the days

Oh, for this radiant and graceless ache, the press of the breath, the burn of the bone. Oh, for the reach of this song, the presence of this long lost resonance recreated in the dust of the dreaming. The startle of your gaze, the casual dancing of your eyes. Wistful and watchful while playing with the fire at your feet. The picture on the bathroom calendar, the puppy staring at the sky. This reach to reach and read to read, the glitz of the habitual, the art in the exchanges. The amaze left in the days. 

A dereliction of direction. The pulsing around the poles. The breath pressed through the hair to the nape of your neck, a visit to the sacred circle, a ring a rosie around the percipience. Watching you then as you find a work around. The wind’s rise, the moon’s ken, the electric touch of your toes. All the ways you already know.

There is this vast intermittence, typewriters and castanets, the music and the disinhibitors. The strike from skin to sky. You step out where the night is always, a deft turn of tooth and tongue, the moon aware you’re watching. Step by step the stars take their cut, spinning around the sands. The bones held tight, the breath a prayer, the impositions of the form. The stretch from sky to sky, the night holding hard. This kiss, this thing we make from the turn and the say. This kiss, the insistent drag of entanglement, the days on days on days.

laying low

There is a wind unbound by the heat. There is a smoke tumbled down the patio. The variations are many, the stories few. Scrub jays and sparrows, mourning doves and carpenter bees. Names that we place upon those that couldn’t care less what we call them. Murder apes mouthing oaths at a world that owes them nothing but payback, chittering away our yip yap and jibber jabber, noise our native tongue. Life on Mars sweeps across the ruinous yard, weaving its spell over cement and shadow, reaching deep in the muddled history of my heart. Foot soldier in a war of lost arts. 

It all follows suit, the strained, sorry heart only wise in its wallow. The cavalcade of lost loves and blow kisses, breaks that never bothered to mend. The parade of the dead ones, family, friends, and the dogs and cats consigned to ash heaps or hurried graves. The litany of dead pets bring fresh tears, their slackened, heavy bodies and their precious, darling souls. The only beings I would wish heaven upon, gone gone gone. This worthless, maudlin husk left to decay in slow circles. This selfish, unlovable heap missing their unyielding light of love.

Leaf and limb shimmy in the long toothed sun, shimmering bright glints and soft blue shadows, the day to its gracious traces. Dragonflies flit in their Hot Wheels colors and swift decisions over the field behind the fence, a glimmer of metal amid the glamour of their deft hunt. Little pieces still in place to remind of the beauty of the fading world. Glib platitudes float past, smug mumbling phrases articulating old saws and misspent wisdom, truths of transience touted as we approach the cataclysmic fall. Taking in the solace of shade, the stubborn continuity of life despite human recklessness and our proud damnation. Laying low while the daylight punches itself out, hope another caution stolen by a fickle wind. 

want

The seasons procreate their own little seeds, not the sparrows or the swallows or the lilies of the field, but the nettled knots of expectations that come splitting out our skulls. Our insistence to play by our rules while never abiding the regulations that nature has written into the architecture. The playing of a game we acknowledge only when we think we’re winning, the rules dashed to pieces at our first inconvenience. Romance and art and the labors that we savor. Culture that tells us what isn’t is so. Minimizing what we lack, obfuscating all we do not understand. More often than not we play ourselves and slaver gratefully for the privilege.

It is in the ache unanswered, the want that I can’t shake off. I listen to the sounds in the distance, fireworks and sirens and the mournful rumbling of a traveling train. I watch as the flocks disband and reassemble, the crows and swallows and raptors and shorebirds that the geography still allows. I try to stay out of my heart and head, but I have posted up there, and in these glutted interiors I camp. Inside most days the gun is in my mouth, my finger on the trigger. I tend to the tasks allotted someone of my station, the small routines barely sustained, the head and shoulders bowed and stooped as is expected from the help. I take the beatings in bitterness and with excessive invective, but I take them all the same.

The empty doesn’t care much, but it likes to entertain. The places where the culture doesn’t reach, the lives where the world won’t fit, the iterations the words only come to debase and abuse. It is enough that we can’t complete the circuits, the connections lost to disuse and the stations that are placed upon our broken crowns. The stories we replay out of hope and habit, the not in this lifetime for all us silly rabbits, having gone too far or not nearly far enough depending on the hole and heart. Crisp descriptors to fit us with disgust or contempt, the language always working on the coverup, the eloquence left to grifters and the game. My lack is mostly mine, a distrust hardened by lovely lies and wisened eyes and the persuasion of well turned limbs. Gray and graven and long abandoned, this unmet want more me than I am myself. A spitting image, in it for the spit.

all of us

Don’t get me wrong, it’s just nothing I was expecting. It’s quite lovely but I’m telling you I’m bound to take it bad. The wonder why, what I think is known. The injury just missing something. The wagering on the other shoe. The flies that light on thumb and knee, the stories of the forms. The night shift swaying softly into place, the trembling voice I am so keen to hear. 

It’s not just the way it breaks, it’s the way the rack was set. The offers issued, the offers meant, the whisper of a distant scent, the way the patterns play it up in our skins. The sacred always there bleeding, the altar getting cluttered with kitsch, the offerings drifting in and out road trip radio. The ritual half happenstance, half saving for the rain. All of us, deed for deed and day for day. The wave the inheritor of the wave.

I’m out on the porch, and so by persona and by preference I am smoking. The smoke bowls and coils, caught up in the giddiness of the wind. The proprieties and the etiquettes, the gone and the yet unknown. A smattering of directions, entities that keep the cull and seed the day, older ones nameless and generous with their gifts. The knots and ribbons culture cuts us into, the stories and antecedents lost to tongue and telling. The street beset with Subarus and Mitsubishis, a pair of touring bikes roar by, rumbling away their names. The sky wispy with hazy clouds and a patient and drifting blue. So many wishes waiting for nightfall. The rest settling on dreams.

busted

It’s a rookie mistake always relearned hard, always work the wound. Nature will, like any adversary, teach every tooth out of your head. It’s not so much the beatings but the slow of the healing, the busted knuckle bloodied again and again. It gets tough when you’re down to earth and never caught the habit of bandages. You forget that pain, like fear, is in its natural skin a warning. So we play too tough to say when and live to gutless to admit we’re scared. So we go straight at it and take it on the chin.

The day exchanged, the night all bargains, full of plots and plaintive wails. From the tower of the crescent moon to the lots abandoned to drift and drudge, the stars stir and the planets wander. Pain in exchange for placement, wear and tear for a daily wage, it is always the animal at last. Pelted with rocks and false promises, caught in the wake of the worshipped false gods, we wither and we strive. It cost so much just to survive. 

Back to the embodied, the blood and bone in broad strokes, the defects adding up. The elusive satiety, the built on appetites with the postproduction enhancements. Somehow settled on the signal, rapt in the static, touching every nerve. Vague attractions and habitual patterns, the circle and the star. You wake up, neither here nor there, wherever the day may take. You fill in the blanks and take your shape.

uncanny

The power lines tangle with the scooped out moon above as I kick dust, gathering the mythos as it manifests, slips and scraps caught along the wallop of the wind. The pieces that I put together, the little ones I toss back. The facets fill with sentiment and appetite, the statue’s stance the tree’s reach. The glass door slides, a portal opens. The porch light the glow of another world behind the slide closed, moths and spiders and other confused cohorts of the messed up night. I turn and head toward the light. 

It’s a bumps and bruises at the intersection of mind and heart, the brain and body already piled up in the road. Everything collision and intent. Stippled with signals from every sense, spurring the focus as it champs at the bit, wandering around the bandwidths, fixing for a frequency. This  strange beast stuck in the center of the labyrinth, trapping the mystery it stalks in dead ends and sudden corners, the sets and stacks each thought avoids or impacts. So lonely and hungry and unsure of its name. Filled with uncanny hungers, uncertain of its name.

My attention suffers mission drift and my body starts to lag, caught up in an unfamiliar process printed in my circuitry, the familiar ritual with strangers across the fire. A split knuckle keeps bumping up against the sort of things that you tend to split a knuckle on. A hammer that sees every problem as a screw. I’ve used up the batteries, messed with the chemistry, a gift for composition once all the parts start to rot. So I rattle around the ritual, staggering the aperture while I spin around the grave. Bit tongue and clenched teeth and the empty of the night.

lattice

Here the mingled smoke and shadows climb tree and trellis, the down bound sun and eastward spin pushing the grasping blue down through the skins of things, setting every darkness free. The tumble and turn along the curve we learn clutched to this careening. The wheel of the cosmos and the wake of this vast sojourn, dragged along this dervish twirl by our mad god star, flung and caught at our apogee to further hurtle for what looks like eternity. The mind soaks in the atmosphere of turbulence and stimuli, a byproduct of thousands of collisions large and small, ground like optical glass, stropped like a razor. The bright sky saturated with the sun’s slow sinking, the intention held as the dusk gathers in on the shallow side of the sky.

I sit still and smoke, offering up to to the directions and the aspects, speaking to the first stirred and the oldest of the hungers. Smoke bowls bitter upon my tongue as dust dances with the devils all about. The gated brain and the current of gut slough off the rough edges and collaborate with the twilight sky. I lick my lips, the taste of remaindered kisses and salty skin. The day sways its lullabies as an ice cream truck accelerates without a child in sight. The power fills my lungs and seethes up through the roots, the once and future filling up the organism, this share of skin and bones fleshed out by star and stone. The entity and the self meeting at the intersection of time and light.

The sky is still bright peeking through the lattice of leaf and limb above the swell of shadow filling up street and yard. Stippled light speckles trees and homes as the tallest roofs sink into the gloaming. Crows call their teams together before returning to their roost, gleaming ink and skill across cloud striped blue, making way for the waxing apparitions awake at once and waiting on the night. Clip the winds wings and cull the clutter from the cacophony of busy humans and unkempt objects gifted with unseemly agency. Homo Ruckus bang and gibber, their turn at its twilight. I think of a dream of bats spilling from my door, a joyful wish replaced by an ache upon waking, their absence felt more as the swallows surf and spill down the wind. The hollow bowl of being always in need of replenishment, the heart hitting the night running. 

nothing from nothing

Like the world had never met her, like the dawn would never come. The dreams there, moving in the darkness. Sleep like smoke abruptly gone, it’s scent lingering on, clinging to the lampshade and the ceiling. Healing like the wounds on an angry fist, knuckles open, splitting every time it mistakes itself for a hand. Bare feet upon the hot, shifting sands. Failing eyes looking up at the stars. 

The shoulders shift and slump, an untraceable ache moving through the waning meat, the breath barely reaching the blood. Joints only hurt where you have them. The head full of snakes dragging the unkind architecture that nature has allowed, inflamed nerves and muscles that never mend, the eyes flicker briefly as you descend. Elixirs and potions and a gait like stop motion, a Harryhausen skeleton short the sword and shield. Flick a switch, the librum is unsealed. A light summoned, a light dispatched, a flick of the fingers burned by a match. Something bothered in your breathing, something borrowed in your hair.

She is a feast in a starving world, a famine once she turns her shoulder. Gray as the grave, but so much older. Birthing and bleeding and the gyre ever wider. Dying and living and the old one two. In dreams she is even further gone, no longer in the ensemble or the mood inviolable. Instead masses of harmless monsters grabbing at your heart, easy to shrug off or dance into butter. Strange, dark roads— unfamiliar and well-traveled, her absence only a lack of looking. You come and go, in and not quite of it. The road is unending, the grave as near as a second guess. 

rapt

The engines rev and the fireworks ignite, fountains of sparks above the rooftops, the squeal of tires breaking traction on the shabby asphalt. The street is restless, the wind cuts loose, headlights reach and tail lights say so long. I smoke on my unlit porch, watching the world pass me by. Houses surrender to the shadows, a window here or there glaring at the night as it surrounds us all, as the shadows part and close. The show is over as the next one begins.

It’s well past my hour of retreat. I’ve tucked my mother in and mumbled a few mixed blessings upon the dogs, the report of incendiaries too much. I am on my third cigar of the day, the bright ember betraying my location, as if the backwash glow of the tablet screen weren’t hint enough. The sky sheds the last sops of the sun’s borrowed glory, moving through hues of purple and blue, colors I can’t quite identify until they are all but gone. The stars are still a matter of conjecture as the night seeps up into the firmament, every pinpoint gleam all happenstance until the constellations gel. I commit to the empty ritual, the unread words written upon the ersatz page. I light a candle or two as witness to the blackening blues.

This is my last illusion. This is the line I hold against all comers, the goers all but gone. Smoke billows from the cheroot I am sipping on, my tongue savoring the sacred as I profane any space I claim. The dreams I had are all but dead, no more love or companionship, no recognition save that of a credible threat, just burgeoning weeds and totaled out lungs. The world is savaged by greedy, selfish fools and incarnated demons devouring all that is good. My time has past, the rest of my days given to emptying piss pots and watching birds. But there is hope in our inheritors, the fighters and strivers and artists and poets. The disenfranchised making intractable demands that will be met, despite the stacked decks and tin star desperados, the dream of justice and equity alive in the blood and breath of the youth whose world has been held ransom for too long. These symbols and sigils nothing but another bad habit I am too stubborn to quit. Rapt beneath these stars, in the darkness I see hope.

the drop

Sometimes you know it because you can see it coming. Sometimes you know it because it’s already there. Right up on you, breathing hot and heavy down your neck. Sometimes you go a whole lifetime never knowing, not even thinking about it, watching it pass you by like the passengers you see flickering the lit windows waiting at the crossbar as the evening train goes by. A figure barely registered in the foreground of your everyday check the locks and the balance mind only to meet in a dream, someone you almost know, someone familiar wearing a strangers face. The end, the end, the end at last. 

Another afternoon devoted to sitting and smoking, hot black coffee despite the blue blazes heat, cold water guzzled like it was the fount of redemption itself. Epistrophy plays as a breeze swings its blessings upon us, the carcass dripping with fresh fat and humidity, the spirit a seed dragged through the gutter by the fierce and fickle wind. The smoke stirs slowly beneath the eaves, catching the faster aspects of the atmosphere and rising into the bright summer sky. The lonesome hits hard, hidden behind the eclipse of the heart. It gets the drop on me, and I sink into the stirred sizzle of the firmament. Falling never a direction but a velocity.

 There’s no knowing what might have been, though I mostly live there now. Wondering how I could have mitigated mistakes, how I could have made a difference, how I could have mattered at all. The dogs tussle as they await the next target to go off on, playful and restless in the weight of the weather. Some love song plays, the volume an emotional momentum every heart has known. Father of miscarriages and abortions, failed son, and lover in the past tense alone. All the tautologies play havoc in my head, the what’s dones and what wants. Waiting on whatever stupid, shabby death is due me, hoping you have something to wait for too. Love runs down like everything else. Over and ended seldom the same.

buoyancy

There is a striving to the high road, a strut to the drapes of every station, an occasion misstated  to every rise. The long day came early and left late, still not bothering to drop a thin dime in the passed hat or to help the host with the tidying up. Now the new moon moves towards its rebirth, a phoenix every couple of fortnights or so. It didn’t make the rules, it exists despite the confines of our metrics, abiding by the laws of creation. There in the heavy moods of matter, it shapes the gravity that it holds. Spacetime wrapped like ribbons around its waist, paired and pulled and spun along, courted like some queen’s promised daughter. Our wander left by the roadside, our faith always the first to be squandered.

I waste my days, I hollow out my nights like a Bible hiding a revolver, the empty there to reveal the truth to the pomp and palaver. Crowded rooms and cluttered shelves, more beasts and birds than Noah ever knew. I move with the ponderance of a laden barge, floating on the tide despite my burdens, carried by the weight I displace. The greedy collapsed star of my heart granting me powers accountable to the mystery alone, my sanction unseen in dreams or the waking world. Day or night my gaze drags the light down to my level, I rise as I write, the tomb empty, the slab shattered into pieces.

The water displaced, the wind Bernoulli’d and bent into lift, a sewer full of balloons and monsters due popping and slaying in the depths of this darkest night. We toil to the tune of glad tidings and stern hickory, treats and tricks unto the bitter end, every corner turned another  labyrinth beast. The enemy spews lies and plagues, covenants and commandments spit, demanding justice’s satisfaction. The elder roots split stones and turn obelisks to rubble, gathering the fury of our mother star and the gifts of our mother earth into the countless clever limbs and trunks of the tree of life to wield against the inevitable entropy, bunnies and blossoms and butterflies versus geology and entropy, speed and sex against tides of iron and fire. Aloft like the bumblebee’s flight, placating the imponderables by hard work and joyous play. I lose the night and the day, and still, a perpetual revenant, I rise.

tremble

I stood before the bathroom mirror, eyes weary and haunted in the reflected light. The fan downs out the outside world as I go through motions piece by piece, the toothbrush, the mouthwash, fitted fasts and glutted feasts. My shoulders sag in sad decrepitude, the bunched and mottled skin strewn with gray and red, my beard shaggy and wild. I try not to meet my eyes, watching instead my unsteady hands troll the slow habituals, the toothpaste to the brush,  the spattered sink and the water’s vaguely hypnotic Coriolis ring a round the drain. It’s a too much day in a too little life, and even I am tired of seeing me this way. I hit the shower and cash out the day. 

The list is short, but it comes up often. The ritual and habits, the aching joints, the starveling heart. The dull repartee of life and art. The envy unto the perpetuity, the pangs and drangs and valentines. The love that moved on to something better, the growing gap between today and the all too familiar teeth of tomorrow. I avoid the prayers and recitations, the dozens loosed at the mention of your name. I’ll keep going, or so it seems. The light so bright it burns its negative across my vision, the day again all but out of hours. The thought of your bare shoulders, and that sacred spot upon your veiled nape. That sound as you tremble, and the memories again.

Now the dog is in the shower hiding from the fireworks. The fan is on, the door is open, the light still too bright to bear. The hallway’s shadows creased by spill on out as the dog twitches and growls upon the grimy plastic, the report of explosives impacting the stuccoed walls and window glass, music playing from my room. The on and off goes on and on, smoke from the altar, the flesh seared to the grill. Headlights sweep the living room walls as someone turns a corner. I lie upon the laundered bed, staring at the shelves and ceiling. I wrap my arms around a pillow, and curl into the empty in my arms. The words all finished, except inside my head.

squirm

The day taken by its restless ends, a slide of blue above the travesty of the atmosphere knotted with the heat bleeding off the asphalt, the embouchure of each breath at once a testament to and a declamation to this enduring epilogue. The losing doesn’t happen all at once. Little by little the purchase is chipped and chiseled, the flesh flayed and the husk scraped clean, until all that is left is parts and pieces. The revered reverse engineered to fit, all the assembled smoke and mirrors applied to our eyes as the merciless incision is made. The game is fixed and the rigging runs right through you.

I was there when it happen, walking with the sun on my back when the heat finally broke. It shifted gears and the air began to tumble down, an avalanche of gust and billow, gentle breezes that riffled through my beard and casually brushed my lips. The sky another intimate as the earth rolls over. The burden of proof shifting its feet slightly as the sunlight sets off over the hills, dusk shuffling the deck. A fly lands on my left foot, sniffing around an open wound. The horizon hastily shaded in. 

The sky and stir of leaves string these gentle scintillations together, look up and heaven is festooned with this shift and shimmer, change the only story I am told. Anticipation and appetite churn through the organism, unseen legions creep and squirm between the strata, cracks in the pavement and our permeable flesh. The dull song of bone, the seething music of breath and blood, the migration of traffic and trash. Scar tissue and road rash, the ceaseless application of force, impact craters and blast radius all the portents that need apply. The returns on nothing ventured in a world that won’t stop moving. The wait all worn out.

skitter

Night falls and the web swaddled bulb draws a crowd, a mob of arthropods floods the porch and walls, busy with the work of the world. I await a signal, a sign of the prophecy meted out by a perennial friend as the expectation expires the way they usually do, in clear, cold facts. Fireworks abound, the dog gone crazy in his now daily way, knocking down doors and burrowing behind furniture full of mad panic. Moths and mosquitoes move in minor multitudes, innumerable before this innumerate fool, all but blind outside the pooling light. The foretold rolled back, the house all a skitter with creep and critter, I gather my infinite ingratitude and return to the busywork at hand. 

The Great Bear held the sky above, another single light lit ceiling stretched out for my endless contemplation, as panicked dogs press their trembling bodies against and I set down more words. I write these sweet and sour nothings down out of some keening I cannot quell, as well as the usual longing to be heard. But mostly it is the sense of doing something, these slow sad soliloquies making note of these foolish, wasted days. Turning the words over and over. Saying I’m here and so long all at once. Selfish, stupid heart and bitter, baseless tongue steeping the static with some semblance of the scurrying poisons stirring in my skull. Some beautiful song I cannot capture and will never sing. Some notation on the space taken up by this unformed entity.

Despite my hiss and spittle of despair and alienation, people are mostly kind towards me. The madness and the impoverishment are showing most of the time now, though it’s hard to tell when you’re an unreliable narrator and only talk to yourself. It was a hot day and is a warm night, and a nervous dog now dozes hot against my hip. I lay on my back as beaten air bumps into me intermittently, too little, too late. It’s all charity towards a pitiful wretch and invective launched from a safe distance, all banal and brutal and perpetual blues. A eulogy, an epitaph, the endless work of worms.

stagger

How the day paces when the sunlight gets long. How the shadows reach as the day drawls on. The trees all mesmerized as they sway in the sky to some tune of sun and soil while trash dances down the windy street. Feathers bend, boughs break, the clock just keeps turning over in its grave. God shows up late in the day to claim creation. Everything tries to ignore him as he continues to embarrass himself before forces he doesn’t understand. The world minds its business as everything continues to happen all at once.

Years fly by unnoticed. Strength fades and beauty sharpens, all those sky blues and grass greens mix and mingle, memory mostly making it up as it goes along. The ensemble changes as the story makes the rounds, people team up and part ways, people die and are born and so on and so forth ad infinitum. The winners and the losers are further disambiguated, all down the return to dust. I look, but I don’t bother keeping track. 

The blue of the sky becomes an obfuscation. The disarray all around becomes a misdirect. You fall, so slowly or all at once off the map. People still notice, they try to steal from you and harm you and load up their laughter on your back. You become another object to destroy or exploit or ignore. Your story goes away. After that all you have is either detente or war. It all depends on which story will have you. The stagger and the stunning, the stressed syllables and the boots on the ground. 

flicker

The cluttered room is lit from a single lamp, the bare bulb blindingly brilliant and still not enough, an oscillating fan rattling back and forth as it bandies the air about. Music trills and grumbles from my phone, lapsed atmospherics and worn out club anthems. Songs that mean nothing to me and little to anyone else, part of the dull accumulations of my dotage. An old man turning in circles as the stylus spirals down to the center. The flicker of screens and the night outside. 

So ends the day, at this place of cats and dogs and textured ceilings. So ends this day, at the business end of the beating. Taking up space, using up resources, just enough mustered to keep me stuck and impoverished. A gong, a bell, some growling Mongolian and the guttural sustain. Fireworks again and again, a panicked dog, and money to burn. Another long night of embodied despair with no respite. Bullets and bodies and evil in the air.

Some days are overtaken by irrational hope. Small blessings and magical thinking, the course of the sun and every iteration of heartbreak. The endless letdown of a world that affords no purchase, nothing to hang onto other than shards and fragments. No love, no work, no purpose other than the piss bucket scrubbing and the minding of the time. Given dross passed off as gelt, just so much garbage awaiting the bin. These notes to no one, discarded the moment they’re done. 

flutter

By the late afternoon it is all wind riders, the assembly of sparrows sorting out their urgencies as the band of crows begins to roll up for the day, the bright blues and the ceaseless breeze keeping time with the sun and sky. A pair of nuthatches flit up the front yard tree, clambering up the sweep away limbs chittering about their beat. Swallows work the wind into shapes and continuities, their art play and plunder as they scrub and scale the firmament. There are more than I see, and more than I say. As is the way, there are more things than I have names to stitch them with. As is the way, the words aren’t worried.

The words have all but killed us, loosed our speculative skills into the architecture and the machinery, made our ghosts out to be gods and granted us alibis to our greatest crimes. The coin toss remains the calculator, the soft cautions and the curious enduring could bes, the reoccurring symbols that come is sets of tens or twenties. The extant magic mingles with the made up until we can’t really tell. We become descriptions and definitions, either or entities based on brand rivalries and false hierarchies. Monkey see and monkey do soon outnumbered by all the monkey says. Eternal bargains once you shed your you, screens full of stories instead of earthbound senses. Every prayer a con job, every praise a curse.

I know there’s nothing new here. I know it’s the same old run around. What do you expect— I’m like you, just meat and magnets and sticky stuff that gets all over. We wriggle and we radiate at about the same bandwidth, we flutter about similar frequencies. We all rot and saunter, we make it up as we go along, we play our parts by rote. We seed and sing and pollinate, make up baroque etiquettes then shout proprieties be damned, there’s just no stopping us when it comes to piling on the nonsense. The world is ending, slow and bitterly, walking the long, bad way home after missing out on an anticipated kiss. We could do a lot. We could keep the hoop rolling, the wheel within the wheel. Our baffling antecedents needn’t be erased because we stan the sort of gods they can put in books. Death cults slit our throats and kneel upon the necks of our kin. I scatter a few words over it, like that’ll help. 

blister in the sun

What use is it to face the west while the sun still saunters off, oblivious to friend or foe? Why stare towards the livid horizon with the day in fresh denial? It is hours before the dusk and no direction loves me any longer. The winds whip and chill, making me think how lucky I am I’m not smoking, and instantly making me crave a smoke. Whatever leaf there was to take a torch to, even as the winds skew wildly. Never a wish that I can quite pin down. Never a break I can play. Somewhere fireworks bang and pop. Somewhere there’s someone where they want to be.  It’s not the world, it’s me. 

Bejeweled translucent carapaces and their brilliant wings lit in flit and swoop swarm the air around me, the wind loose and reckless, the sparrows bodying the feeder in the nearer pine hard as it shakes and spills. It’s another no one day, a day veering hard into the razored reef, a blow the brains out the back of my head sort of day. I shouldn’t write, it does me no earthly good, and it hurts to bother. But I am only a small part of the worse off world, a piece of statistical lint readily tossed aside, a slow, easy death coming undone in flesh and letters. I’ll try to leave the preamble to the act off the boards more. Stick to the shiny descriptors, and the dull rhetoricals. 

Fuck who I am, fuck what I want. The world’s too far gone to include my bellyaching. Just this plenitude of parasites and storybook deadenders. Words like hornets from a kicked in hive, words like dust catching up. The tears never have time to dry. The new songs decades old, the new moon another wish for wings, the days so swift and heelless. The trees wave wild, sweeping away the tracks of the clouds, always favoring the away. The sun struts slow, never bothering to answer a who goes there or how dare you. The words spill and stray, squirming long after we’ve all gone, alive as soon as they are touched by a mind. The story of a nation, the burden of a flag, the sunset inevitable despite the loitering day. Goodbye the only truth left to us.

wave of mutilation

The eyes in the shadows, staring at the tree whipped sky. The mind a couple of bridges away. The song sways low and gutters the gravel, the wind saying “whoosh” now and again, the onomatopoeia unsettling to say the least. Sometimes they don’t even try to hide it, mix the palette with the made up parts, the thinking fixed to the frame. Voices carry whenever there’s a way, whether the wind or the inkwell words. There’s a trick to this, but I don’t know it. There’s a treat in living that just won’t stick. 

The flesh is the only tender, offered on the altar, rendered it the pit. Outside of kin and culture the value is caloric, the worth is weighed on a scale. You turn and tread and spread your blood, you plant and stray and lose your flocks. Cracks in the clouds turn to cracks in the sky, the fertile fields to ash. The enemy has its hands on the arsenal, it has its fingers in every pie. The words will rise and fly all over. The flesh will again bear the brunt.

There is a wilding to the wind. There is a shifting of the stones. Old gates are opening, the forgotten firsts awake and silent. This deep, blazing breath before the dive into cataclysm, the future only fuses burning towards our end. I sit still despite the gauntlets tossed, my inheritance built to be spent at once, a brutal spasm of springs and ligaments with maybe a little conflagration to top it off. I see it as momentum gaining mass, a series of impacts we have failed to group for, a few more rolls until the bridges and buildings shake apart like water shook off a dog. I do nothing but want someone who never wanted me, and wait to be called out, or culled outright. The wind rises, the first lapping wave washing away.

times tables

A styrofoam cup without a bottom tumbleweeds down the street, dragged in the wake of passing traffic and blown by the fickle winds. Crows crown the yard trees and the undecided atmosphere trades in huff and gust, hints of stolid humidity with a washed out overcast sky and breezes of varying directions and alignments. I sit on the porch, a singular pestilence, a lingering extinction. Bathed in smoke and diethyltoluamide, my aura all sweat and flies, I watch the world as it leaves. Abandonment all in how you do the math.

It’s all arrivals and departures, the kept schedule and the novelty, the intermittent as we go. Gears and springs and cogwheels serve their purpose as the engine of the organism keeps ticking away, hollowed out save for habit and ritual, impulse and instinct and the way of least resistance. The husk held in place by attachment and kept alive almost exclusively do to the kindness of others and kinship burdens, the name never mine, purpose all played out. More fireworks sound down the block despite the date and daylight left to burn. I’m alone here with all the ways I never learn.

An ice cream truck trucks on by, on to more verdant and youthful markets I imagine. Dull, and sore, and occasionally vaguely mesmerized I burn my time here. Stubborn and stricken and all but done, not just not the one, but not among the ordinals and maybe unmet by the imaginaries. All the numbers save the wily statistics fuzzing up all the edges, waiting around the corner for your saving throws and star signs. We forget life is largely the crunch of numbers, countless multitudes born and ground down again and again for the fleeting spark and strive of the lucky, timely ones. Nature cares, but always has the gloves off. Inevitably rendered irrelevant in the rearview, us stragglers fall off in scads and one by one. All I offer is words that we already have more than enough of. I leave it to all the ones that want it more. 

clout

The list is long and sad and full of skies and blues, the tension between the stretch of light and the reach of shadow, simple repetitions and well placed cravings. The depth of heavens and the thick of the atmosphere, the day while the world crunches the numbers and grinds its gears. Deep breaths and the press of devout flesh, the fireworks busting out in the drawling afternoon, always explosion time somewhere. Flies touch the perspiring skin, flitting from hand to forehead, a canonical expression of some dug down dream or deft symbol. The trees stir suddenly. The wind does what it wants. 

It’s the mowers and the blowers, and the traffic past in scads and huddles, the scintillating green and oasis blue. The fever on fairy wings, bitter magic on the tongue. The stairs and ladders the words reveal, the hidden doors and magic portals, enchanted mirrors and rabbit holes. The whetted lips, the stropped syllables, the glistening of fricatives and sharp teeth somewhere behind the sentence. Clothes hang like thumped drunks, limp and damp in the sodden evening, shoulders half clothesline, half gallows as they shrug like shining horizon. Stuck to the world, stricken from the ledger. The words fall where they will.

Maybe it’s the prize of consolation, maybe it is the haunted house of the heart. Maybe it is tender to the east, maybe it is the timbre of the west, or just the way that dress swayed and clung as you walked away. A box of letters in the chamber of days and dust. A ruthless pin through being and board, the spat out incantations and indifferent curses. Time a low light, life a tall shadow running from the dusk. The skin adorned with scars and scratches, decorated with bite and blemish, slowly losing lucidity as it returns to the dust. The sun gives up on all of us yet again. The wishes scatter up towards the stars.

the ol’ reliable

If only I could settle for the signs. Six swallows knotted in pirouettes rise and fall as the sun breaks character, I think of Hamlet but skip the yipyap. A little sunburnt, a little played out, a wasp nest in my car. Smoke coils and strays, taking up with the wind and its upstart agenda. Huddled beneath the eaves of dusk and the lullaby blue sky, I feel the looming heel of night. I should smoke and stare straight into the twilight’s gravitas, but I look to the west instead. All is lost, the dance of absence, this leaning darkness. The weighted faith of flesh and hunger, this too too you know the kilted screw unto I replay like imagined repartee. All the sayings left unsaid.

The horizon scaling the silhouetted hills of oak and scrub with ornate radiance, lovely colors that I probably can’t see gently pulling the shadows over roof and tree. Smoke swirling before my eyes as the night brings the boot down. Stuck in fisticuffs with the worst of the unfed fallen, waiting for a backup from those oft mentioned better natured ones that never show. Throwing hands and elbows, leaning into the lowing throat of mad eyed stars peering into existence. Apart from car horns and my own charging heart, this is the witness I barter. The longed for long lost and the portal of breath. 

It’s always close to some joke or story, the daily bump into. Sometimes it well oh well, sometimes its hard upon the eyes. Aging with the last light leaving, some feeling like singing, and a sinking deep within. The unbreakable spells you cast on yourself by wanting one. The night with all its dogs and cars. The last dregs of the cooling coffee, the chunk of the steel cup empty. Words that no longer work, a kiss that never was. Something like the evenings keening, something like a blur of birds. I sit with some light on somewhere, smoking what I got. 

altitude

We bump and scuff about inside the dregs of the sky, transforming leaf and limb and light into us, we rot and bleed and evacuate into the rest. Its quite a procedure we’re caught up in, plopping out of the unsettled earth into our clothes and words and structures, unshakable in our convictions, nostalgic for our acquittals. We dress our elders up as gods and titans and devour their worlds as they wane and fall, we send our trash and trinkets into the heavens so we can watch our souls be stolen by burlesques and glissades, these edelweiss and columbines— the laurels our heroes long for that keeps the sherpas in the black. The altitude past our aptitude, the yearning evermore.

It feels like I have always been here, though I remember when I was new. I don’t remember the fall or my arrival. My name is not my name, but I answer to it anyway. Time is like that when it flies, and it’s like that when it stands still— that’s right time, I’m watching you. The hitch has long been gone from my giddy up, just some fifth business cameos and a little background art left me. Life is like that— always catering to the hungry talent and the latest trends. I haven’t had a lead since my thirties, and even my character work has gone largely unreviewed. I can’t dance, don’t play, and never could carry a tune too long. I still do my own stunts, only the falls seem to linger. 

The air shifts, the earth trembles. Whole cultures dissolve in moments, vaporized or painted in boiling stone. Leviathan awakes and does its shtick. We are only mirage and moonlight, a soup of synapse and symbol, the bead of the weld running down the efflorescent seam. The cauldron of stars and convergence all left sticking to our frailty, the mind always climbing Jacob’s ladder, running in loops and circles. You shake us up and watch us become some other, we shed our skin and start again. Here beset by rapacious minds and endless translation we rewrite each moment we know, missing everything but getting a rain check. The words always playing every side, the last one always the winner until the next iteration. I scribble away like I know. 

thorns

I don’t quite know how to navigate above or below, however I am unfolded I do not reach the sun. The day is not my element and the night is not my friend, the words strung from end to end without blood or breath to carry them. Scratches on the asylum walls, petitions from prisons left awaiting dust, the tracks left before the magma made them stay. Some puzzle to encumber a scholar’s notes, a heap of unsent signals and letters left in the tablet. A flower pressed in a Bible, a painting of a rose. Just bones left in the wilderness, a headstone tripped upon in the depths of the woods. Fragments that will not fit, and do not serve this life. When you stop to smell the roses, the thorns that remind you where you are.

Neither satisfaction or survival, the words a slow leak and a desperate tether, they spin and spit  and circle the pit. They creep and the crumble, ever overreaching, always a little too blue and askew. The same song on shuffle, bridge and chorus, bar after bar always too little too far. Sentenced to repetition unto senescence, the dereliction until the dereliction becomes the duty, the animal in its run. The blackberry brambles gone reckless, raking skin and tearing cloth, clinging to the right of way and the road, every course the insistence to reach the sun. Something to the common striving, the reluctance to retreat. The press of the moon upon this heft of meat and inkling. The call of the absent kiss.

There is no love in the dreaming, just the wounds from where it lost its wings. There is no future I see for me that I would want. The world turns, the old fights are going concerns and age old campaigns. There is blood hunger and blood burning, skin in the game down to the smoldering bones. The skill sets that speak in close, the drive to go out good a blinker wired hard into the ideation, a hunk of seething nothing sicced at the vulnerable and the vital. An SUV takes a T turn up my driveway, crushing weeds and sticks as it goes. These words both gut and ghost, the hard calls all made for me. All the touches left draw blood. 

the burn

The sun comes out though the heart’s occluded, it shines and blazes and barely touches the mouldering bones and the desiccated flesh that it beats so readily and burns so quickly. Breath labors while the hammer beats out despite the failings of the revenant, the swaying of the tree tops, the sweep of the brushed out blue. The yard ebbs and flows, cats and dogs, birds and squirrels, disparate sets scattered across debris and flora. The ever present exchange of tire squeals and children screaming keeps its own schedule, the entity and the organism in pitched disagreement as the wind sweeps the world away. The sun cycles down some, the lingering feel of the burn speaking clearly clean through.

I’m played out. I’ve tapped out, surrendered, left the building and all. There only pull besides a couple of cute little duties left me is the burdensome blood and bones, this ever errant meat flopping around on the pavement, this sea of scabs and appetites unconcerned with gods and philosophies. The name diminishes with the fallen body, words like the stitch work in steam, lost before read or spoken. Yet the entity won’t let it lie. The unbound wings and the boundless depth of this startled sky. The winds run through and reach into the onslaught of night, the shadows dozing in my lap. I can’t go, the animal won’t let loose. The night sits beside me. 

I smoke some more, I sit and spin, out on the twilight porch watching the traffic pass and idle. The line of last light rises, the swallows swoop and spire, children dismayingly play in the righteous weft of the wind. The heft of the wore down heart still hitting hard, I shift like the sky, uneasily from day to night favoring a hip. The crows call out from some winged distance, ever the race to the roost. I give way to the feasts and the rituals, the families flush from the unburdening moon. I give way to the light that is leaving, and the day when all will end. Until then I keep up with the continuity. The way a fire might take notes. 

embodied

Empty me of these etiquettes, these ring a round rosies I play along to, like the laws I follow when they go my way, the dead dreams turned to labyrinth and rabbit rings. Slow me of these jumbles and intersections, the mind spinning out this rough cut cloth, the so thens and what ifs. Shit out the jingles set deep in framework, hardwired from the way to the weld, the songs of the never breathed wind. Let me breathe through this direction, let the weave of blood and breath walk with me for a ways. Let the moon wash on through this current. The light to be and abide.

The wind frets and struts, it’s got moves like Jagger, it spins like the devil in your dreams. A crow caws from a neighboring tree, and a neighbor words some pneumatic tool to death. I’m imbued with blossoms, I am bathed in smoke and dust, kitted up for the sudden cool. From laid low by the oven of the atmosphere, to get grandpa a sweater never the longed for transformation. Black crow circles overhead like it knows I’m talking on it, my tongue bitter with black, cooling coffee, the leaves running their greenery through the down bound sun. My fingers cold, I stop to smoke, and consider the positions. 

The winds are all wreck and rumpus, the sky has that goodbye last chance cast to it, a tip of the hat and a wink kind of shine where once you see it you start to feel the gone. The witness washed away in the sheer volume of transitioning majesty, all these breathless beauties and wished on stars and kisses, the sun climbing up the trees to the tippy top. The gloaming at once a go, traffic speeds and staggers, home and fun and night shift intentions. I cough and start and mitigate the mix, the weight of the change between there and strange. The entity so seldom embodied, the animal always ahead on points. A train wails as a child shouts, and my place is put. The sky behaves like a savage.

lavage

The hot black coffee lolls upon the tongue between deep dive breezes and the scraped clean blue of the scorching sky. We live amid the wounds, every molecule seeking the easiest state, washed clean by breath and ablution. We steam and fume, melt and plume, struggle and dust all at once. Our labors and our creeds cull our strength and spirit, serving a set of tangled words and ways that came along after all our gods were dead. Plunder our last remaining honor, with brutality alway quick on its heels. We spit poison and invect the depths of known hells and doom harbingers alike, our cause so short and sharp. We spread sin with every verse,   every sura a sickness older than the gods invoked. Dealer’s choice or go for broke. The spell is as simple as any empty sentence. This is the flow you can only go with. 

The heat spreads in asphalt and engine, in sunbeam and albedo, in thirst and burn and swelter. I sit on the front porch as the dogs shift from shade to shade, wasp and dragonfly flitting across the dead weed lawn and the green sweep of leaves, slices of color dragging on my sight. The neighbors go about their lives of hard work and lawn maintenance, careful to keep their first line of defense intact. The appearances and such. The mind on the mask, losing sight of one’s eyes. The flies light upon my flesh, a taste for blood and sweat. I watch as you change your origin story yet again. 

The old wounds still fester, left unattended and unmentioned, the open shame we inherit along with the loot or the beatings. The direction the game tilts toward, the burdens deferred to the other. Look away or feast upon the bounty granted you by the power of punching down. The skin you cannot peel away you can at least get in the game. The elder wounds must be cleansed, an offering of back and brick and blood. The lessons must be forever taught, the stories forever turned into breath and bloom. The gardens again tended, the wicked returned to the rich and precious loam. The sins always soaking through, washed clean in blue and blues, learning to tell the truth that doesn’t favor you. The sun heads west without an answer or regret. Come out, calling down the blessings of the mindful moon. 

beyond

The wind in the leaves strums the sweltering sun, a laden shimmer and a blinding flash, all that a star might leave spinning in its wake. The thick air stirs enough to bump shoulders and stand too close, staring heavy too near your face, that feeling that it would all be tolerable if you just had a little more room to breathe. The aging day lit is stark contrast, bright skins and deepening shadows, chirrups and the knocking of a woodpecker somewhere very near, the wind abrupt and indecisive. One moment as fleet as any demon, the next sulking like mighty Achilles in his perfumed tent. The earth churns in the deep beneath, the livid core purses its lips. Hush, hush children— be patient for your fresh hell. The sun heads west as I would in a perfect world. But the world’s imperfect, so I watch beyond it. 

A fly alights upon my thigh, the blind dog pants and pants. A cautious squirrel forages through the remnants of today’s offerings, slow with the scene and the heat. Alone is the burden of proof of the waiting in the wings. The empty almost on top of everything, then the impudence of offense after offense filling the old skin with its native state of righteous rage. The back fence aglow with these sunset strips, the ever incandescent foreshadowed tomorrow beaming until it breaks, the stars stippled next night and the begetting moon. The black coffee burns a little going down. Even the flame almost smiles. 

Things are ablaze, things are boiling over, much of it outside of our influence and some the very symbol of our skin. The fear is awake, and always aimed at those that don’t think it’s all that. This is as it is, to be awake in the world of what may be. Our power together only reinforced by those who would beat us down. We walk in the field of death and pain and sorrow. We take our sin wages each day on the chin. Our bonds are deeper than blood, our kinship stronger than words. We live as the sacred oath to the other, to abide and strive for everyone’s best. The struggle is a wisdom tradition, we lead as we follow, knowing the danger, singing as we march into the storm. 

fustigate

The dream breaks out past the dress up, the costumes and offices and all the naked emperor jazz that goes along with it. You wake all meat and bone, bound by the same old bonds, caught up in the same old cages. The whole ball of wax, all the monkeys by the barrel, the stacks for stacks and stacks— all breath and spittle, from the know how to whistle to heaven’s furthest outpost. The stick figures we whittle from equal parts ink, mystery, and mumbo jumbo charged with ominous portents, as deadly as their witness might wrought. It’s only magic that makes them stick, a magic that is subject to boot and brick. Work the numbers, the physics does the rest.

It’s as real as your cup of coffee. It’s as real as that sandwich the other day. The words and the ways loose and easily slipped. If the numbers aren’t favorable, change the math. Every army is a set of plus ones. The street gets in everything, every observation is a tell. Weird these wars with only one side throwing shots. Impunity is a pretty big Achilles Heel. There’s an awful lot of lead with chins to be checked. Bad days will come back to bite.

When they tell you to submit or they’ll hurt you, believe them. They speak in their fears, lashing out with their weakness, trying to be the pain. When they speak with glee of murder and assault people with idiot mayhem, they are the enemy. They have come to chain you or worse. You owe them no mercy, whatever any king or priest declares. Fuck them up, fustigate them, however close suits. You will teach them to mind their  Ps and Qs. You will teach them their myths and maths. They will show their evil for all to witness. You will teach them they’re history. 

the clampdown

Comes a time the times are the trouble. Comes a day that there’s not so much a choice as the countdown of some suspect package, left all wires and spinning digits, waiting to unleash some unknown quantity as the minutes peel away. Burning cars and shooting stars, the professional goons and their rabid compliments of evil nitwits and other craven unfuckables upon the streets making their untested claims. Always en masse upon a peaceful protester or hapless straggler to poison or pummel as they may, it occurs that they aren’t expecting to be met with resistance, certainty not prepared for ordinance or an incoming nature. It’s the sort of hubris that has burned many a greasy bones cracked black. For every fool, an errand.

No words to mull, no love to mourn, no wished for woman or poem with a bad alternator dying in the drive. The de facto foreign op idiot crime boss racist in chief has declared war on America, grossly mistaking the mettle of the poor and downtrodden, and the wisdom of his shit stain master. Things will burn and centrists will urge the ballot box as bullets riddle our children and gloating villains prate and bleat. Folks like me will rail and fume and be removed in quiet lapses or tragic crimes. Me? There’s nothing left of me that’ll leave much of a mark. I guess I’m just a pair of cheap shoes looking for the right machine. Until then I’ll roll around in these words a little longer.

Still I work the increments. I am wide awake at the bottom of the well. The blue flame, the black candle. The older of the elder goats, a song about the alphabet, the mountain always on the way. The work of awakening is a tall order in the late game, the shift of senses and the limits of the animal. It’s in the way we draw our lines, and the way we hold them once they’re dear. This bewitched bandwidth, the static at the border and the bead on the seam. We speak as one from well worn ways, the absence of justice forever bereft of peace. Our hearts ablaze with fiery wings, our hands heavy and as matchless as the moon. The breath our inheritance as we sing out in Guthrie country. The rescued message in a bottle opens as a djinni.