last light

The hours climb the long steps, through the forest and up the mountain, straight past the observable sky and beyond the ken of all the obligatory stars. They tell the length of every take, chewing scenery in months and miles, strumming along and beating the boards front to back. Soon the calendar swaps dogs, and the words do the say so, strung along in dry heaved proclamations and dead eyed threats. The score from some movie scene gives way to Rue Bassin brass, the Sunny Side of the Street playing as the last light leaves. The long sustain and the rising night. 

The shadows assemble, pouring from form and frame. Unseen wings spread as the light retreats into street lamps and headlights, pressed inside of windows, peeking through the blinds. A heavy sound rumbles down my spine and sounds out through my chest before growling out my open mouth and butting heads with the wall and the amplified voices of strangers. My anxieties and tensions all assemble through the scorched ley lines strung between neurons and the occluded fuss of what may be, the husk a song that never starts, the heart a litany that doesn’t end. The ceiling just hangs there, how ever long I stare.

Dreams are obligatory, love is on a sliding scale, the sky’s the limit depending on your sky. Better keep a bag by the door, better make those kisses last. The possibilities are diminishing as we seek the sacred self and the graceless gelt, as the words devour themselves and all the teeth are showing. The crackdown laces up their shiny boots, acting out their skull cracking credos, seemingly unaware that the other side hasn’t been hitting back. Breathe in, breathe out. The earth blesses you with heart and power. Let your roots sing out blood and fire, the starry night woven through your plaits.

attendant

The gray tide of sky held a warm wind to the whet of the world, the thick spill of heaven pushed into the earth until it trails scintillating sparks and myriad blooms. With the bitter on my breath, the black coffee’s warm regards spill from my tainted tongue. I sit, spewing plumes of smoke and respirated air, watching the leaves slow shudder as if in deep pleasure, imagining the bride of the sky. 

Something moving through the mantle. Something dragging along the atmosphere. Crows abandoning their riotous assemblies, their solemn rise sleek and righteous against the stirring sky. The clouds avoid any confrontation, wandering off as clouds will do. I maul a cigar into submission leaving a smoldering, chawed up husk of damp leaf and smoldering embers fuming in the ashtray. A long list of usual suspects committed to the busywork of changing states. The thoughts all assemble as coffee runs down my beard. I lean into the deepened breath.

Suddenly the sun is the headliner, brilliant blue sky above the shivering green, stirring the incandescence. A crow calls, three times then alights the passing gust, eloquence to the shimmering ink black feather. There is an ache, there is a yearning. There is a burning down blazing away and the weight of loss met, and all the loss to come. The moving on you whether you choose to move, the deep heat and the flagrant injustice crossing currents as the flame abides. There is the trembling before the transformation, the weight of a great silence rolled aside. An old man smoking on the edge of a storm. 

walk the weld

I’m sitting though not knocked down, though that did happen a little earlier. My skull is ringing on the beaten end of bone. Looking away I misplaced my eyes and walked into one for the team. The stars weren’t quite shooting, but I was well aware they were there. Distance points pinning down the particles. The busy blaze and the tail end of the fall. Head thumping on the driveway, curses spewing from my every seam. We find our feet, we walk the weld.

It’s not as if the clock was counting. It’s not as if there was ever enough of it to slow down. Gathering up the apparition, watching from the foothills of the mirror. The turn of the earth, the spin of the storm, sore from every star that’s screaming on, it’s feet or footing. The coffee down to the dregs. The little laughing dog that thinks this is fun. The fool ever wheeling away from the teeth at his heels.

Every day it’s a whole new low. The late sprint up the hastening hill. Your beating breath closing into being. The framework trailing sparks, the house on fire. The hardest part is knowing what to do with your hands. The passion play looms as the flesh goes erring. The magic all in knowing what you will. Turning the time down to save on space. The stars always speaking to the earth. 

powerless

Head shaved and showered close to clean the lights went out again. Lit by the dim glow of an old battery powered emergency light, a blue apparition staring through the shower door from across the room, I continued my ablutions staring into the suddenly impenetrable shadows in the corner of the stall. They gathered and thickened, awakened to my attention, playing the abyss that stares back. I turned beneath the spilling water, brooks and rivulets slithering down my chest and shoulders, spattering off my back. I dried off in the warm, dark room, then opened the bathroom door. I stepped out in the hall, naked in the unadorned dark. 

That was the second blackout of the day, and it barely lasted half an hour. The earlier one that day lasted from something like 7:30am to around 2pm; both were little more than inconveniences, closed refrigerators and reset clocks. The heat wave landed hard and stomped around a while. It flattened all us beasts a bit, giving only the ectotherms a boost. As I paced the property this afternoon flies lit from every surface in numbers that’d make Beezlebub  reconsider his dominion. The dogs and cats are draped all over the property, holing up wherever the shadows gather and the surface cools. I fill up the water buckets and bowls, doing what little I can. Like me, it isn’t much; like me, it’s not nearly enough.

Despite my depression and volatility, despite my intermittent death drives and nearly daily suicidal ideation, I know life is precious. It is a brief fleeting glimmer in the vast impassive devouring, as energy takes a nap and space wanders away from the group. This ancient scintillation, from the early oceans to the first earths, is our common inheritance. The million iterations of living that we are a late fruiting from all seethe and dance around and through us. I am a colony of intentions and happenstance that will outlive me and my species, part of the earth’s scabbed over mantle, the myriad of mouths that aspire to eat the sun. All our middens and bowers built upon drives that existed before we are here, drives that will squirm and soar in a million different shapes and skins long past our expiration date. Our one true divine soul the dust we shall succumb to, my life a flicker already all but extinguished. Until the lights go out, the eyes drive on.

preamble

What waits other than more cruel contagions, the busywork and yipyap while the world burns to ash? What is left other than begrudged platitudes and incentives towards murder. The little things give out one by one, following their bigger kin. Downward spirals turn to kissed canvas lives full of ill slept nights and bare light bulbs and their contemptuous kisses and the kick in the teeth. Conversations only had with walls and kinfolk paying nearly as much attention, despised by neighbor and stranger alike. If I can wait another month or so, it will be the shotgun. Otherwise, the belt and a gruesome reveal will have to do. 

It took all I had to take a shower, my heart crying havoc and beating down my ribs, a drifty dreamy sort of cloud settled in my head. Short of breath, arm and chest in an alarm of pain and weakness, while I get to discover the evening’s latest betrayal. It takes a spell, but the decrepitude goes hard once it gets started, and the world steps in swinging. It’s the sort of thing you don’t know until you feel it. Everything up to that point was make-believe, everything after epilogue. You take them at their word, they take you for a ride. Either ignored or toyed with, I’m cutting to the chase. 

Too many vital people have lost their lives, lives full of love and work and dreams rubbed out like so many typos. This precious chance, with all the brutality and joy and passion and pain it comes with. I don’t deserve to be here, and I can’t stop the chyron in my skull from running the reasons in a loop. I’m no longer up to the task of carrying out my duty, and am too beaten and cowardly to abandon my station. This has been my inner monologue the entire year, trying to find something to fix a safety line to, while mulling the available options for a successful exit. Now even my ups are down, and I am done with this beggar’s choice. Soon I will stop all my words, and likely delete every trace. My only answer for fifty years, for all this gnashing and weeping, has been silence. It is fitting that silence is all behind, slipping out so quietly no one will ever remember I was here at all. 

ideally

It doesn’t matter what you have in mind. It doesn’t matter how you choose your words. The hitch in your giddy up, the stone in your shoe, the song in your precious little heart. You don’t get to pick the poison, you don’t get a say at all. The heat rises and the world closes in. Small sad rooms and throw away lives. The ceiling that you fix your mournful gaze upon as dismal as the ragged countenance on display for all to see. The tattered standard of perpetual defeat, the constant contempt and disavowal, all the bitter sins they blame upon your very being. Your existence a filthy, hated thing, the unwritten but long held sacred shibboleth of this wounded world demands your ridicule and sacrifice. The goat left out for God’s demons, the blood price of this foolish compact with a shiftless, burning wind.

Shuffle through the deck of days, picking your wager from empty pockets and stripped down wishes, your life the only marker you have. Day after day, night after night, bad beats and bad breaks and the unending apathy. The separation of help and faith, the shitheel kings and the degenerate priests slaver and thieve, the gutless minions of the gibbering gods they serve set loose upon you at every turn. Any attempt to get aid is either crime or paperwork. Some story to tell you of your worthlessness, some savagery inflicted atop of injury, the directive to give over gelt or die in a ditch. Life is so very precious because of how quick most are to snuff it out.

Ideally I’d be dead by now, not stuck in the ignominy of these words and this world set aflame. Ideally I would never have been summoned to fill the role of scapegoat and other. Instead my breath founders and my head spins. The least labor sets my heart into painful alarm. Naked before the ministrations of the oscillating fan and the staggering brilliance of Miles Davis, I lie here waiting out the day. A strip of bright sun flashing in my open window, stomach growling, no purchase for my wants in this human world. Every day denied three times, even though the centurions are backlogged by years. Behind the children that they murder before they can drink or vote, behind the people with the audacity to think they can be within their skins safely among the wicked death worshipping throng. Behind the ill and the elderly and the readily disappeared, or anyone to be so inconvenient as to really believe in justice or equity. Just another bad stock to be bundled and liquidated as their winning streak gives out. Just another crummy brain waiting for a bullet.

ugly

The air is spun sugar and silt here in my room in the dead of night, the blue bias fire of the television flickering on the ceiling, the fan rotating back and forth in a slow, perpetual no. Sleep won’t come, and I can’t meet it halfway. I sneeze as dust is buffeted by the relentlessly beating blades, a soft and constant whir, the shush of white noise beneath the dialogue of the half watched movie. The entertainments are used to it, and carry on without a hint of contempt or disgust. Would that I could say the same.

I am sick, feeling suicidal, and desperate knowing I won’t act upon the urge. Breathing is still a low level struggle, and my thoughts are running riot on an ugly bent. It’s been too many years in a bad way, and there is no relief In sight. I still go through the motions, minding my mother’s schedule and tending to her modest needs. Some days she’s not unlike herself, but largely it’s been a long, losing war of attrition, with a little something lost with each hard fought battle. As long as she wants to be in this world, I’ll try to hang in, though other than the endurance parts of the job, I know she’d be better cared for without me in the mix. I’ve given up pleading to the powers that be to end me, mostly because they’re even more useless than me. If you want something done, as the saying says. 

My dad died back in October  2006, dying in the hospital without any family there. I was late getting to town, my mother waiting impatient on the front porch, yet another in a series of disappointments as I let my father down one last time. Fourteen years later, I am still here, unstable and all used up, so insignificant that no one even texts me any longer, just the old and the older bumping around in the deepening darkness with barely a word shared. There’s no one I can talk to because there’s no one I can trust, my mom fading hard into dementia, and all my allies long gone. I stopped being a person many years ago, as my context left me and my interest in the world waned. Love, work, family and meaning all words that mean something different to me than they seem to mean to most people. It’s two in the morning, and all I can do is talk to myself in sad fragments. Even the moon carries her curse for me. 

momentary

The feeling is fleeting, that passage between the heart and the wide open world, where you remember the bright and beckoning places that once held you close. The times when there were friends and family and some measure of consolation to be found. The years before the getting up was all the labor you could manage. The days when pain wasn’t your only companion. To live within the world, to love and to feel love in in the ebb and the flow, the mystery vivid and all abloom. These days it passes fast, and so I try to cherish it despite my bitterness and despair. Even now as the feeling fades and the illness wells along with these hot and doleful tears, I acknowledge the blessing even as I sink back into this fetid flesh. The world without will do just fine without me.

The heat accumulates over the course of the season, day by day until the nights pass drenched in sweat and the stirring of vestigial feelings, all wishes and oscillating fans. It rustles the leaves and sweeps the wind aside to loom and glide upon every surface and skin. People pass as if a sunny day would sequester all their sorrows, thinking they are free because they are points of infection, vectors that serve to carry the disease with their restlessness and hollow faith in their preciousness. We move on, barely bothering to acknowledge the dead, on the path to become some cautionary tale before calamity and collapse. Smoke em if you got em. Believe me, if I had them, I would. 

This is the year I lost the last of my friends. This is the year the same old same old shifted beneath my feet. This is life, and it’s passage. The consequences of being inconsequential and combative, the long line of told me sos all coming to roost at once. I hope the insurmountable isn’t so, I hope humanity fixes its traditions and finds its feet. There is much to love despite the prevalence of dull villains and unrepentant shitheels. The preponderance of selfishness that I find my useless self upon the same side of history with is unsustainable, and I am glad to be driven to extinction along with the rest of the trash. The beautiful hearts still move me, even if they no longer can sustain me. I hope my passing lands like a bouquet of blessings, an explosion of warmth and butterflies after a long cold winter. The simple symmetry of a long overdue return to dust. 

abstraction

This day is stuffed with straw. This day is built brick by brick, the sun and the rhythm of the lost path. It seems pretty dumb, but it knows what it’s doing. Shadows fill the landscape with bright birds and blue ghosts, children screech and play as the burning world goes gray. The words come along the way words occur, in fits and starts and telegraphed nods to art. Feast or famine, bounty by the bushel or the ramekin. Mouths full of syllables, mostly missing what they mean. 

To be honest, there’s not much asking left of me. There’s nothing much past vague longings and tangible threats inside my heart. The last stack took a lot out of me, and there wasn’t much there to begin with. Just this pathetic urge to scribble something on the walls of the cave. A note scribbled upon the walls of the asylum, a message in a bottle hurled into the rage an rollick of the open ocean. This year I lost my last confidant and got schooled again about things I keep not learning. This is whatever is left, the shape of a hand in bone blown ochre, a flag planted on the moon. Some stupid conceit left to say where I was when the gone caught up with me.

The lungs strain on, thick in patches with fluids and phlegm, the heart sore from the uphill trot. The colors sweep the sky as the street cools and turns towards the deeper palette, the broken notions of the bandwidth while the twilight wanders through.  I plunder the lexicon and body every definition, clumsy and impatient and ready to pummel and clout enemy and interloper alike. Instead I beat my knuckles bloody against some innocent post, my life just the pocket change of a sacrifice made too many years ago. Not a man, not a person, not even an entity with any reckoning in the fleshed out forms. A set of loose limbed abstractions left in the dashed off magic of math and servile sparks, a bunch of written down tears and wrong turns trailed by a name that is never said and hard to remember.

rigmarole

The shadows reach towards tomorrow’s sunrise while the slowly sipping leaves take in the last of the lingering day. The sky climbing up the trees while the sun says its long goodbyes. I lean hard into the breathing, rasping and spitting and clearing my throat like I’m about to start making a speech. The animals laze around the yard, and the crows are calling each other home. People work their mouths and minds, running them at different speeds, racing around separate tracks. It works about as well as you’d think. 

It is high dudgeon season, the outraged how dare yous and the declaration of a very specific set of rights, false positives and last hills and the evils of the flag. The belief in belief itself seems to wag the dog of late, though the whole kingdom of man is built on foundations of similar sands. The world we inhabit mostly ghosts and thought experiments, culture always in it for itself. The earth proclaims the laws that are, while we scribble in the rule book and simper about the original meaning of all our barks and grunts. Bells and whistles while the barbed thistles silently declaim the lessons of the flesh. We can’t help it, we were late to the party, and we think we’re somewhere else.

A crow calls out its retreat, summoning its band to assemble unto the roost. A man and a boy ride their bikes against traffic across the street, the yard the disarray of weeds and the clamber of animals. An art song plays long and sharp, a piece of some other heart that left me long ago.  The evenings machinery shifts, sparrows flit beneath the eaves, the crow takes flight with kin in tow. All we are is unleavened labor, all we are is a roll of the dice. The neighborhood vibrates with pent up energy, ready for something wild and raw after all these days of self discipline and enforced denial. I miss you like I always do, constantly and without purpose. I miss you like I miss me too, saying goodbye each day, the rigmarole and the curtain calls and the tears of no tomorrow. Everything in the way we take our givens. 

hint of whiskey

Out of all the stars, it’s this one, beating down the doors of the day. Out of all the worlds, it’s this one, turning beneath our feet. Fate’s funny that way. Full of falling skies and shifting sands, earthquakes and tidal waves and wild fires. One thing happens so half a dozens things don’t. All the imponderables that accumulate because of the lay of the land or the impromptu entrance. The consequence of causality always a bunch questions that only get to exist because the chips fell. All these miracles even rarer still. If it all played out again, it wouldn’t be us except with goatees. If it all played out again, the asking wouldn’t be ours at all. 

It’s all dregs and remnants, photographs and regrets. Spring slowly overheats, the flowers beckon red and yellow while the sky turns a brutal blazing blue. The cruel asymmetric romances and the wild flourishes of burr and weed. Cast off sad alphanumerics become impenetrable mysteries, spun on a turntable, run through magnets and mazes as the crows rally and the traffic rattles past. Things chosen and things that were not continue to occur, people love and leave, life comes striving through the seems and death nurtured and nourishes the ever imminent next. The labored breath, the insistent wishes, the crushed heart ardor and the impending night.

You come to me in the dead of night. You come to me in the middle of the day. A fleeting glimpse, a fragment of a sentence, the echoes of love and longing radiating from the lives of others. Strange wandering dreams where we speak again, desperate kisses and the hint of whiskey on your lips. It’s a constant manifestation of the latest iteration of this starved and grasping heart. I know it’s a one way street. One thing happens, then another. That’s the way that happenstance becomes destiny. A lifetime of mistakes and being mistaken. A rough patch and a respite, a roadside attraction leaking the bones of better days.

waiting around to die

The sun spills out across the long drawl of yards and houses feeding lawns and trees as they ease their magic for the day. Traffic and packs of bicycles slide on by. A pregnant neighbor walks her resolute toddler down the block, stopping to strategize about a pacifier, before waving and heading on down the road. Some frou-frou truck rattles past, shaking with dopplering bass. Breathing is a slow deep burden, work that leaves me sore and spitting. My heart is both ends of beaten, an unloved but stubborn machine, keeping time while time keeps unwinding the flesh. 

Oh, for the songs and stories. Oh, for the snuffed out love and squandered hearts, the waste and the wander and the calendar full of exed out days. All the children and the poems and the dashed brains of the silly hopes that sustain through the darkest days and the dead eyed nights. The snips and strings and sweet soft things that hold the husk to the grind of life. The schemes that seemed close to fruition always out of reach, leaving the litter of feelings and failings to dwell in these laden bones. Everything eludes save these empty words, and the work of breath and blood and tears. Though weighed down and a little fearful, there is some small relief in the hope that the ghost will go away.

Life is a precious swarming, a chiding of the ruthless forces that blaze and claim the seething stillness as their own. These great rings danced around the brilliant, fading grace of creation. These cycles that bind the sunlight and glum matter to the great aimless guts of god. It isn’t transcendence, because there is nothing to transcend. It’s here, or it was here, or it is arriving. Eyes opened wide, this universe thrives on the short game, while the long con of life is gone before it blinks. A couple of neighbors mean mug me before retreating into their lair. The shock and splendor unending while I sit here, waiting around to die. 

blue mood landscape

The afternoon takes a deep breath and exhales sun and sparrows as shadows paint the cement and the doves make their move. The sky takes its time, shuffling clouds and spilling wind as the the air warms, birdsong and amplified music mingle while the world takes us for a ride. Families move maskless along the sidewalks, children and parents mingling with neighbors like they were going to live forever. Everyone has a price, no matter what the cost. The dark days have yet to come.

Breathing is getting a little rough, some congestion settling in deep that I can’t seem to clear. I might be running a temperature, but I haven’t confirmed or disproved this yet. There seems to be some mild imbalance while moving and a growing ache in my head and intermittent soreness in my throat. None of this is enough for me to assume I have the most current available illness, as I generally don’t keep up with the latest trends, but my opinion ain’t worth much. Whatever happens, I won’t be seeking medical attention. No insurance, and with my many human deficits, no real reason to carry on. I’m already holed up, but I suppose I could hole up more.

The Ghost Dance Religion, the Boxer Rebellion, the Xhosa Cattle Killing movements were all driven by colonizers destroying old ways of lives. Millenarian movements tend to be like that. The Roman occupation of Jerusalem caused the millenarian movement we call Christianity. The modern American Evangelical movement is another millenarian movement, but this anti American doomsday cult has been essential in the rise of the malignant irrational right wing. This particular intersection of white supremacy, capitalism, and American exceptionalism is unusual in such movements in its participation in the dominant power structure while maintaining its everybody’s pickin on me narrative. As the lawless vermin at the wheel consolidate their power, and our undisciplined natures are celebrated, we are headed for a plague and idiot driven collapse. These blue mood landscapes I paint just more ephemeral frippery while smoke fills the heavens, this wasted life all the more shameful for the facts. 

the wide periphery

The ceiling goes on as far as the eye can see, right up to the walls. The shelves below it stacked with books and tchotchkes, photos and old toys surrendered to the dust. The ragged baggage abandoned for a moment, the precious treasures carefully placed, they all hold their ground as they are battered by a single silty light. Memories thicker than the cobwebs that cling to the corners waiting to alight on every shelf. A portrait of a former goat squints pettily from its frame. There is always music somewhere, padding out the atmosphere. There is always a window open, letting in the night. 

The dreams drift in and out, vague notions and sharp words. Black hair and bare shoulders, a stairway to the moon. An impact like the strike of grief upon awakening as the dreaming turns away, the heart a sharp and sinking note. The long sad sustain, everything fading so fast, to live is to lose and lose. Even the dreams will leave you once the leaving begins. The frames fill with empty pictures, mysteries mounting with every year that flees. One day all the names will be as lost as the dreams they cherished. One day the waking won’t take. 

There are foxtails on the pillow. There are burrs in the bedding. The earth imbues its multitudes with every appetite to pick the locks and pass through the walls, the seasons beating down on the roof and rafters, the ground rising up through the foundation. Constellations wheel unseen as the wan electric bulb struggles to shine. Heaven hides its grace somewhere off beyond the wide periphery as the organisms slink and writhe, singing and reaching and hungering along. The candles aren’t even counted, let alone lit. The blessings all beggared as the words, one by one, crawl away to die.

sobriquet

It’s been a while, but I still hear your voice. I still turn to tell you something before I realize that you’ve gone. I haunt my house, I move in slow circles if I move at all, muttering through the dismal drudge of my hapless heart. I answer you aloud, these imaginary conversations I have in my head seemingly sticking with me unto death. Then I hear my voice and the trance is broken. I find myself alone, staring at a wall or a lamp, awake within this further falling. 

The days expand and contract, spilling steam and salt while the sky runs wild. I sit on the front porch as the music dreams and smoke em if I got em. I read a passage or poem, see a show that I think you’d like, or a funny thing that one of the animals did. I keep them to myself, and the world turns as it is it’s wont. The birds raise up a ruckus, a rousing chorus of chirrups and harsh scolds, the wind making every tree wave goodbye. Goodbye bird, goodbye tree, goodbye the heart inside of me. 

There’s words I can’t hear without feeling a clout, terms of endearment, little scraps of jokes and moments freshly buried. Months and years, the time it takes to disappear, the way my heart insists things aren’t so. All left out for the weather to wear and the wind to blow. The days so empty and threadbare in the space you held. Gone all at once, though always going, a box of letters and the ledger in the red. Kisses and courtesies, and too many memories, leaving me with a lot of things I never wanted and a name I can no longer say. Still, I hear your voice, and listen.

downbeat

These aren’t the words I intended. To most it probably seems they never are. The poem I was working eluded me, and the subsequent despair surprised even me. You think I’d be used to it, after fifty years of my emotional volatility and frustrated longings. Instead, I’m sweeping up glass, and dragging the page through my vacant skull. Instead, I’m thinking yet again about where to leave my corpse. 

The writing is a thing to do, a placeholder that’s supposed to keep me thinking about writing like doing it is accomplishing something, like “well, at least I have that.” It isn’t supposed to elevate me or get any better or even be understood, though all of those things might be okay. It’s supposed to keep the shark swimming, that’s all. That it is terribly upsetting doesn’t help much, but usually I can use the momentum of the emotion to fuel something. Shame and disgust are all I got tonight.

I feel horrible. The things I can’t say, the things I don’t say, and the things I shouldn’t have said are all sharing a cab in my head. I think they’re going to just drive around all night with the meter running. The black dog, the blue blazes, and the lonely heartedness all here to tell me to get on with getting gone. Sorry for the repetition, but this is where I live. Sorry for the same old song, but it’s the one that’s on. 

dead flowers

A day spent languid in masked traffic, I lean against the west side of the afternoon, smoking to lawnmowers and reckless senses. The trees wave green in the sun’s long encore and the busywork of the wind, this same old day in deep descent as the world slips past in untied breaths. The smoke dives for the eaves and is caught upon a gust. These things happen, as well as many others. 

There’s a puppy on the calendar, there’s a spider on the wall. You try to keep these things contained. The hubristic rises, the deep dives down, the marked off days and the graven awakenings. The dwindling of the pleasures, the conspiracy of the assembled aches— all these  walls and windows, all these alcoves and points of egress gather in my spine and shoulders, aching from hip to heart. These freed demons and licensed sobriquets that fill up my devil’s workshop in these ill spent days. I take a long shower, watching the water spill off my husk and riot down the drain. 

It’s all hell and habits, silly rabbits. It’s all stones to the sea. Unsustainable objections and stumbling in the dark, the corn on the stalks and the grape on the vine, all this turning and turning in the rich blind earth. I sit here alone, animal and archetype, entity and organism in this confounded drag of want and bloom. The bright and the beauty long faded, the fix of the affection long passed, the brittle bulb casts a strange light. The weighted words another flung bouquet left to litter the floor. 

all flesh is grass

There is a seething in the way the hours weave through me, time’s thread so slender it wends through the spin of particles, the ache and the relentless gaze of the entity. From bed break to slumber’s careless spurs I drag and wrest my begrudged bones. Soft shoes and homophones, to wake so beaten, to rise so bold. This rich unfolding, the rush into and out of being like a burning at the borders, I fall and rise. Clockwork is work, I say, counting every in and out. 

It is the towel on the bar and the clock on the wall, the grit and grime of the shower stall, every mirror scuffed by heavy eyes that follow no matter where you go. Things keep happening until we wear them out. One and then the other, the consequences of the felt and the break. The wandering of the hungers, the inevitable next as we gather up the gravity and drop the the other brick. A deep breath, then we’ll see. It’s all there whether we’re here or not, but it’d miss our company. The show goes on, but the bottled water costs fifteen bucks a piece. 

It wasn’t like this when the old ones arose to stir the soup. The wrigglers the opened eye of the smoldering mass as its fury chilled, answering the entropy. Then they began singing in the atmosphere and calling up the oceans, churning in the teeming depths and the thin veneer of the earth. The creation of the chemistry, the pulling of the seed of starlight from the plucked petals of the sun. The crunched the world from the innumerable multitudes, the bones and blood of probabilities a strumming of strings. Then the bouquet of appetites, the flesh and fire and the song lines and all roads going. The ancients and the ancestors, you and me, the plants and trees and birds and bees. The perpetual arising to meet the reap. This feast unleashed upon either side of time. 

this chair is always empty

This chair is always empty. This page is always blank. The skin a restless patina of want and itch, slipping through the sea. The clouds are gray, the wind is a hammer, my heart a dish best tossed out. I sit, wrapped in the wind and my endless failings, watching as the day is dragged into its grave and buried alive. Skull crushed by the stone grim press of this heavy handed heaven. Buried in birdsong and the coming going gone. 

I get it. There’s a lot not to like. This hollow hearted constant self immolation, the incoherent trail of crumbs, the unyielding rage that runs through me in violent torrents. I am needy and profane and endlessly mercurial. And unmedicated and unnarcotized I am all but rudderless, too volatile to readily engage safely. Writing isn’t helping at all.

Empty gestures and half measures. Insults, sabotage, and souvenir seekers. My trust has been burned down and the fields beneath have been salted dead. Every day I wake to my heart literally thick and aching, the early morning all soft moans and goddamns, the whole fucking world rushing back in to remind me of its well earned contempt. The wearying indignity of having no help available, no insurance, and no respite from the machinery have cut me enough this time around that I know I’m not getting better again. Buy me a shiny, tell me I’m pretty. That’ll fucking help. 

underwhelm

The day always comes. The slip up, the misstep, the inevitable comeuppance. The monkey shows its tail, the stars fall where they may. The begrudging breath, the sickly beating on my own heart. The spell wears off or I can’t keep up the charade. As is the way of all tautologies, fucked is fucked.

I got nothing. Not a played out fragment, not some whipped up confection of words and weather, not a list of wishes to dismiss. Sitting on the front porch with the songs on shuffle, the wind doing its thing, drinking coffee and trying not to cry. Another troubled set of receptors, the wretched flesh of my existence, the hard urge towards the inevitable. I have to let go.

The lesson is there is no lesson. Other than don’t be the other, being yourself being okay depends a lot on who you are. For other people, finding their voice will be rewarded. For those of us who underwhelm, you’re more likely just to be ignored like everybody else. Fuck you, fuck me, fuck em all. Nothing but the long shadows. Nothing but the broken mirror.

ordained

It’s no mystery how the spirit passes through, the restless legions of the wind and the innumerable tribes of the sun. The rain awakens the antecedents, the first singers threaded through stone. Wait until the rain calls you. Spread wide your arms and breath it in. Your name, your place, the places where you and others collide arrive. Here from this first breath, hand over hand, knot by knot we climb along this intersection of dirt and rhyme, by the silk and by the stitching. Ordained alone without the counting, the book predestined to be made up as you go. The ghost there in the knowing, and the not. 

It used to be there would be ink and scribbled out phrases, a trailing of scratches and coffee rings, the drift of composition expressed in slips and lists. Now it is the words hung between breath and exposition, the phrasing and the way they land. Something in stepping out of the entity and messing with the instrument’s mix. The causeway of senses and expressions, the conjoined hungers and the intended appetite. The ploys the lexicon makes to drive you to pollinate, pretty blossoms and carnal scents, the way the words lay waste. To have been and to become. The cold because the wind is blowing, the spirit because it says so.

There are paths and there are powers, ways that shape your passage and corners to avoid. You tell the old stories, you tell the first story, and you sing along the way. The devotions of the celebrants, the virtues of the abandoned, the way it becomes grace as you practice. The prayers you know at either end, the rocks and the rain, the moon and the wind. You take it in bruise and blood and trade, you make it in dream and dance and craft. The wisdom of the work put in, the blessing of all you carry. The words you let pass through.

a blink and a miss

The day comes crawling on, abandoned to lonesome smoking and the tumult of the restless wind. Overcast and swaying beneath the tides of sky, the world sighing and creaking at the foundations. Long in the tooth and cooling off, the day just bucks and tussles, passing traffic and oft walked dogs. I try to stretch and soothe the ache in my back and bones, flexing the bent with my every breath. Eventually I settle back in the body. Eventually the absence is all.

Hunched over words in the mess about weather, sore in the shoulders from shrugging off all I don’t know. The taste of coffee of my tongue, the smoke patois of smell and taste so close you could kiss it, the whispers of a flavor you long to guess. The moment bright but deathly fleeting, the glass hanging translucent before it’s dashed upon the bricks, the wings of a bird before they’ve gathered up enough lift. Blink and you’ll miss it. Look away it’s been long gone. 

There’s no question in my wanting you. There’s no question to the thinking that you claim. I’m no good at transitions. I’m no good at picking out the plot. These selfish bouts of missing kisses, the long road down the hill, the same old empty on arrival. The same old been there done. Just some songs playing at random. A place where you made a wish that only you thought would come true. The crow calls out the curtain call.

maybe the moral

Maybe it’s the seeds, maybe it’s the soil, maybe it’s the karmic burden, maybe it’s the mortal coil. It’s there in the data if you know how to look. It’s there in the story provided you don’t listen too close. One disaster begets the next, the problems that go unsolved are passed down to progeny and the general inheritors of the shitshow so far, a life looks like a series of perfected mistakes in the lengthening light. Once I thought I was meant to mitigate other people’s grave errors, hold the place of the missing person, hold the line despite. Now I think we just make ourselves useful once in a while whatever it is we meant. I guess that’s the lesson. You probably do some good however badly you constantly fuck up. Maybe not, how should I know? Maybe the moral comes as part of the upgrade. 

Mostly it’s been the old sow and reap. The deep reserves of what else did you expect. The days you do and the days you don’t ebb and flow, until it is only this island with the tide out. The shimmering wasteland surrounded by a sea as yet unmet. Salt and rust reclaiming every self you ever met. Just ink dark nights and the blazing sun beating down, a fever dream scribbled as you feed one hunger to another. The shrug of celebration, the plodding doddle of survival. The falling sky and the missing kisses. The last day feeling the only thing that lasts.

So the pit bull rolls around in the sun. So the coffee cup sits empty. The rosie always ringed around, the ashes all fall down. What gathers in us as we empty? What is left but these omens of blood and bone? The earth takes it as it goes, watch the clock or plant the flag. We are gone before we arrive, lost in the telling and the toil. Humming along to the strange songs, singing along to lives we do not know. The world we learn is seldom the world we live, torn down and turned around by brick and word. All of us stories told as they are written. Each of us nothing but flung stones while everything is glass. 

Blueberry Hill

It’s the same old street beneath the same old hush, an overcast dull to the color, a few shades down on the shine. I sit on my front porch on my designated seat, stoned to blue blazes but still smoking steady, feeling the flower and the blue of the hour. I had the cake, and now it’s eaten. The memory, with everything in a different tense. That long gone thrill, that long ago song. The place you stop to listen when you don’t bother to sing along. The change of cast and the missing trees. So goes another year of me.

I miss some people, I miss some pets, the drift off and the dead of the day. Potential and probability and the long way down. I stand upon my dead selves in the grave of my next self, a burble in the numbers, the links in this miserable chain. Black coffee and the lean of dusk, shamanic blood and a gut full of hungry ghosts, I steep and steam in the lingering heat and the slow change of scene. The shadows reach and deepen and the sky hasn’t found its sea legs. The year begins anew. 

The song was the start of it, but a cover that caught me off my guard. I’d fill you in on the details, but this doesn’t work that way. The telling is never the moment, it’s the angles where he seeing shows. Another year older, another emptying of the threat. A husk of sodden bone and brushed blood, another hunched entity with a pinched mind. You’ll know me by my dropped pins. Exercises in ache and vague exclamations, words tangled through all the want and countdowns of my petty, ridiculous incarnation. Another candle blown out before it existed, another turning further from the thrill. 

almost

The afternoon falls without a filter, restless wind and mottled sun, summer warm and weekend wise. The squirrels making their last rounds, the scolding of the scrub jay, the dead sparrow laid out beneath the stars. Sore in all these aches and motions, the ghosts of lost loves and spurned poems sting and swarm, this carcass cranking out dull words and wheezing breaths. This ego draped across the desperate landscape, sun and shadow and drowsing pets. Hours until dusk and the rising of the full on moon. Almost at the shifted statistics. Almost at the occluded hue. 

The day drawls by, reaching shadows and the glare of the sinking sun. The west all aglow and the wind messing around, I squint and sneeze, allergy afflicted and all at once beset. Another hole in this faithless vessel. Another worth to miss in measure. The music seeps while the engines blare, the mortal meat seething in ache and bleak chemistry, the way the shadow eclipses the reach. The years starved of laurels and kisses, the days feeding on dreams. The way you say you wished it could be.

It’s the sort of light that makes me wish for a knack for pictures. It’s the sort of light that says soon the scene will change. The stretch of sunlight through the pine needles, the heaped up shadows pushing hard across the horizon. The time that sidles soft and slow before us gone before you blink. Almost another year all but empty. The fecund moon both claim and call, this festive self another mark made in the dirt. All flags unfurled and blessings yet and wonders still to come. Almost the night, another bellyful of need. 

the plaintive pull

It’s at that moment of night where the twilight glow is finally fed to the ravenous west and the gravid moon rises, raining bright moonlight down upon tree and rooftop, that the witness awakens. Back hunched over the tablet tapping, a sharpness between the shoulders, elbows on my thighs, I turn rapture into captions. The gracious glory of the goddess moon arriving in radiant light upon my brow as I lumbered through the rat ravaged brambles. The shuffling beneath the plaintive pull along the darkened path, the light that beckons to be seen. 

Now it’s in and the evening moves along, soft songs and ceiling fans, the shower stall and the rescued spider’s return. Pain in pinpoints and along my faults, I drag along the path of habit, stoned dopey and silly with memories and missings. The tatters threaded with the brilliant firmament and language soaked in tallow, I add to the gathering dust, the entombed transition between tales. Something unsaid to remain unread. The message so impossibly bottled. The sea so incalculably vast.

So the wheel turns unceasingly, the blinding moon burns and swells, another number comes up quick. The old by and by, the age all at once, I clear my throat and check the clock on the wall. It’s these sparse words, then I hit the showers. It’s this fool’s mission, then I call it a night. The hard times lean in while I dream of kisses in the moonlight. Instead I call down the moonlight inside my mind, and bask in the attention, this fervent shine. Generous and careless and always on its own. The sky so vast and enchanting while I witness it alone. The words where the wonder ought to be.

cursory

You know the target by the way they tell, the clothes they wear, the descriptions where they dwell. You know the trouble by the way escape is scaled. Safety by the map of your fool intentions, the blame you take for being in your skin at the inviolable location, all the dangers that being you is akin to. The acceptable breakage and the strange fruit reveal. The list of corrections after a cursory description. The place where it’s safe only revealed in its absence, some other world of some other people. You can tell them by their tales.

We are weak and we are savage, built out from the bone to mob up and shun the other. We’re good for a party or picnic, a bacchanal or a cut the rug. But we’re jealous and we’re petty, and we’re always envious of the wants we got, the way you get yours and ours are absences and licked lips. Take a look what can be done with dumb words and so little will. Think about how far we go to make the words the most. We don’t even call the offer, figuring the blood will phone it in. Chasing shadows, looking away from the light.

Sometimes I hate to look out the window, mostly I try not to answer the door. It’s not that the local view is going to be so bad, or that most answered knockings turn out alright. It’s that there’s little there worth the getting up for. Just cold pitches and sob stories and neighbors complaining about the lawn. You’re never much more than around the corner from torches and pitchforks. You’re seldom more than an effigy once they call you out. An old man, lamenting his lost loves and growing hungers while the butchering blooms. The carnival and the tree of life, and every day the hill. 

love me not

The itch in the eye summons the knuckle before I really notice, before reading brain noticed body brain and said ‘ummm.’ So the left eye, the allergy afflicted one, got a good turn at playing mortar as I ground in more allergens and a healthy quotient of insect repellent. The right eye still isn’t getting it. I look around, the mortar side a bit squinty, and see my tangled yard of dust and weeds dancing a little dance with the busywork wind. The sun is bright and the yard is busy with the work of wasps. I suppose I could have done something. Knuckle or not I saw it coming.

Honestly, I’m trying to mind my business and bury my thinking in some ancient forest. I’d really rather not say. I’m just trying to dull the sharper edges of being, I’m just trying to lose myself in smoke and poems. The balance between this sad mewling thing and the fool’s dance only there if the words hit just so. My heart wants a direction, my bones want a home, the page wants to fly in tatters into the rampant wind. Too late to love or leave, too late for the forget-me-nots, gone like the Valentine flowers and bouquets of wishes. My itchy eye, the passing traffic, a mouthful of smoke and bitter. 

Believe me, I’m hard in the wishes were. Believe me, I’d pray if I had ever picked up the habit. But mostly I’m in the here and now, wearing out the words, holding down the fort. I circle while the world is burning. I hold the line while the minds come and go. Talking to myself because the dead don’t listen, they just keep on being their same old selves, only in the past tense. Talking to myself because the words want out. I do the day I’m dealt, and no one’s asking anyway. All the answers I’m ever getting, petals scattered everywhere.

acumen

The day rings different when you lack the usual pings and ricochets— plans and family, children and partners, friends and good intentions. Sitting around, thoughts mitigated with flower and the right before you while the will unspools, catching up on a lifetime of origin myths and told you sos. The hot black coffee gone tepid from the low rotation, hands full of habits while the miracles miss the mark, the day is all shadows and sharps. We tend towards the directions of our talents or the tide of our tribes, either drifting downhill or tethered to a track. Those that lack a pack or any particular acumen caught up in the eddies and currents of chance and love. I watch as a neighbor family returns home after a walk. Engines roar, tires squeal, numbers crunched for every devil’s deal. I hit what I aim at, yet always miss my mark.

The circuits short, the signal drops, the machine is all sparks and parts. This is the world we live in. This is the way time made us, in it, not of it. We gather our forces, we pick our hills. Life is always trying, every stalk, every cell. The sky and earth a bounty of yes ands, dice rolls and localized probabilities, the reach and seethe and hunger and passion all at once. We take the shape of the sacrifice demanded, fill our cups with our daily kerosene, and get on with the burning. Never sure who’s pulling the strings, we are dragged through these petty etiquettes and this clumsy repartee. We serve the patter we serve the cycles we spin upon the axes of a pantheon of wheels and forces. Spun sugar before the cosmos, our cluttered sparks and spasms lapped from the beaters of the mystery. 

We burn brightly on our altars, we serve softly all our swarms. We are the needle spun, always aiming faithfully north. The blood and the bubbles, the wires and the work. Read us our riots by the light of our appetites, tell us to kill our kin for the whim of flag and crown, serve us to the stir to feed the fires of spin. The numbers run through my guts and kick the stuffing out through my seams, whittling away tomorrows and cutting off avenues of egress. Out here with Ozymandius as the catching up catches up. I took my chances, I clicked on the terms and conditions, the contract goes you only go once. We are stirred by the world turning, good to god or ghost depending on the givens. I take my portion off the top to turn it over into the rush of earth, a steady bell in a world all stir and strive.

the unspoken

A moment ago as I began to write my heart objected to a drawn in breath of smoke, my inhalation interrupted with a hot sharp proclamation from my chest. A quick exclamation point of pain driven straight through my breathing, the sort of things I gather you’re supposed to look out for. I sat down, exhaled, and began to type. It’s the way the words work out. Of the things no one is happy about, this at least shouldn’t be at the front of the line. 

The yard is wild and the winds sweep the bursting green leaves into a tumbling tide. The late rain added an extra burst of bug and bloom, everything dusted with aphids and pollen. Birdseed sunflowers sway and wilt upon their stalks, and dogs and cats doze, strewn around the property. The day has gone from morning marine layer to restless overcast to clouds that might have reached their coming home moment. The winds has us surrounded and John Coltrane’s sax joins Milt Jackson’s vibraphone from the speaker on my porch, playing past the grave. Forever never lasts, but it’s still a lot of time. 

I smoke some more, I pour myself another cup, the coffee black and whispering steam. The gray of the day is a weight off my eyes, the sunshine seldom more than a pleasant acquaintance of mine, and anyway, my personality is more suited to the dark. I speak in circles, I think in pits. I am trailing graceless ache and stunted longing in spit shined sky and clouds of carbon, blood mixed with earth and wind as I plummet clumsily through time.  I long for tangled limbs and kisses, I have all the same spent dreams I’ve always carried, all but dead in the wide warm squander of my heart. But here and now is here and now, and the sky is wild with the wind, and words are all I have. 

out along the count

May isn’t meant for grim tidings. May isn’t made for the cadaver on the slab. It is all spring queens and summer skirts, the turning fancy and sun beckoning the flesh. Instead come these days of dull walls and chiseled inhibitions, the dust covered lampshade, the long ago loves. The witches and the workers and the dancers as they reel. May here with a heart underfoot feel.

This is a year of voided warranties. This is a year of vacant Valentines. No sweet nothings, just the regular kind. No love letters, just cruel invective in a pretty hand. Just another empty placeholder, a number in the long countdown. The light you loosed just the door you held open. The love you shared another expiration date. The world falls down, and you left to hope that life hangs on somehow.

Your world is made of counted connections. Family and friends, shared obligations, wild fascinations and vigorous interests. I’m about half a dozen people and another six beasts out from the event horizon of my ending. My world is sad and shallow, sitting in a curbside, waiting on a bell. It isn’t what I thought I wanted, but want or not, it sure works out that way. A car stalls beneath a streetlight. It sputters, a cleared throat before it turns over. The brake lights flash before it turns a corner. Lost or parted, it’s nothing I will know. The world takes its turns and I sit here like I’m waiting on mine.