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.