emotional growth.

The sunlight dims and incandesces as stacked cumuli fill in the firmament. A couple gangs of sparrows have occupied the trees and power lines in the yard. They perch on the redwood fence as the bolder birds test the waters, setting the feeders all a sway. A mockingbird sings boldly above all the buzz and burble. It will still be singing after midnight. We all have our reasons. Love and plunder, beauty and fear, all the rot and dogma that runs us on the wheel. The world is beautiful and sad and ugly and full of nonsense. I am tired of most of it, and done with most of you. The beauty most of all feels like a beating, like— with all of this radiant stubborn splendor why am I still here? The ugly burden of being the note struck most by my dull beaten heart. Had I a gun, it would all be done. 

sprung

The day breaks and there you have it. The day breaks and leaves you to pick up the pieces. It’s an old story if not a good one. You don’t like it, you can always get your money back. The season that has been bursting through the seams at last collides with the calendar, all doomsday prep and crescent moon. Sun and birds and the laughter of children. Plague and panic and picnic ants. All there and then some, you take it as it comes. Spring has sprung, making it my 54th as the anniversary of my unexceptionable arrival upon this dizzy world. Just the latest in a series of descriptors loosed upon an unsuspecting earth. Somebody should write a song. Somebody ought to plant a flag.

The beauty’s still there, but it hurts more than ever. The beauty persists, but it won’t look my way. All this spun green and boundless blue, and still I only think of you. But all the absence adds up, and I can only fight so many asymmetrical wars before I got to swap a few of them out. It is the way of things, one more than the other. Even mutuality is seldom mutual. There are too many season under my belt to take a beating just for the bruises. I think of you, as the seasons slip by. I’ll think of you as the years peel off, knowing that despite all the changing, some things never change. Sometimes the beauty only comes with a whole mess of ugly. The truth is out there, but it never leaves a message when it calls.

I’m all locked up like the rest of ensemble. I’m all caged in, but I’ve been this way for decades. I do my shtick, I say my lines, I hit my mark from curtain to curtain counting matinees. The wheel grinds away at all us squirmers, from seed to dust. We name the moons as novelty, we talk up constellations of stars that never will know that we grouped them together. Our spells and curses entangled from our angle of the great commute. 250 million years to take a spin, and we pretend we know how it’s going to end. I serve the vast enchantment of our moment of hubris, destiny always written after the fact. I follow the mystery in scribbled lines and tiny rotations, the continuity all leaf and chitin. Everything talks at once. You get mentioned fairly often. My name doesn’t come up.

shadows cast

For once it’s the blue of the sky and not the blue of being. It’s the green of spring and not the green of envy, though I have a stockpile of that ready to go. The yard is flooded with nature’s disarray, grass and weeds and the trees dressing for the weather, sunshine between storms right on schedule. Shadows cast from wrecked wicker and rusted steel stretch towards the street, the chain link fence and new growth pitching patterns across the sidewalk. I imagine if I had the words, and even for a fleeting moment, it is not enough. 

I prefer the rain to the sunshine. I favor the night over the day. I got a lot of problems, but who’s counting? Out of it for so long, I am never quite sure what it even is. Maybe it’s a style, maybe it’s a fad, maybe it is the whole damn wheel of the world minus the natural I have missed. The stars make their rounds, the moon does her shtick, all the hopes of love and connection dashed so long ago that it’s no wonder I wound up this way. The night is here, the day long gone, and I’m not crazy about either circumstance. Hold still and it all repeats itself. Hold still long enough and even your stillness is gone.

Inside I go through the nightly dailies, the shave and shower, this stupid blog. Everything is locked and labeled. Everything is put away in more or less its place. I slouch into a chair, slumping over with a sigh. Put away with the rest of the ephemera, caged up like any other vague contagion, the clock is down for the count. Easy to stay put when there is no place left to go. Easy to plunk down anywhere when the house you hole up in no longer feels like home. I put away all the dreams I had, try not to think of the ones I wanted, the ones that wanted me and stopped. The shadow of the earth stands up straight, another day all but done, so much more losing left to do.

shelter

The rain came down as the evening settled in, heavy and cold and unconcerned with the forecast. It flowed down the eaves, spilling from the uncleaned gutters, drumming upon tin and steel and plastic as the water found its way. I awoke from some blank dream into a brief respite from my sorry heart and my sore headed soul. The light in the room authoritative as the world rushed back in through my eyes, pressed into me like commandment slabs, the room lit with the weight of certainty. As it was so shall it be as I sat on the edge of the mattress, holding my head in my hands. 

The orders came hours earlier, another place becomes a shelter, the shut in shores of this disorder all a ruckus in my skull. Nowhere to go, no one to be, nothing much different than any other day save the tides of consequence. The map is shaded in, slick streets and cloistered yards. An alarm goes off, I make a cup of coffee. I watch a car idle before the drive. The street lights painted in rain and astigmatism, streaks and stars and the words a blur. I go inside and lock the door. 

There’s not a lot to say about my prospects. There’s no phone call coming, no check in the mail. The cats commune in the garage and the dogs chased opportunity up a tree. We are old and slow and slip between the cracks. There’s nothing to smoke and no torches to carry. The rain falls, the night rises, water drips and pools on the back porch. The pines sulk and sway. No one says a word, and the world goes on, just one thing after another. I write one line after the other, the distance loose inside me. No one asks because no one wants to know. 

knowing nothing

So goes the figment of progress. So goes the adhesion of hope. Bright eyed tomorrows and painted on skies fill your eyes, the future of your blood blended with the grease of smudged air and the stories carried from burden to broken. You doze and scheme, you twitch and plot, caught in yet another trap. The lies that come as easily as love, the stone in the hills, the clearing in the shadowed wood. The wheel grinds it all away, the wishing stars we are made from to the innocence squandered. Gone goes on and on.

The weather takes its chances, the tree in the yard stretching green towards heaven, my coffee and my hands so cold. I plod through common causals, stumbling between uncertain footing and the stubborn ground I stand upon. Fingers stained with tobacco and neglect, teeth all sorts of broke. I sit still as the winds rise, with my circus skill set and my unmet needs, burning all my temporary. The things I hoped to hold all past my reach, my potential now residing in foolish crime. I get a grasp on the situation just as it slips my grip, taking fresh flesh and the little understanding left me. The repetitions I crave subject to the commotion of entropy planting its failing flag. Falling with the familiar orbits, spinning beneath a glaze of condensation and stippled stars. The bubble always ready to burst.

You ascend as I dissolve, a story everyone knows and still gets wrong. Mistaken for some other, pinned to the board as the essence dwindles, counted out as this or that while you float like prayer. The very air adores you, the wind rises just to touch your hem. All your tomorrows sown with echoes and retreads, a prophecy of indulgent progeny threaded through your ancestors unto the end of time. I spit bitter bars as the song eludes me, some reckless ocean, some ruthless rocks running through my lungs. Left to dither in the litter of other lives while your story steals everything that isn’t nailed down. Knowing me better than I know myself the same thing as knowing nothing at all

big ticket

The world goes on in snips and snails and shock and awe, endless iterations of the same old song. Layers of puzzles solved by the primal forces and the ancient multitudes broken by heedless half-smart apes, dizzy with hubris and fantasy as they devour their children like Cronus without the ipecac. Disease and war and our bafflingly empowered idiots, these grifters, thieves, and rapists that continue to plunder and subjugate as we cheer and yawn. The magic will outlast us, however long we endure. But big pictures make for cold comforts once the engines of the transitory begin to grind. 

We are more than the names we wear and the faces we make. We are more than our jobs and our homes and our families. We are the numbers and we are the words, we are the animals that arose from the boiling oceans and the poisonous skies, the pieces put together by the titan of time nigh eternal, the breath that brought the gods to life. Dirt and blood, sea and skin, the flesh assembled from grass and spark. We are legion, the latest shape spat from our busy earth. We are the path unfolding in proteins and prose, making up destiny as we go. 

I live in the margins and the mystery, a fool and minor pariah, trapped in random actions, animal patterns, and half-chosen consequences. I survive by resigned obligations and kindly strangers, habits and rituals, and yes ands and no buts. Some of us just fail to live up to our incarnations, but all of us are trapped in these stories spun for so long they seem true— the impossibility of change, the righteousness of cruel cultural amalgams that are worn exclusively to bind and blind us, that money talking isn’t the greatest bullshit to ever walk through our thick monkey skulls. The heart is made of preposterous stuff, meat and lightning and the entangled attachment to the continuity. Love and compassion, generosity and cooperation— these are the truths highjacked by all our greedy little kings. The heart is a big ticket item that must be given freely. The grace more than beating blood, our legacy more that grief and gelt. 

love letter ( number two)

We believe in chimneys and bricks, we believe 

in smoke so we call it gray and ribbon

as it spirals above the dusk. We believe in 

the sky so much that blue is lost

in the tumble blooming above the stiff horizon,

throaty pastel bloating the oilskin of the sun

returning to the sea. We stare until

there is no longer any light. We believe. 

And these things make sense in little worlds, 

to name, to measure, to speak, to stare:

I watch you turn from left to right,

I watch you turn away. I believe

the spill of skin, the smooth struggle of each

shoulder, the edible depth of your stride toward 

the horizon. I believe in the mottled shadows,

the elasticity of contrast as headlights 

briefly bring you back to me, the motion of

your name in deep relief across the blank pavement,

your shape touching me with what it obscures.

You move between me and distance, hair

clinging to your shoulders and the shrill

hiss of spinning tires and the struggle 

to breathe or rebuild the world in your wake. 

(first published in 1992)

placeholder

Night has come. Lock the doors tight, shutter the windows, and turn on the lights. The rain is falling. The arms that once would hold you are folded tight, the eyes that poured into yours no longer look your way. Write your name inside the book sleeve, pretend that things are yours, that this belonging might catch on. Sit there and stare off through the wall. Even sleep won’t return your calls.

Oh fragile heart, oh merciless night! The weeping hasn’t ceased though your eyes are dry. The sad dumb world so much dumber and sadder, the lonesome honed to a hazard. The words spent with barely the press of intention clutter up your hands and mouth, the neuron map homunculus a cartoon hung with your flesh and senses, the horror show stillness as the doorknob slowly turns. The madness is there, the rain is falling. Your heart awaits extinction.

It’s the way we never learn. It’s the way we fail to compensate. Shouldering the pose, harboring the burden, weighed down by the body you forget is you. Lilies and sparrows and other hints and figments. Ten thousand years of lies and nonsense clogging up the culture, the monkey so high it seems all tail, banging drums and thumping bibles to fill the time. The long line of luck and misgivings leading all the way to this dead end. Us murder apes locked in our little boxes, a few perfect darlings, families, tribes, and creeds. Then the placeholder, then the dead end. Turning is slow small circles as the rain fills the night.

storm motions

The day measured in sky and wind comes to dusk, and the storm arrives, its bags tossed in the night. Now the roof is a ruckus, the trees all a riot, and the clouds clique up in gust and stir below peekaboo planets and one off stars. Leaves and needles dance with the dust as shingles fly and gates gnash their teeth. Inside there is light and there is warmth, the whole hand of shelter here if you’re not too picky or precious. I’m all cough and ache and worn through words. Hunched over, staring at shoe and carpet I keep time. I wait leaning against the sharp shocks and dull groans, listening for the rain. This salacious pace of eyes touching objects, waiting for the big reveal. Rooms without much room, and sober dry-eyed dreams.

The hours creep around the house like they’re prowling for a peep. Like there was something to see in the mundane markings and factory glass. There is no beauty, only threadbare love, and precious little treasure. As soulless as a golem, as plaintive as a wolf, this shambles shifts and fumes. A cup in the gutter, a blemish on the lens. An abandoned lighthouse and the copious swearing of the ocean. Flecks of foam and glistening things scrambling back to the shelter of the sea. I brush my teeth and spit in the sink. Outside the wind takes flight.

It’s the shave and shower ritual, then to my restless bed. The rain isn’t due till the morning, and I’m all out of smoke. I’ll likely be lying awake when the storm arrives, listening to random music and mumbling careless nothings to the ceiling. Like a mirror in the dark, like the song on pause, there is a purpose I cannot capture, a worth I can never know. Unknowing and alone, I’ll chew my wishes and swallow my regrets. In the dark going through storm motions like any other disposable convenience, tossed about like trash.

regrets

There’s no one left to talk to, so I mostly talk to myself. There’s no one to write to either, so these are all the letters I send. Be careful with your connections. There’s no telling what is getting through. Shuffle the words and deal again. It’s not really a meal if no one eats. The places set in memoriam, the uninvited guests that crowd the gate, the hats passed around. Nothing ventured, again and again. 

There’s worse to come. There always is. But lately the days have been plenty bad enough, with the nights making it a competition. Can’t be me, and it seems the only option. Can’t live like I live, and death won’t oblige. No matter how strong you are, never agree to hold up the sky. Once you’re beneath the burden, no one else will ever shoulder it again. 

There’s so much left unfinished, so much left I will never do. You miss out on a lot when you spend a lifetime going crazy. Just bills and ill considered correspondence in dusty boxes, letters never to be read again. An accumulation of debts that cannot be repaid and failings that only grow more damning. Letters that I should have ended with, instead of love or yours truly, regrets on the signature line.

here comes the night

Here it comes with the jangles and the shadows. Here it comes with its old Leonard Cohen records and its pins and drums. Weary letters and fields of flowers. Blue kisses by the dashboard glow. The places we wandered, the places we parked. Memories and souvenirs and all those if only opiates we keep tucked in our tired and our alone. Unbidden and seething with wishes and appetites sudden upon the flesh, here comes the night. 

You wake less one arm save a few pins and needles. The arm you slept dead jerking and flopping as the feeling won’t return. Another one for the hymnal of stories left unsaid. The way the details start to slip away the more silence you carry. Then it’s the unsaid and the impossible to say. The build along the barrier, the press of dreaming, the palmed apocalypses, the pocketed gods. The creature and the entity, the blurry embodied sets of songs and urges, the meat and burn of this blasphemed magic awake to the reach signal. You jump and tumble, the momentum between intentions a kind of randomizer, them bones rolled in the box top where the rules are written. You become again.

As it is, I speak to no one. I scribble out fragments, I wander into the wilderness spilling crumbs. The music on shuffle, the rituals on repeat. I’ve been turning with the wheel of sky, I’ve been circling the dirt. The words stroll on, through the bleak and blue. The mattress on the box, the ceiling uninterested in the terms and conditions, chaos creeping in. There are clouds, there are stars, there’s the drowsy gaze of the walk away moon shining up the scene. There are letters that start where they ended, the dusk rushed windows and the song in the air. There are letters I never start and just hit send. All the rest are poems and prayers and process. The bottle tossed overboard, the sea all but infinite. 

mumble moon

It gets complicated once the symbols settle. It gets hard when the knowing goes dark. We grasp at the afterburn of words that don’t fit, riding the tide of language until we can come to grips with how much we missed. We’re the recognition of the place and the passing. We’re the moment the meat is torn from the bone. The feeling first, from fact to figuring, from frying pan to fire. There’s no telling what we end up with once the words arrive. That’s why we talk these circles, every sentence diagrammed. That’s why we spill into instance once the story goes. The cycle of appetite and sacrifice.

A bird shadow manifests upon four shrubs, the long light falling off the roof, the wind doing stretches. I lean low, breathing in emeritus, ache and smoke and gravity where it hurts. Dahomey Dance loping off the porch, the animals all a drowse as the sun goes west. I burn through the words in staggered reels and microdoses, clinging to the fabric and the flesh, spitting on the cement and smelling the dirt. The sidewalks stretch out past the boundaries, treetops staggering through yards and hills, the landscape scraped by industries fading into shapes and munitions. The busywork and check marks of the observable realms. 

Love becomes the wilderness, the bird loosed from its cage. Everyone has their fingers crossed. Everyone has their hands full. Ex and oh it. Seal it with wax, seal it with an emoji, the kiss in counted thought. The world goes on and on. People keep saying nothing, they say it all the time. I guess this is my people part, on the porch while the sky grows dark. This is me at the wheel, mumbling at the moon.

tickalock

Often after the invocation, one is beset with the irresistible urge to lick one’s lips. Slick with breath and the seal of power, the tongue reaches for a taste. So the kiss is set to flesh, only to find a lingering sweetness. A hint of a delicious lavishness, some decadence drawn from the bent of direction. The bristling being a grateful flavor hustled from the gray ephemera. The bright in your belly poured on by the bursting moon. From the moment you can taste it. 

It’s like that now, in the simple scramble of words strung from the line. This reward and imminence, the intersect of animal and urgency, the resonance of the altar. The deep drink of the night sticky on the lips. All that’s left to do is say it. The speaking that makes it so.

The moon swells, the mood swoons, keeling over at one glance of the majesty. Bowing down beneath the weight of full on moon, this divinity at once love and duty. The secrets loosed on hands and knees. The stories carried to the grave. I call the sign as I see them. I turn the lights off and the moon pours it on. The secret’s yours to play along. 

cloud cover

This morning the moon was painting in glowing albedo, filling in the cracks between the clouds. The hour freshly arbitrary, the air a dull gray drowse anchored to each parcel and the pavement, roots dangling deep within the breathing of the earth. I grumbled through the routine, though the hour was odd and alight with strange beauty. I picked and pawed at the fittings of the ritual, and the day filled in the gaps. It is one thing, then the next. Just as you expected, but new and novel somehow yet. The words go everywhere.

Later the meditation settled upon need, the lacks and the druthers, the whips and the wonders. Head bowed as the evidence mounts, droplets darkening the dust, black plastic stippled with gathering beads. The drizzle a mere graying of the air, humidity as much optics as meteorology, the dark of the subdued sky as the cloud cover occludes the afternoon. Cold drops of rain on the back of a bare head. You ink in your invocations as breath escapes. 

The space is vast between us, but it could stand to be vaster. Strangers arranged haphazardly across the face of the sphere, aliens exchanging abstractions that nearly synch up in post. I list all of my absolutes, give the full crypt keeper, list all my kinds of kryptonite. I’ll tie both hands behind, if you insist. It is the artifice that exhausts, compounds the pounding repetitions with self satisfied palliatives, a whole genre of mantras and cognitive dissonance. I awake; the day is lost.

smoke goat

The calendar will get around to it, given enough time. Sometimes the dates slip past unnoticed. Sometimes they play the scales, and all the moments stranded on the chord dance their ringarosies around the mind. A reminder of the value of best wishes and glad tidings, the way meaning can put you through it out of the blue blazes. A reminder that sometimes it only goes one way. The words left to the bare walls and grimy floors. The feeling you’ll have to find.

What good are the blessings of the expunged, breathless prayers from some vague, vast beneath? Why should I gather posies for the ghost of a great disdain? Less merit and more worth, the memory still favors you. Your manners taut as you moved on, all this wishing turned to wound. The inevitable hurts the way it’s bound to, however hard regards the prophecy. I scratch and spit, dragging on with it. I’d light a candle if I could.

The years peel off and melt away, burnt and blended to the myth and the bent. The dogs bark until they die off and other dogs do their barking. The light of some longed after dawn, heavily dreamt on, no likely arrival in sight. The songs of some old man’s youth, the dust on the breath of the muse. We sing in expanse and attrition, circles around the fire, a sharing of rendered air. I leave a flame for you to wish on, and pay you in smoke. 

diatribe

It’s the rise of smoke towards the overhead fan, it’s the bored shadows sighed by the bare light bulb. It’s the lean against the wall, holding on as you cough your head full of stars, the stitch in the breathing, the pain like a blade in your back. The falling that feels like the ease into dreaming, the fireworks and clatter that turns out to be brains bouncing in bone. Another lapse towards the fading side of the calendar. Another fall alone in the dark. Always failing, forever seeing stars. 

The failure of the frame is a special kind of diatribe, listen here Sonny Jim, time will have its say and its way. The front porch prophets grumbling and grieving their told you sos as the inevitable takes the mic, call and responding across the blur of realms. Here it comes, there it goes, I end in spark and sigh. The anchored chains of the curse woven into the marrow, the cruel lance of time cleaving the strength from the flesh. You take a knee, you hit the floor. There is no noble dying. 

To rage unto the flesh and the feeling, to put it to every breath. To sing these furies and ecstasies out of this blood and haunting. To rise again and wrestle the moment from its feet, to hold on to something by bone and ghost, the press of the will an alarm and a beckoning. Eternity goes on and on: it’s important to hydrate. I take a long slow swallow of icy water. There’s a wish for your kiss, a sigh, and the laden ache that passes for how the time passes without you. I crack my neck and take another smoke.

consequence

It’s as if it didn’t matter, which is not to say it didn’t. Once they get you by the similes meaning might take a minute. Once you get started, some part won’t stop. Things happen and then more things as they are wont. I’m gone, whatever the reasons. It’s done, whatever was meant.

It’s the sort of day where I feel the teeth of what I’m missing. It’s the little hurts as they linger, the weight of the wounds all at once. It’s the absence of any words when they’re needed. It’s noticing that when you’re going through it you’re only going through it alone. Things land where they’re forsaken, the numbers and the light. The way the phrase goes fallow. The way you’re always being told and not shown. One fight begets another. The tiger and the dragon team up.

Once in a great while you catch a hint of the truth. Once in a while you see the self you don’t see, the stranger at work in the world. I stopped talking and the light went out. I was shown my worth. Hard to hear but good to know. There aren’t stories that undo this witness. You can’t face the facts and expect to walk away unwounded. 

uncoiled

It’s been the sort of day that ends up this sort of evening, hanging on the chemistry, mouthing every word. It’s the sort of night where the flesh reminds you just how much it feels, where the bruised world around you is just waiting for the wish. All the pent ups at the end of their leashes, ancient chains only bits from the break. The strain and crack of spine and tendon. The old aches shared with you alone. 

Eventually you age out of every consideration. I’m bent and wasted, and lack any wealth, distinction, or prominence. I think I’m an outside dog now. Met mostly with a fence before me. Known mostly by what little I was. There’s sparks burnt across my vision, there’s stones in my walking shoes. Eased into an uncontrolled orbit, disappearing into gleam and myths. Constellations dragging the stories through the sky, the memory of the world that was. 

Still the old ways abide, a thunder through the center, the moon and the tides. We descend into the bright horizons, birthed in our spells and beauty, written on breath and skin. The lost and the bent turning over and over in the lapses in the lexicon, living where the pieces are missed. These dreams of drums and tall flames, the dance of smoke and shadow. The night awakens and uncoils from its bones.

write off

I stood outside as the dusk took the day, feeding mosquitoes and filling in for shadows in the night. A long spacious conversation spent itself into the gutters and the weeds, taking up the lion’s share of the late afternoon. I got behind in my smoking and my wording, still playing catch up as I type. I’m not quite back at writing off writing again, but we are spending a lot of time in that neighborhood lately. The words aren’t into me anymore, and it makes sense to let go of this last lingering romance. The silence only grows.

The wax on moon, the half glass fool, the sad repetitions. The switches tripped and the lights left on, television jabbering against these sleep thickened walls. The stations change and the story drags on. Someone loved, someone left, something changed in an old familiar way. War stories down the end of the driveway. Body counts filling where the words won’t go. The night a buzz with breath and blood. The words livid with wishes and wounds. 

I feel the slow peeling away from the real, the distance between root and ritual, the autonomic spells dissolving upon perception, the world at once all last gasp and true blue. The words still and fade. Once the saying was something that thought it needed hearing, now the saying is something to keep the nothing another day away. The world so insistently around me, the words holes worn through. It’s not nothing, but it’s getting there. The gone always gets there first. 

uncle

Ease up on the throttle, we’re burning plenty fast enough. Back off on the beat down— I get it, you’re mad. There’s no trust left between us. There’s the wail and the drain, and the distance traveled. There’s the story and the telling and what really happened.  No going back with all the bridges burned. I give up. No jokes, please. 

I don’t get the play you’re making, I don’t understand the move. It doesn’t read as forgivable, though. It doesn’t read as fun. I already said uncle. So fucking stop. 

prettify

Way past when I thought I’d aged out of mirrors, I’m fool enough to catch my eye. No razor, no toothbrush, just the inverse skin stretched out in bright shining glass. Just the same old witness behind dulled windows. The soul burning softly, dissolving into this stunned hush. This settled silence the only argument left once all the arguing is over. Just this semblance of sadness heaped upon these shoulders’ burden. Another shrugged off ache added to the bill.

There weren’t words enough for how much I wanted you. There aren’t words enough for how much I want you now. I’m not big on change. I’ve always been out here as the time winds up. I’m always waiting to be down for the count. It’s not so surprising, your beauty at the start of the haunt. It’s not surprising, all the want in the world aimed your way. Words spilled on the unswept floor. Words scattered after your gracious wake. 

The best days take their shine from your smile. The curve of your lip prettifying every last glimpse. Of all the things to be, imagine me in love. Doom on doom, with a strong oblivious streak. Of all the things to be, imagine your hungry grace descending. These tellings and their back handed kindnesses. These tellings we make into our truths. Our best days long ago eclipsed. Our best selves left to the imagination.