half a moon to go

Here we go, the wheel turning fast. Here we go, the berated gift of vision. The shadows grow as the dancers reel. The scent of smoke and the rise upon the wind. The tumbled skies bright and bedazzled as you smudge your chambers and light the candles. Frantic panics beat their wings within your shroud, troubled grumblings from hideaway child and the windows giving in. Awake within the measured breath, you are at once winged in ascent, the moon on the water encircled with the word. All that you carry carrying you.

I crack my back and shift my hips, trying to briefly turn the tide of this rough decline, shifting between aches like bare feet on hot sand. It is a dance of diminishing returns and intermittent respites, leaving me the questionable benefit of at least being on brand. One foolish squander to the next, here a star, there a forest. Carrying memories of kisses and coyotes and circle of paw prints padded in the sand. Small fires and cold nights, never knowing there’s always colder to come.

It can only be a temple, this clumsy conduit. It can’t help but be the journey, it’s the only thing you take. The days float past as the years flood in, drowning in the distance carried, wearing only want and wound. Little treasures wear away. One by one our compañeros ride off, leaving us alone as the sun goes down. Still we spin and spin. We turn, holding the world together dancing ‘round the flame. The fire smokes and cracks. Join hands and rise. 

the way it breaks you

It’s sorry about the news, sad about the horns, the song spinning thick as the scene pans around. It’s the trial and error, it’s the force of habit, go go dancers and the rabbit on the run. Sundown has hung around in the recursive strings and minor strains, the moon met night seeping in through every crack and keyhole. Hunger in the way you want it, beauty by the way it breaks you. A soul left hollow by a riddle. Footprints trailing straight into the tide. 

It is blood for the breath, blood for the bramble, the tangled shadows loom as I take the stars for a spin. Briar scratches and bug bit, I turn the slow table. Moon met halfway beneath the shrugged pines and early stars, I unwind these wants and whims. They fly like arrows loosed, bent on intent and wish. These unbidden directions, these wanton haunts that hook the heart. I close the circle and set to singing.

The night comes to small rooms in dimmed light and dust. It sits smoking, staring at a screen or window, at the cobwebs in the corners or the spider on the wall. It sits in grim rooms with the music ringing tinny from the phone. The alarm of the instant, the catch up touches of gray and the darkened weary eyes, the dull plod into the inevitable inferno the echoed dreams of the nevermore. The smoke always rising and the memories blur. The night and the thought of you and the empty bed again. 

gaze

Before you were you enough to recall you were wide eyed, your hungers bent to illumination, your vision pressed against every vivid skin. Along comes the light to burn away the placental tendencies, the flame now loose inside you, another facet to bear the fire. You awake in the world astir, language steeping through your senses, the self risen and churning with the unspoken. You point it out and say the word until the word is pointing for you. You say aloud all you see, until you see everything else looking too. Bite down on that forbidden fruit, the garden will never be the same. Welcome to the waking world. You are here.

Most of our lives are like wasp’s nests, built of what’s available by whoever happens to be around, unplanned but allowed the providence of legions headed in pretty much the same direction. Also, they are full of a shitstorm of pure vengeance and pain if you kick them hard enough. Swarms of stares and words and obligations, the harkening of the hive, whether we resist or oblige. Id and etiquette, empathy and appetite. The gaze an anchor of language and intent, a circuit to the unseen architecture that bends and binds, the monkeys never typing all at once. All awake within the power of the place you hold.

I remember everything. The soft touches to the leash lessons. The bare shoulders, the brushed back hair, the summer a silty weight against your skin. The hunger and the hallow, kisses and bruises. The recitation of the recipes. The devoted gaze, the clamber and sigh of knees and hunger, the sacrament of oath and salt. This I harbor in my heart, this lingers upon my breath. I bank away my witness. I saw you then, I see you now. The way the light wove its way along your stride. The way it made you look.

conceit

Blank page or blinking cursor, the meaning is what’s missing. The inspiration or the impetus or the stain of counted sins. The tools change the task, and we are ever measured by our lexicons. The metaphors where our stylus dropped, the verse we jumped in on, they ink us to this long missive. The deck is shuffled talk and tech and the local color. It’s the nature of the idiom, the truth of the work. It’s words on the page, or at least the conceit. The writing is the work, the rest is left to the reading.

I’m sitting on the back porch smoking with a squirrel. Writing is lonely work whether you’re doing it or not. A place you got put you are always getting away from, the steam of the aggrieved finally telling your side. A need to add words to a bunch of stuff no one needs to know. Spreading your troubles from town to town, scribbling whispers in strangers skulls, tagging your words on breathing bones. The combination of treading water and rising as blinding light that comes from smoldering stillness and practiced craft. The eternal urgency of the tragically mundane. An old man all dog hair and house slippers, playing at poems. 

Say it’s the birds or the blue of the morning. Say it’s the absent school bell and the dog by my feet, the tenacious strangeness of this presence, the missing piece ache clamped hard on my heart. The words were just passing through, marking me in the strata, my point in the plummet. Last line to last line, the language turned like worm dense earth, the animal all skin and game. Morning mosquitoes and dead end dreams and letters never written turned to bare laments. Lack and longing and barely the breath left to tell. A habit of tongue and static, this conceit of ink bleeding brick and rune.

all

All at once the wind comes up and all at once the trees alight, waving green and gold. The fire on your mind becomes the fire in your eyes, seeing always saying something, the smoke and mirrors until we appear. Awake in the world as the tides collide. Painted in kind words and ravening hungers, the whim and wonder lapping at the shores of the self. The scintillations of every present tension, all the now you can handle. All of us in it at once, a bright and boundless center and the sea of strings and sparks. Shimmering like leaves in the wind, scuffing up every surface with makeshift mirrors and algorithmic lenses. All these flames burning time.

It’s really the senses playing catch up, the words overwhelmed or the engine diverted. It’s what all that focus is for. Love and kindness and passion and hunger. The things that claim us and the things that make us, always looking out and ever in our hearts. We plunge and plunder and steal some souls and seal our fates. There are windows we leave open once all the doors are bolted. There are lights we leave burning even once we’re gone. 

The sky is bright and the wind is high, every bud and bloom, every leaf and limb bearing the blessing of the play along sun. The world does what it wants to and we keep the game afoot. Creeping through the undergrowth, crawling with intent. All eyes and appetites and origin stories. Catch phrases and frequencies and stretches of the spectra. Alive in the only time that will take us, now spilling over the brim and no one to say when. The flame we carry, the fuel we are. The wind full of pollen says it all. The wind says go. 

celebrant

The year the long way comes ‘round again, full of long rooted shadows and heart haunted rocks. The journey always a step at a time, this long toothed wander restless through time and continent. Roads older than the species followed over crest and crag, the deep tide of the cooling slabs of iron and stone expressed in bluff and peak, the old walk between hearts and hunger just another piece of cake. You take your turn at another reel around, from the pale thirsty filaments writhing around rock to the great splay of leaf and limb that sweeps clean your skies, you dance to polish all your stars.

The day drawls on here, the heat like a hush in the gray green light, slow and mosquito thick. The reach of your roots and the sway of your radiance touch my every breath, the dogs lying down and pollen everywhere. I shift my shoulders and clear my lungs. I see you standing beneath imagined trees, the rising and the fire. Your bones an old church, your blood the most devout of congregations, your foundation fixed in rock and firmament. The fire taking its heat from your shine. The altar only where your intention sets.

This is the story of the story you tell. This is the path where your feet touch the ground. One turn and all is same and different. One turn and the dark is coming hard. But your skirt sashays mischievously as your boots shape the earth, and you dance despite the song being wrong. Your day, the first of many others, all color and canopy. You stride along your bright and weeping path, a candle in the darkest night. You are the work and the earth. You eat the cake.

apostasy

Mostly, I know things don’t go this way. Mostly I know it’s me. The baffling bare knuckle of the everyday, calendars and traffic and the traveling sun. The way the ends won’t meet me halfway.    The way I never accomplish accomplishments. Nothing sticks, nothing lasts, and also I quit a lot. The world works one way, and I barely function at all. So, yes, I know the problem is me. Nice work, Columbo. 

So I sit here as the day goes long. So I sit here as the earth exudes its multitudes. Aphids, mites, and carpet beetles. A legion of the chitinous and winged tangled in my beard and crawling on my scalp. Mosquitoes, flies, and paper wasps. Eyes grainy with allergens and the green exceeds its bandwidth. I smoke long and slow upon the sacred path of diminishing returns. I turn over with my back to the sun. 

This is the path of attachment, the low road of letting go. This is the wash of warm shadows in the glow of the going gone. The consequences of being of such little consequence adding up in ache and drift, hunched beneath these ill fitting burdens and well earned beatings. The monster stays the monster, the beauty goes her way. This pause before the dusk comes calling, this settling of old bones and new mantles, the dying name and the bloom of the forever moon. The world spills away, awaiting your return while this absence looms. 

paint the walls

It’s late in the day, veering in on midnight. I’m sitting out back, struggling with my old pal suicidal ideation. I’m not going to kill myself, if that’s where you’re headed. I’m not going to kill myself, at least not yet. But it’s been a bad year, and it keeps getting worse. My current bargain goes something like hang in until mom dies, or hang in until the last pet is gone, with daily adjustments and wild card variations. But today. Well I don’t have a gun, but if I did I would paint the walls.

So it’s the hateful traces, the wreck of this back porch, the ruins of my life. The slap in the face that passing tourists seem obliged to offer. The tea party thinking and active not listening these sightseers bring to their transactions, pennies flung in the fountain for the scrambling children (that’s a lot of money to them), beads to buy the island. To remind you that you’re alone, to remind you that you’re strange, to remind you of who says what and when. You are unloved, here’s a trinket, fucker. 

Here I am wasting everyone’s time. Here I am making things worse. As if the indignity of being me isn’t enough. As if I hadn’t already given the fuck up. Not one moment was worth it. Not one day would I keep. Just a statistic waiting to be counted. Just a life wasted on wishes, out here wishing I had a gun. 

the externals

The afternoon bends warm despite the wind, scintillating shadows and sunshine in the pines. A House sparrow does his dance about the branches, hopping around his intended, shaking his tail feathers and fanning out his wings. I’d call it a courtship display, but I leave the terminology to the more expert observers. I don’t know what the birds are thinking, or the thoughts of any other people when it comes down to it. Every other entity a spark of mystery. Every being a share of the dark. You miss someone, mostly not knowing what you’re missing.

For fifty four long years I’ve walked among you. I have learned from trick tongues and false prophets while I learned to wear your words. I have struggled with your etiquettes, and made not stepping on toes a matter of practice. Still not a spark or clue. The world has long since had no use for me. I gave up on motive, and stick to the motions. And so I go on missing. I just go on.

A Bird of Paradise bloom sways in the breeze, brightly a bee visits. The sun spills in thick dollops, glistening and streaming upon every skin. A birdseed sunflower stirs above the weeds and winter grass, yellow in the golden beams, as bright as the name it bears. Through these honeyed days, these blessed respites, left all shirts and skins. The chasm between worn and born, the measure of the externals all flights and falls. I know less of why than bird or flower. I stay here still and watch you as you soar. 

national anthem

It’s eyes closed, then the morning. It’s eyes wide, then the rifling through the names. It’s nobody’s fault, there’s not much here to persuade me. It’s the way it plays out, nothing lasts forever. Just the now thee lay mes and the pledged out flags, the drag of the draw, the heat of the flame. The wake into the frantic search, every noun gone AWOL. To still the wild just enough to wonder about the worse to come. There’s really nothing to it. I can do it in my sleep.

The song plays and I think of you. That could be so many songs, and a lot of thinking too. The machine doesn’t know what to make of blank coordinates. This intention weaponized and always waiting for a fix. This longing a cruel hollow emptied out over truth and time. This longing no fault of your own. It’s like the light in the morning window, or the sparrows waiting out the rain. A moment witnessed, the blessing sealed. Still, that Lana song unfurls and it’s you that seize my standard. Nothing to do but take the hit. The world knows what it’s doing.

You wake and you take a minute to find the time. You wake and you get the greatest hits. The world is spinning wild and you feel the countdown beneath your feet. The wake of the day, the wish for endearments, the weight of containment and the words that won’t come loose. The stories I will never hear, the details I will never know. This is the song, hand to my heart. This is the hill handed to me. The heavy how it gets.

in place

In a way I’m always catching up. In a way I’m always being named by my wake. The words turn over, always starting something, tumbling down the page. Maybe I meant to say it different. Maybe I’ll get around to reading it some day. I move around in circles, sprinkle in some punctuation, spice it with detritus and a little weeping salt. I shuffle from day to day, tripping over dog and cat, stirring up the dust. From word to word, from room to room. Every day breaks about the same.

We are gathered by the implements, the signals that seem to see us. The mirror of every moment, the rattle in the cough. Each breath pressed against the window, looking out, seeing in. Each breath the water clattering the stones. We pitch and toss to toggle tenses, plural to singular, you and me and the vagaries of the tide. The sand sliding beneath our feet, the sea seeping  between toes, every shore constant contention. There in the impression left, there in the ought that’s not.

I am where the coffee cools in clumsy sips, I am where smoke threads each breath. The music tumbling down the walls and the room is lit at unnecessary angles, the somber dust and the glittered ceiling. I am the punctuation put in its place. These dim rooms, these narrow halls. Locked away without shelter, alone with these unwanted words. By the time I look, I’m left behind. Once I see it going, it’s gone.

spring for a minute

The season broke strange, in late rains and gray afternoons. It’s been spring for a minute here and I haven’t seen a bee. Well into Sunday afternoon here, and all I have to add is the coughing fits between drags. I hack and I spit, not a whit of worry for the plumes and clouds I expel. I cough and clear my throat, the occasional stage-y AHEM dislodged like I was really selling it, like I was on the last legs of my patience trying to flag down a waiter. I’m all tics and props, sipping coffee, squinting off into my invisible mark. Sooner or later I give it an and SCENE. I won’t bother leaving without taking a bow. 

The words aren’t exactly gone, but they’ve got a lot going on. Everyone is on a separate trajectory. Everyone is always eager to move on. The world opens up once the empty is out, endless hours, lots of scenery, no expository dialogue to mess with my constant monologue. These drizzled fragments fraught like stars. Skies and sidewalks and fitful trips between screens. Every replicant needs a place to manifest, even talk it out with the counting down. Every ghost needs a shtick.

It’s no secret that I don’t work right. It’s no mystery how I earned my exile. I wear my skin in seethes and legions, it fits and fevers and well worn forms. The world just wore away, and one day this was it. Now it is golds and greens and sinking blue shadows, the moment and the edge. I drowse beneath the library, inked the color of due by stamps and last glance eyes. I lean into the wind chime twilight and the mosquito haunted eaves, the hours always running down. I smoke on sunrise side with the sun going down, clearing my throat to little effect, playing the part. I wait out for nothing but the choking.

rubicon

The words, if they ever did cross your lips, were never spoken where I could have heard. The curse you spat barely creased your brow, a stubbed toe has caused worse. The normal elective  invective, the crucial usual suspects spent in the heat of anger or striking ‘cause it’s hot, nothing outside the idiomatic curve. Instead, there was a door that was closed. Instead, the dam burst at last. The light that finds your eyes, the words reconstructed in your shock and awe, the place where you get your head together. The stone of the fruit glisteningly cleaned of fruit. The wonder left off where the tongue begun.

There is a touch that will not mend, a stubborn, bubbling wound that cuts right through. A mark that separates memory and history, a built in breaker that kicks in once the alarms go off, a step that move the tense to the past. Even so time hurtles on, the words go fast, until you’ve used yours up. Once the worth ends up in the red, there’s no fix that’ll stick, not horse and soldier, not king and crown. Only the day and the matter, honoring the might have been. Only the hope and the story, making up for all this graceless waste.

The words live on in sheaves and slabs. Hints and mementos and dark manifestos. Letters and gizmos and ritual abandon. The music is playing and the lights are left on. Still, the words go quiet as the house goes dark. No one speaks and no quarter is given. The days break off and drift into the sea. The moon through its motions again and again. How low the blow, how hard the fall. Loose like light seeping through the blinds. The silence hanging like a lock, hope a river crossed at last. 

star spell

Watching the light change on the tail of this strange strewn afternoon, the glimmer glimpse of the spark and shine of caught right leaf or tumbled insect wing turning into momentary wishing stars right there in the blue gray day. I look to the west where my wishes hole up, the tumbled color of coming rain seeping from the horizon. I turn to words, I turn to wishes, remembered kisses with my hand placed just so. The singsong of that old star spell spent on chitinous wings or a stray ray of sun. Even so, the world is mostly wished shaped, at least when it comes to the human ones. The ruinous bones of misspent wishes the shape of this shambling life. 

How quickly they spin the stories. How readily they spin an ear. Head for the hurt and cross your fingers against the blame. The world is a long walk when grimy vindictive liars call out most of the directions and arrest anyone who make a map. When all you own is your voice and what you borrow from tomorrow, filling your pockets making graves by lying might not be the wisest of ways. Wishes used to make others want, the shape of need denied.

I carry an older torch, a duty to bear the flame, and an assortment of ancient claims and preexisting conditions. A glint of gelt, a change of states, the insipid evermores. I’m the usual suspects on a tear, all hands and teeth. The way it shines when you say it. The doors all blown open at once, and the way it carries through. A dusty streak of sunlight on bare shoulders strewn with hair, a flash of oath and feeling. The dream of another afternoon a wasteland made each day, a breath held just before a candle is blown out.

missal

Sometimes it’s the grief, sometimes the gravity. Sometimes it what the flesh contends, some urgency of appetite, some embattled old ardor. The sun recedes behind slow sea clouds, the wind goes dancing through the trees. A heavy breath, a double spaced pause, the gathered and the dance. The arguments of the unseen colors, the hints gotten from the fringe of hue, the patois perception steeps of us getting in its licks while the world imbues us with its getaway greens and discount blues. The light arrives and reads us aloud. The ceremony shakes out somehow.

So it’s the front porch as the over casts. So it’s black coffee and sacramental smoke as I lean into my indolence, while the neighbors heard their scads of children, and shelter in place orders go largely unobserved. The yard does its thing and I do mine, weed green and lonely old blue. The day wanders off and the dogs take turns, with fence post assemblies of the local gossip covens spilling into the streets. They rove and revel, as if they are among the blameless blessed. I am a stranger to their faiths. I hold to no mysteries and serve only my own madness, the waiting world above and below, and the absence of your archetype.

The world stirs, strained and graven around the humans, fluid and vernal through the true. We die in droves, we grasp at straws, we issue declarations as if they’re going to help. The words work us through the abruptions and impacts. The words tie it off where it’s bleeding out, the words tie it up neat and pretty with a bow. As if we were ever more than ribbons scattered. As if there was ever more road than the one on through. This is the ghost that longs for resurrection, the tripping tongue, the reserved breath. This is the reason left of all the ritual. The place where the animal at last escapes.

spin

It is written in the brickwork, it is stitched into the shadows, it is wringing out the tears. The startle of eyes open to the instant, the world in its spin, the day as it turns. Pretty songs from pretty singers, spring always ready to tease. A squirrel drinks, a sparrow drinks, my skin is ashy and pale. My bare shin in the bright sun a signal sent. My old limbs in the bright sun a weighing and a flight. The warm sun on my bald head an old wound reopened. The day takes it at a sprint. 

Now come the winds and the tracings, the cool gray end of a bright blue day. The pines stretch and sway, the fleeting sun barricaded by marine layer mechanisms, as the storm stirs the form. Dirt and buried pavement, the remembered intentions drowsing in the encroaching earth. Fence posts dip and rot, the tall shadow of the turning sphere rising from the ankles of the depths. The dusk it’s own comeuppance, with the fireworks left to the firmament, and the night waiting for the words. The hours rush past me, hurried counters dizzy from the clock. Sparrows sing to the illustrated heavens as the light wanders off.

There won’t be a calling though my heart says it must be so. There won’t be a singing though my lungs wheeze and bleat. There is only this seething entanglement and the keening of distance. There is only eyes to the lost direction, the bent of the horizon, and the turning of the yearn. Wishes and want sos and if only tales. Only the words that won’t say and the deeds that won’t go. You long gone, the hope turned down, and the day that was never going to stay.

blanket party

The lush abundance of the overgrown yard, with its wild grains, winter grasses, burr clover and seasonal weeds bursting from the earth, is over stocked with busy paper wasps. They sample the flora as they fill out the map, maws full of pulp and purpose, wings lit with afternoon sun and flashed signals. They browse and scintillate, every threat shared a promise, gloss and glitter and the edge of function. They make their dream kingdom known mouth by mouth, the calm geometry of their ancient faith. Another nest of fundamentalists I will learn to weather. The season all release, this blanket of reaching green. 

And so it is coffee by the cup. The day in barking dogs and squirrel circuits, an old man dragging bags of cans, the crows all call their shots. Old songs and sullen children, strangers made of mumble and bristle and kill you later eyes, the wind dancing soft and slow. I am a keeper of ancient distances, a holder of unyielding grudges, the narrator waiting for the next reel. A shuffle of feet, a scuffle of dust, each sacred circle a sharing of steps, a holding of hands. Writing on the inside of the light. Inking in the empty patches in the sky. 

It comes in waves and lasers. It comes in sharps and skins. The earnings of the hour, these bright slices of burned down sentience, the particular party this blanket seems to imply. The distance is always open, tomorrows always waving goodbye before you get there, all the lasts gathered together somewhere in the leavings of my skin. The great failings and old enemies that always seem to show. The ache for yet another world that wasn’t. A woman opening a door with the window on her mind. 

threadbare

Sure I see more doom in the everyday than most. Sure I spend most of my sunshine days in the shade. I come precompromised. I use up my pleasures as soon as I find them, I use up my welcome before I even show. I leave it to tomorrow when I know it never comes. There’s no use in coveting small troubles. There’s no use in half meant half measure words. It’s the utile side of futility. The threadbare end of the phrase. 

The sky is a bright and blinding blue, and I am bent with ache and smoke. The agency I surrender nothing to the furious core that I cannot control, a tide of iron and fire ringing electric through the bones. The sparrows flit and feed, limb to seed. They gossip despite the scrub jays alarm or the nuthatches proselytizing, turn to turn and perch to perch. I idle in the elder engines, only ritual horns and empty sets. Busy wings and the wind in the pines. Want and your unspoken name. 

You feel it in your blood, you feel the heady rush of your heart. The steady sense of your claimed center ringing through the hymnal of your womb. This bright blue burst of being, breath all but bubbling over in laughter, the rhythm so obvious now that you are always dancing. The root of iron and time, this life the filings magnet dragged, the truth as it is ionized. Tall and alive in the warmth of this slow soft day, you are all the light that reaches, all the shadows waiting for your voice. Deeds and dreams the devil’s work, you get to the doing of your day. 

the spoils

It’s a day like any other, drinking coffee in the afternoon, spelling everything out. I find the crow by following its shadow, find the dove by the beating of its wings. There are some dogs and cars, old songs and a bunch of different birds. The circuit wasn’t restarted for me, I don’t see the stitching on the scrim, the trapdoors and turntables and rollaway stones. But I never take a god as a given, so I miss a lot, the sales pitch and the vamping while the basket gets passed around. So it’s dogs and birds and the coming dusk. It’s the rippling foliage in the rising wind, the low ceiling of the rising sky.

Most of what we call the world is a bunch of safe words and stories, handshake deals and ways it was always done. Fashion and habit, convenience and chemistry, so much is only extant in compacts and definitions, placeholders and black hats. You lose the deity, you don’t miss much. You give up the rituals, there’s a room left empty inside you. Then only the next harbor, then only the held note. To the victim charge the spoils. 

So go the days and seasons, so goes the unmarked map. The soft of the afternoon broken by a tide of travel and worship. Calendars and crowns, herds and whole free hearts, the world ripples from every impact. Folding forth from ricochet to ricochet, everything fitted to its set, everything from bite to breath. Rising voices from passing traffic, the Doppler down to the last rattled bass, children shrieking finding colored eggs. The treasure of tomorrows. The stitching to the earth, the seeing of the sign. The riches read in inference, the witness you have wrought among the words. 

stride

I let the day have my back, sitting on the front porch with wall and window between me and the sun pressed against everything behind me. The dogs lounge in sunlight while the shadows push their way out. The wind rises as I cup my hand to the flame, leaning into the light up. Drag and draw, lean back and look. All these slow devotions, the day busy going, the fanning of the indulgent pyre of dusk by the green laden limbs. The trees all swaying, slowing their breath with the leaving light. 

Sometimes you have to listen to the music. Sometimes you have to kick the words around. Sometimes you’re a caution, sometimes you’re all crutch. The experts of the moment have to put it to you, the endless addendums and the tiresome reveals. It’s a problem both with the language and the form, as all fast magics must. It’s a problem with the comfort of the tongue, the hard truths never said. The defenseless taking the initiative to attack, not one note or word the different. The walk through the garden because god’s already plenty mad. 

There’s a spot I’d have you scratch is usually how I quickly miss you. An itch out of easy reach and this cruel indulgence. How heavily the fantasy has to lay it on. Pretendings laid out in strata, the song ever timed just so. As if you would ever, as if I’d really want you to. The wind whips through the greened trees, the shadows reach out further on. No reason for writing, no room for wishes. Done before the saying hit its stride. 

slowed

The seeds were scattered, and so there’re squirrels. The math isn’t that hard. You could do it in your head between punctuations. You could call it from a mile out. The sun warm despite the clouds. Just a slowed moment, all dog and dash. A montage of greatest hits, eyes closed, the heat of your skin. This is the daylight into dreaming. This is the still in the gutters of the world.

Even something here amounts to nothing, a breath,  a respite, some time in the light. It is all that it could be, another page replete with invective, another string of hapless impacts. All the steam and all the smoke, the silhouette pine needles shimmering on the pavement, the Pixies on the speakers and coffee in the cup. I smoke on the shore of no tomorrows. Engines and axe stroke, out with the dogs when the cat comes back. 

A sip of bitter coffee, the bite of heat and steel, the price to taste this kiss. Another deep breath as the battery fades, with the breeze all ice and fingers. Another long drag as the flags fly half mast, the world worn down to bare bones and exposed wire. Bernstein’s Ohio and tractor mower rattle, blue skies and scrub jays. The afternoon drawls and lounges, the words tumble on, the heart knows when its beaten. The empty so much more when you feel it. The stillness alway stirs.

visible

You ask me for the color it depends on the end of the spectrum. You ask me what I see, I see a bunch of words rushing to inhabit whatever me is seeing. You can see the problem. Me getting asked questions. Generally my attention is spent just trying not to run into stuff, so asking is asking a lot. I’m barely extant as it is— now I have to be heard and seen?! The bandwidth isn’t giving anything away.

The afternoon is all warm winds and April grays, soft songs and porch chimes, dogs dashing and children’s screams. The yard is overgrown with sprouted bird seed and seasonal weeds, squirrel and sparrow prone despite all the affiliated carnivores, littered with falcon stripped bones and feathers. The hour plods, laden with raucous dogs and shrill preschoolers, careless traffic and gravid shadows. The wind rises and a cooling closes in.

I write this out of wild passion and plodding hobby. I write this on a thumbstruck tablet stuck on my front porch perch. I write this like blown ocher around my hand in some pitch lit down below, like some flag left on the moon. This is the translation of my dissipation, the pattern I played out. Even as I fall, I mark the arc. Even as I disappear, I am something seen. 

induction

We won’t address it bird by bird, or build it brick by brick. One moment the body, the next the mystery, choking on the throttle cough by cough. The ghost is there, the ghost is gone, seeing stars while the band plays on. The engine in the turning over, the purpose only explosion and exhaust. The words are there at the crossing of the wires. The words a map read by lightning bolt. One hand on your hip, one hand on your throat. Somehow the spark is there. Rebuilding the world by hand.

The moon wasn’t playing either, the swell of radiance a constant shroud of becoming, always the revelation of arrival. The sky bright and bursting with reflected glory and holy shine, I dragged around trailings of cat and dog through bough eaves and bramble, the stars so hard to see. Drag the leg of most mistakes in slow hungry circles, working best up close. You are a song that plays on and on. I am a circuit spewing symbols.

My shoulders clench, my breath a stitch down the side. I clutch the counter, I glean the mirror. I give a little brush and razor. I give it a go, then I hit the showers. Time won’t look me in the eye, and my visions iffy. The words arrive as you read them. They find an opening and they mind the gap, turning over page and mirror. The old song all along. The ring a rosie, them dry bones. The words walk right through. 

the teeth left to grin

Left to the gravid moon and the pent up prayers, the hungers pace the pews. The wished for wanton and the wished on star. All the little repetitions, all the strolls around the block, the call and response, the mother may I s left splayed out on the floor. All the real roads that make the rounds between the words and the put on show. The way your intention always leaves a mark.

Bared fleshed and battered knees, the crowded bouts of reignition, memory makes a list you always want to check. Close quarter shoulders and dark cold rooms. Sunlight and dust and the taste of passion pressed so tight. The old days get older and the good times just Bible gas, smote right off the boat for busting covenants, back when in the pretty pleases. The streets rolled up and the porch light on, the moon goes out of its way to make it worse. 

It’s always about the one more round. It’s always about the going gone. The moon shining bright through the trees, the ache for the scent of her nape, the sharp of her jaw, the impassioned gasp. The ache drawn as taught as a bow, the arrow tense and perilous, this want a rope around the throat of the night. To steer through these restless stars wheeling through the seasons, with memory always held hard against the wall. To feel the distance as the speed of a spark, not a penny to the name, not the teeth left to grin. 

the last forecast

Who knows what sounds the wind stirs in, who knows the next available rain? Who knows what the dogs are after over the solo with the earbuds in? One of the local squirrels on a tear or the stray I’ve only seen passing fast in silhouette, some remarkable witness, some elusive evidence? There’s no telling what we miss, watching the one thing and not another. The applause rises as the song stops short, the portion of past appreciations scribbled down in the cacophony of long gone ghosts. The wind stirs, all gray light and receding sky. 

The day takes the gray on early, hosting the last forecast rain for the foreseeable. Skin beset by itch of mosquito bites, the soft husk of sky dripping a few drops, I follow the context clues. Hunched over this lit machine, tapping out trails of expired moments for strangers to taste and spit. Chasing steam with smoke, the aura of the bug cluttered porch light aglow in my peripheral sight, I watch the exchanges as they rate. Dog and cat, bird and squirrel, wind and rain and the existential drain of this slow motion gloaming. All the want, and the words to boot.

Some song plays back when the world I thought I lived in still included marriage and family, all the well worn wounds hit at once. The lost possibles that just disappear from view, one moment a fork in the road, the next the road you chose. The old camera with the aperture all wrong. The synopsis whittled from old shows and ghosts, the reasons that come scraping down the hall at night, someone plays a saw on that song you can almost hear. Just the words, and the bones you huddle your guts and gristle around. Just the words, and the dusk gone cold.

plummet

It’s not so much in the sky or in the forecast that keeps the rain on my mind. It is this shade of gray, a thickness to the atmosphere, the thirsty air waiting for the water to fall. Thinking back to the way the storm stitched itself into the fabric of the firmament, every thread a binding of heaven and earth, the way of matter wanting the lowest road known. The weighted gray of the blanket drawn up nearly over my head, the earth I’m made of electric in anticipation. The sparrows rush the seed strewn ground. 

The clouds have closed and the shadows gathered. There is a heaviness to the light, a thickness as the wind gnashes and the sky scrolls. The heat has given my fingers to the cold, holing up somewhere in the deeper regions of the organism, the breeze wicking smoke and sparks from my insistent flesh. The gravity seizes and the light hangs its hat, the rain in waiting existing only in swaths of probability and my self inflicted suspense. The cold keeps its declamations going, marching down into the marrow, singing from rainy afternoons out to the depths of space. I smoke and shift as age has its say.

I cough and I sputter, I choke and I don’t cover, spitting bricks on the edge of a heavy hit. A cargo plane rumbles aloft above the airbase, neighbors lofting gripes and gossip not too partial to social distance audible between songs, as the leaf and needle ripple with the busy wind and the rain doesn’t fall at all. I’m a lonesome contagion crackling in the atmosphere, another noisy vector competing the bandwidth the air allows. I shuffle through the scenes and sift through the pictures in my head that pass for words. Every flight a falling invoked, every sparrow a plummet unspoken. The rain still thinking what to say. 

skyline

A distant crow atop a teetering cypress waves in the wind and rain as the rain comes calling on us all. Whether the window watchers or the weather gossips or the back masked sublimation of those 70s rockstar satanists finally catching up, the rain stretches and whispers, it patters and drums on the aluminum roofing, it casts a shadow threaded from the light to the soil. I look up and the crow is gone. The soil awakens, taking the skies breath away. The skyline all treetops and gray horizons. The skyline all the words to the write off. 

Because the words came with the story, because this is the process part of the poem, fingers peeling slow from the keypad. The smudges another set of symbols, the building blocks and watermarks, the thin veneer of agency boiling away into the restless atmosphere. Cold hands, always cold hands. The limits of the instrument, the wearing away of the dated organism, the machine unmade. The day a storm, the day the steam drawn by the icy skies, the day a set of unsettling remarks. The witness to the too late. The walker into the blizzard lost.

So the words wander through our hearts and wounds, the stunned and the stuck and the heavenly host of us. So we have our say as the the words spill out. My old eyes and cold hands typing another string, as transient as a glimpse of rain, the moment tailing plumes. The giddy green and gray of it, the pouring through the pines, the simple wish for a particular kiss. These images that draw me out, the way I stare and stare. The rain falls, the music drones, the I want spilling out as I go. Witnessed without a word by the world at work.

lapsed

It is the hour of the pitter natter, the words herded close and set to telling. It is the hour of the appetites, every skin lit by want and burning, the light left on well past the look. The time of pillow talk and breathless abandon, of flickering feelings and restless flesh. When we would breathe our goodnights against our bared desires, passions pressed like flowers in the Bible, the symbol also a sign of the sacrifice. When our ghosts would run barefoot through the halls of our heart, waking every hunger, touching all the ways.

Letters hold their folds, fading as they age, holding onto a lost moment with the weight of words and paper. Bent and boxed up, all the stories that have since broken, proven untrue, or simply had their day waiting to be unleashed upon this world that proves them wrong. The song that held no traction in your past all at once on top of the playlist. The words you missed the first time around back to jump you in. They linger at the warm spot where your heart used to be, waiting for time to turn in its badge. 

Now the moment speaks in itch and whisper, always scratching after it and saying what? The things said so long ago they’re dead upon reading, the things said so long ago they always ring timeless and true. Memories of want, memories of passion, the taste of their kisses, the picture in the frame. On the losing end of some lapsed romance, hands in pockets, kicking rocks. On the sundown side of a same old story, alone in the dust. Dwindling down another night, wanting everything.

whatever stars there were

The afternoon scatters its shadows all at once, strewn from tree and stone, left to litter the yard and stretch out into the streets. Bright skies and unburdened winds, the angle of the sun’s distribution played out in a host of pointers, the day a game dealt from the same worn deck. The hand played slow and sure, you remit each detail for every cent you can get. The words run amok, meaning less the more you loose. 

Run a few hours through it, the machine keeps them coming. The scattered clouds, half a moon, and whatever stars there were. The night right there despite the lapsed transition. The night on through no matter how hard the book is hacked. The mirror always staring back, the panic caught on camera, running ice behind your eyes. The little it takes done in the intermission. The percussive aspect overtakes the invocation, your voice the crack of static, the bell tolling out its blessing. 

So we move, from dream to dream. The scrolling backdrop or the dizzying fades, the scene is strung along in the slip from line to line. The view of you, the list of wishes, all the scuffles of blood and brain the day sustains. The things I always say, the things you never said, and all the listings in that neighborhood. The place you take up in the tenses, the sentence or two you might add up to, if someone ever asks quite right. The way a name hangs when it loses purchase in the world.

the first

The drop comes and it’s hard to count the damage. The first of another unwanted month or half a moon plunked right down in the middle of it, another shift to the system where the words already quit working. A smile bent with the wince of bad teeth, the day given over to the giddy liars and their wide spread lies. The sky is cold and blue, a waste of fervent illumination. The day is bright and careless, a song not worth all the singing.

The cold bites the bones, even on a day so mild and bright. The gray muzzle not a lie for once, my body in a hurry playing catch up with the grave. Each day back bowed beneath the weight of waking, before each breath a coughing fit to clear the causeway. The categories just write themselves as I move from fool to coot. Something in my angles leaving me always a little askew to the heft and hew of the days latest techniques. Something in my mettle always getting me tuned up at the forge. The old was waiting for me all along.

All the songbirds improvise as the dogs work their bones, the day lit bright and pitched wide and outside. The sky makes its mirrors where it finds them, mud puddles and water bowls, windows, cars, and oil. The light gets in everything, strewn among the tree limbs, dripping off the eaves. All these orbits and rotations racked up in pictures and instruments, the dance done by the numbers, the scenery painted by the book. The black coffee swallowed before it cools. The numbers set again to one.