the regrettable

 The stars are out even when you don’t see them, beaten at once by the boundless blue sky and the blazing yellow sun. The thoughts exist even when you don’t think them, spinning there in the circuitous grooves of the ethereal wax, your mind the stylus instilled to the inevitable. This spilling inside out self and sense, the thorough stirring of the every element in the mix, the prosaic to the poetic to the cyphers and the figments in and out the dreaming. The tables turn, the candles burn, every sinking sun takes away the breath and leaves the breathing. We weren’t before and we won’t be later, the scuffing of shoes, the shifting of labors. We are in the midst of our imagining, the regrettable day only going to go around the corner and come up behind you wearing a fake mustache or a wig. The moment only witnessed in its extinction, the self just a voice in the mirror.

Outside the hazy day begins to breathe a little easier, the smoke thinning in the blue gray gaze of sky. Flies light upon the flesh, beetles speed along the concrete, traffic passes as if it must. The unwatered tree drops its leaves upon the dusty earth and the jealous ants that swarm and huddle and madly thirst as the dirt goes dry. The crows that croaked and cawed have taken wing or hopped a fence or are keeping their own counsel. All that is certain is that the heavens are less without them, and the world hurts down to the foundation. From the firmament to the fundaments, the diminishment speeds as the matter huddles, everything hurtling away all at once. Learn to want more or learn to live in the unbearable less. Contend with the contentions or manage the machine.

The hours creep, the words have gone, the heart set many miles away. The day recedes, the ceiling weighing in on the cluttered roomful of empty. Counting in cats and lingering kindnesses, watching the sky and the pines. Soon the moon makes its way, flouting the fractious bonds of the night. We all scrape and fawn, swayed by angle and albedo, spun by the myths built into our blood. The television warm tones of remembered yesteryears, a busy two year old thinking the landing was old news based on the space family Robinson and that awful Dr. Smith. Jabbering away as plastic jungle animals and toy soldiers continued to contest the rug. The older lore, the revealed gods and plentiful werewolves had to wait, though gods and monsters were busy there already. This was long before the calamitous soul was loosed in the child, back before the sorrows of school and the long body count. The moon yet magic, all the mistakes save one still waiting in the chamber. 

idiot ouroboros

 I’m still working up the courage. I’m still thinking about loose ends. It builds, it eases, it begins to build again. It’s not news, it’s not a current turn, I’ve been like this for many miserable years. It’s part of the kind of impossible I wound up. It’s part of the picture I can’t see. It might be that it loves company, but it still ends up alone. All the world seems to move in another direction, while I keep on keeping on straight to hell. I know, I know, I’m repeating myself. It’s all I ever do. It’s all I’ve ever done. Lights on, lights out. Again the lonely corner. Again the long long night. 

The night is a little star stunned, a little hazy. The moon is out and making a mess of it. I watched a little this and that. I took a shower and shaved my head. It’s all too much, I’m all too much, the bounded in a nutshell but for bad dreams kind of king that I am. Delusions and allusions and the soundtrack always on shuffle. Always more limits, always less light, the foregone conclusions and forever just never with time to kill. Every single day now taking a little more. No fault, no clue, just sorrows and furies and nothing up ahead.

It’s getting closer. It’s dumb and it’s frightening, but it seems the likely course. I hope I stay my extinction long enough to put my defects to good use. There’s just so many fewer pieces left, and none of them fit. There’s no one here and there’s no one around, and nobody talks anymore. They just type snippets of idiocy back and forth, too busy fragmenting themselves to sit through a conversation, or to bother with yet another burdensome fool. The swerve the tech took eludes me, though I tried to keep pace. Yet another in an endless loop of failures and failings, this idiot ouroboros made of words and weeping. Yet another candle in desperate need  of snuffing out.

stipulate

 At last there will be a last gasp, a tremble before the final curtain, the structure’s vast collapse. All the burdens borne, all the grief beset flesh at last released. The unfinished business finished none the less, the work, the love, the leisure done at a stroke. Shapeless and changing, given all at once away. Neither woe nor consolation, neither trick or treat will reach. The lassitudes will be paramount as the flame gutters and goes out. It isn’t really a whole lot of help while the clock is still on, but like the heat death of the universe or the sun’s eventual devouring of the inner planets, it is the kind of perspective that gives some comfort to a certain sort of mind. Like a will that will stipulate the journey of all your loot and treasure, but for the moth and maggot set. 

The day arrives a little busier than usual, with fire truck and ambulance flashing their lights in front of a neighbor’s drive, and the animals restless to begin the rituals of the dawn. I remain agnostic to the immediacy, bound by blankets and an aversion to the world to my meager bed. The dogs at least delay the parade of the lost and the dead and the evil all about. The music softly shuffles and the cool ministrations of the fan feel almost cold as the hour of alarm approaches. It is easier than waking, shed of some distant dread or amniotic comfort, the aura of the other story and all the strange explanation abruptly dispatched for this same old sorry notion of worthless flesh and bones. A name I never took to, and the reasons left unmentioned.

The hours creep, all dust and grease. The empty is always on. Little tricks with dirt and bricks, tiny tasks all flame and ash. The war rages on while the election theft is telegraphed, vile brutal cowards and the associated guilty doing on camera what they once did beneath the cover of night. The bright and the beautiful lose direction and are stricken down, falling to plague and injury, and the ubiquitous hailing bullets. Knowing how you’re going to go is half the battle. Unless stricken down sooner, political violence will take me along with many, many others. No one wants me much anywhere, I am unwelcome even where I live, but my blood spills just fine. The earth and I still sing along, same old chestnut, same old song. Now that my fire’s all but out, I am but delayed dirt, the watched pot of passage here for now. Loosed, perhaps then purchase for fresh roots. Finally a chance for something good to grow.

skull sutra

 The night at its darkest, the dream’s encasement, the troubling music from organs unknown. Waking from the healing witchcraft, from the angle of insistence, the memory of the entangled limbs and breathless kisses between cures. Sore on down through the various barriers, the concrete poured so deep, the sledge breaking and burying at once. These whims and constructs batted about by the animal, these spells and prayers that poison the perception, tricks of light and mind played havoc by the loosening of the forms. Nightlight and toothbrush, mirror and towel, all the shifting from dream to being and all the in betweens. The head always hardest where it knows the least. The bone bragging calcium and carbon, the brain gossiping goo.

The nightly repast of dread and sorrows, art guitar noodling and the buffeting of the fan. The reading lamp yet another lost love memento, the starved heart and the unyielding stars, some secret syllabi of every lesson missed. Postcards and photographs, and the places where the conversation broke clean off. The ardor still fueled by the flame of the first fire, teeth slick with coffee and gravity, these smiles that cling to the skin of all this honest want. Sinking slowly beneath the strata of burned bridges and blown chances, the madness of the meat and the beaten on bones, flesh slack and turning towards dust. The constellations slide on by while the spider of the mind spins its busy webs. 

The morning holds the darkest parts, the tomb and the passage, the heart and the earth. Things take shape between sense and thought, between dawnings and the dawn. The ghost holds court, bathing in blood, sealed in the skull. Placeholder, face maker, thread bearer to the great weaving. Goggling bloodshot eyes, wearing the sagging skin and worried mien, the mask full of capers and caveats and the uncouth truth. These bones tossed and twisted upon the tides of the dreaming, thoughts sloshing over into the brick and mortar world, the dirt and bug bound opulence that the words are birthed from. The healer’s percussive ministrations interrupted by these idiot dogs, the breathing tethered to the ache of this failed form, awake in the coursing night. The way yet witnessed in the shapes we shared. The touch still missed never truly gone. 

spoons and sails

Everyday is all wake up and wonder, everything always hurry up and wait. The fever breaks and you barely notice. The moon sails by and it barely makes a dent. A blunt bowl, a glutted sail, a luminous spoon spilling shine in a drive by sky. Not a hint of that as you spin on your heel and get to work. The padding to the picture, the packing peanuts of the words as they aggregate in all the negative space all around it, the margins around the real where the descriptions fit. The move from dream to disclaimer, the singing in your sleep becoming the song droning on. This ache, this absence, this shape that thinking makes around the thought that is gone. 

The dark night of early mornings, the reading lamp and all the constellations that got along without you, the absence in the song something about the space in the room. The waves of light fussing with the shadows and humming along with the skins, photons bombard the neighborhood bandwidth jostling loose the sparks. The adjustment to the atmosphere as the scene is set, the temperature and the impending doom. A sip of water and the trickle through the mouth, the small moments and the fleeting joys. Then the rush of thoughts and the map, the heart heavy not this but that. Scale and placement and the current of your urges. The shape and the negative space.

Flesh and phantom, the aches and pains and frets and phrases. The press of the breath against the blazing moment, the drag from perception to conception, the scrapes and bruises as you put it all together. Hungers and appetites and the lingering upon the bones of the one that is missed. The longing in reveled sense and air thickened by the insistent anticipation, the ley lines and the old lists, the ritual spilling in slow ripples along memory and prophecy. The singing of the taken shapes, the droning of the blood’s demands. Every breath a burning down, each thought an effigy, written in the angle of enchantment. This alchemical transmutation of flesh to fuel as your flame burns bright. 

manifest

You might stand time’s test, you don’t know. By now you might already even be a cult, who’s to say. I go by a book or two, but that’s mostly all I got. A corner and a call sign, a preponderance of words. So drolly as we fade away, so glibly as we grieve. We are seen or we are occluded, the dream unraveling in the day. These small pleasures, these endless sorrows, we do and we don’t and the scene goes on and on. From squirrel leap to bird scrabble, from root to vine these tendrils reach and stir. The clock is on until the clock is gone, we are counted until we no longer count, still we may stir the earth and atmosphere. You might be forever, but it will always be too soon to tell.

The coffee scalds, the coffee cools, the coffee swallowed just the same. Inky as the dreams of prophecy, shiny like a lucky coin. The incantation a conversation between chemistries, the tithing to the blood, the tide of ignition rolling through every breath. The stitches in the seams of seeing, time passing between bleed and burn, you always riding the wave you watch. The stretch where you meant to speak and the path of the stumbled tongue, never that permeating version, never a resolution to the tension’s secrets. In the field behind the fence the school is being mowed. Something in the way the grass smells, something in the difference between the sense and the expected ideal. Lost thought to current bird, flight forever a becoming and its lapse. A sip of magic mirror black coffee, the tape moved along.

It is the ache of each mismeasured breath, it is the pain of the shadow shook loose. The day presses on, never waiting for you to keep up. It rolls like thunder, a temblor set upon the moorings of your heart. The old frequency where the moon was always whispering away. The elder channel before the elders were there. So it was and so it is, always entangled, always in the dark. The sorry amplifier, this insistent bandwidth. Leaf blowers and riding mowers and Counting Crows, as the wind breathes clean and a kiss nuzzles the nape of your neck. The habits unacknowledged always make their mark, little scars and drear repetitions, letters and pictures and odd parking lots. The world burns and the calendar is counting, a cup of coffee, the talk about the stars. I take a swallow, I see you shine. 

the whether

 These are not the days we savor. These are not the joyful hours. The morning smoke from the blazing fires, the choke that grows throughout the afternoon, the early evenings clouds and winds that loosen the cord and drives the clouds through the burdensome blue. We make do, sweating through the swelter, holding our places as long as we can bear. We do without, the thick air full of exhaust and heat, the little room crowded with dust and the sorrow down the years. The walls closing in, life on the downstroke, living in the painful dwindle at the end days’ end. The will is all won’t, the whether, weather or not.

The day is a faraway country, the sun a long lost tongue. The burn quickened dusk comes thick with mosquitoes and broken hearts. The night always off to a staggered start, its parade of wounds and wishes ever more vicious as the losses add up. A bite, a bruise, a cut or a scrape. Sprains and tears and breaks. A body can only be so much. The moon in bloom, the sea of sky a seethe of gray and black. Bones strewn about the rooms, a wheelchair dragged through the darkened halls, the near by hills obscured in shadow and smoke. There are fewer and fewer avenues of escape. Doors left unlocked because there aren’t dangers that would dare. Windows left staring because everyone breaks and looks away. 

The mystery shook me off years ago. The moon and me have long since parted ways. I only know the short cuts, the old ways of moving without hearth or home. The knife and the flint and the starry tomorrows. The wandering of the beasts, the lift of the moonlight taking to the sea. The songs sung by old bones about the rain, the limbs of a lover seeking shelter from a storm. The hail of fists and boots, the sticks and the stones. The falling off in ones and fews as the years burn away. The changing stories to fit the latest lies, the outside all that’s left of us. No more shared beds, no more love letters. The roads were chosen, the sides divided. All that’s left the consequence and the barn owl’s screeching. Pale wings against the gathering grays, the moon’s shift sliding off her shoulder, the burnt smell of scorched earth everywhere.

utterance

 The light wavers once you switch it on, maybe the lamp, maybe the surge protector you project. There is no amount of expertise you won’t flout for these scraps of conjecture. There is no amount of dread enough to slow the roll of your thinking. The little shops you seem so sure you visited before now direct you to the mall in the ziggurat, to be lost again in the foot traffic and the labyrinthine. Another moot point now that sleep has sped away. Another moot point, as it’s the only sort you make. You walk around the darkened house stepping over cats and dogs until you step in something unexpected, then you slowly blow your stack. Something to be expected from the unexpected, the bad penny and the butter side down. It goes around, and here it comes.

The piece you thought it would be has now departed, the brain storm setting off nerves and curses as the blood does its slow burn. The letters you long to write, the conversation you want to have, the words loved left unwanted in the silence that was always closer to her heart. Sore and bent and thirsty as a wanderer winds up, you clean the sick from the hallway and your foot, the wishing a small thing dwindling in the distance. The pain in one hip now shared with the other, the songs so sad once you think of the singer, the failed artist finding the sort of immortality that doesn’t do them any good now. Wavering between the myths and mistakes while her world burns as well. The lovelier, busier, more important of the two, but still something that you share besides moments you misunderstood and time she wanted wasted.

The forced light, the heavy heart, the pain that never leaves only ebbs and flows. Some song plays that you never want to hear again, some words that won’t leave you alone, the hard truth seldom settles long enough to look you in the eye. The way you want it, the one you miss, they were never there. Not for the troubles, not for the lonely, not for the long haul or the short steps either. They never claimed to be, never said it could be. This is you being you, dumb and stubborn and invulnerably enraged. Sad because this is the only story you fit, the only story you know, so you tell it again and again. The nail that only knows the hammer, the dog kicked once long ago and is now only savagery and teeth. Not the act but the way you took it, not what was said but what you learned to hear. The things she would never say, then all at once she went away. Everything before and after just the color that you paint in, never sure where the truth was severed, never knowing what the least utterance meant. 

the taste

 The daylight turns to wishing and the wishing to once weres, the thought along the arc of each particular orbit. Some sad scratching in the dirt, some bored staring at the stars, all this rough and tender telling left us. You wake when you wake, you sleep wherever you fall, from asphalt to silk, from silk to cinders. The hours take it all, limping along through right and wrong, singing to the stars you barely see. Reading the riot act to what wanderers are strewn across the smoke and glances, the heavy heart of wasted chances beating right along, flutterers and scuttlers and the spiders on the line. Light some incense, say her name: you won’t know the taste again.

There is the lonely bed of sweat soaked surrender. There’s the labor of the toss and turn as you burn away in the embers of bridges and the ghosts of the never known. Dreams sliding around inside like unsecured furniture in an urgent rental. Crates and boxes and that weird corner table. The bumps and crashes of each hasty retreat and every reckless get up and gone lingering on in the dusky sediment of your flesh. You lean into the ropes, you hit the shower, all your life and labor barely a dent in the heavy bag. There are words and there is witness. There’s the trail into the forest and the footprints in the sand. Gods and glands and promised lands, lost in the dark of our skulls.

You sit there motionless on the end of the bed as the forces again gather against you. You set slumped over in your chair as the news blathers away. Fresh hells, dull horrors, the whole spread there like the evidence on display for the cameras. You shuffle, you limp, you shit and shower. Some stray light, some sad hour, a meal from the microwave a cut from a can. Home is where the hurt is, this exhausted heart, these played out hopes that persist in this stubborn flesh. Vestigial graces plague our days and gnaw upon our nights, fight or flight or wait for the clout. The bell sounds, and you step back into it, the fight in the rounds the war by the battle. Scattered and foolish and clattering like spent brass, you raise your hands again. Silty smoke, the gift of fire, her name upon your tongue spilling from your lips.

the fading

The dogs go off and I’m awake, eyes snapped open to the gossiping dark. The mind races then it idles, finding traction in the little details while the brain is still telling stories to itself. That fleeting awareness of the multitude lurking behind the sense of identity, the name and place and where you left your pants and keys. The barking long gone before I am down to one, the ache and dread and regrets that make up this self. The sorrowful sense of loss waking into being. The legion descended into hints and whispers and the tingling of my spider sense. Shapes and shadows and portents of doom past the animal gnashings and the daily debts left unmet. I switch on the light, and I am back to the long alone.

The house is quiet, the dogs out hunting the rat army, the cats alluding to sleep and roofs. I swallow the available tonics, the dosing that moves the marker down the field, the black hot ichor that passes for coffee at these hours in between. These sacraments burnt on the altar of the big empty, the vacuity that drags me through the world as the world runs through me. The mingling of earth and sun, the leaves and flowers of the continuity, the blood and bones of other birthed beings that bear the brunt of all this useless suffering and beauty. Toothache from a mouthful of broken teeth, the aches from the spent systems and busted architecture, the words that dig and multiply through the trembling furrows that pass for sentience in this flesh. These dreams that break me like the rocky shore breaks the stubborn tide linger through the day.

In these dreams of late it is largely those I lost, to death and to the fading as my company loses favor and I stop clinging and inserting myself into their lives. They are dreams largely of the past tense, conversations and pleasures I miss with people that I knew and love. Sometimes there is the wandering, which is most of my traditional remembered dreaming, headed for a location or trying to get somewhere through strange cities and unknown woods. But lately it has been the dead ended, the residue of acrimony, the dislike and the disappointment that leads me away from where I’m not wanted. The sense of the lost love looking wearily away, having hoped never to see me again. Fragments of words from other rooms bearing contempt and malice. Intercessors trying to shake and harm me, seemingly unaware of my unyielding capacity for rage and violence. The horror of being backed into a corner, the grief of my boundless limits. Missing fiercely someone that won’t embrace me again, and demonstrating again and again every reason why. Failing as I wake, fading as I live and breathe. 

doomsday nights

 Dusk came early and the mail came late. Smoke was everywhere. My lungs and heart exchanged expletives and goodbyes, their long established grievances given new grist to grind. I rattled and puffed along as I always seem to do, the lickings never stopping the ticking completely. I don’t make good company, but I sure do keep the time. Some of me is shareware, some is ancient graven prototype that remains anathema to the jealous gods, some is plug and play no payments up front. The cost comes in the collateral, dark visitations and insistent visions, shrapnel and all manner of animals underfoot. Night came, all wind and ash and the ghost of that doomsday sun whispering that we may not ever meet again. I kept put like I usually do. I know my place; this isn’t it.

These days it’s all death squads and despots, cheap dumb hoods wrecking up the country while well meaning fools get out the vote. Nature has an answer, or rather gathers consequences like picked posies. Flood and fire, blight and plague. Bullets are cheap and flying in swarms, but they are the least of the busy demons. Money is the root of deep stupid, but it won’t be around for long. Caught between brutal narcissists and their planned deprivations and the simpering of our better angels, the devil will have his due. At the tarnished end of the golden rule, they will offer us our final forms based upon the evil in their hearts and the fear that fills their nights. Time’s up, but who’s counting? 

There is a gauntlet that has been tossed. A line drawn by fools who cannot hold a line or take a punch or bear a burden. They are brutal, but they are gutless. Make them bleed, make them burn, watch them wail and scatter. I limp along, a broken old man who may as well swing. I am not strong or smart or swift. I am a fire all but extinguished, a candle that gutters and pops. The days are mark by shameless crime and rife with desolation, the nights thick with smoke and curses. I beat out a weary tattoo upon the drum of my bones with steel sledge and iron bar, choking on my lack of smoke and the sorrows of the unloved. When the killing picks up steam, I will not be missed. I am among the dead already, missing in my skin, empty in the eyes. Be certain, they will come. They will not be ready.

thorn and crown

 They say the fire jumped the highway. They see the smoke will take the night. The wind insists in the wrong direction, the blind dog digs and bangs. The spice of soil cuts the air, the breath burdensome and shallow, the heart as thick as a stump. The trees are dry from years of drought, neglected along with the rest of the visible spectra, every day a little dose of dull edged doom. The light leaves quick, the stars are gone, shadows seethe from inside the topiary. Some fool or another rumbles past, answered in kind by the opposing direction. There is a tinge of panic in the ordinary. Dusk grows ever darker, setting off a handful of lights.

It’s all been wrong for so very long, everyone led astray or chasing geese. Wrung hands and rang bells, tallied and tarried and clocked. The sanctity of henhouse foxes and stray rounds, the crunch of boots on gravel and glass. Statues fashioned of marble and bronze, of latex and carbon and the current flavor of hubris fall along with fire from the sky. The lost and the longed for, me and my same old song. The sorrow and the sledge and the stubborn burdens of the earth. 

I am among the most disposable, a dull, artless factotum, a scraped up placeholder. The envelope for a bookmark, the button for a bishop. Out here where the world still burns and the insects creep and bite, I sit amid the debris eyeballing the shifting winds. Little rest and no solace, the body declines as the tribulations build. From rose to thrown, from thorn to crown, the missives all kissless, the dreams all drones. The plaintive tones of the long gone troubadour still singing to steal your girl, the plucked strings and the salted silences of these eternal goodbyes. The alarm sounds amid the barking dogs and the porch light graveyards, fire truck and ambulance and the thumping of a helicopter. A train wails, and I look up: there are stars there after all. The sirens grow closer. 

coffee hot, smoke burnt

 It all comes together as it falls apart. The insistence of the instant, the ripples in the pond. The skin glistening with sweat and kissed only by mosquitoes and the shrapnel of concrete smote to smithereens. There’s always a fire somewhere, there’s always someone cutting loose or falling out. The dreams seep in through the soaked sheets and buffeted air, the blather that they broadcast and all the ones that have gone. All the conversations left to sleep and the mind reaching the emptying of some sorry reservoir, the heart clotted with these days of ache and fire. The head always thick with spite and mischief. The itching’s a given, the scratching’s the art.

Softly, softly as they sleep. Gently, slowly as they sing. The places left unseen, the graces that elude. Prayer you never knew were prayers trickling down your neck. It has the aspect of an altar. It wears the affect of an ancestor. Burn what you burn, break what you break, there’s alway more give than you can take. The silly credo of the theist about something bigger than yourself, when that’s about everything that there is. You’re soaking in it, and other such relics of a marginal, stained mind. Out there dancing in the dark, the sky gone gray and the stars on pause. All the effects apart from your cause. The traction of your dissatisfaction in the way you misheard the universe. Fate is just dumb luck once the hand is played. The future just the dawn you expect to see.

The last scads of days have been brutal, the atmosphere all coffee hot, smoke burnt as the hammer comes down. Drenched day and night, unlovely in any light, the story grinds away. You might as well make your play: who’s going to stop you from getting away with it, those darn kids? The depths of each burdensome breath the perpetual tide of blood and sky, the stubborn turn of being and burn all about. The ones we lost, the ones we miss, the clock of hearts and the beat of the unfailing feet. All of us misfires and ricochets, the began beguines and the relentless begets, the picks and the frets and beatings yet. Some small sop, some little morsel, some moment between action and appetite playing out grand designs or sheer delights. The agency of the animal washed out to sea, the fierce fight against the flood. The moment between the reading and the write off. This soft shoe, this old one-two, the motion as it steadily slips away.

wingspan

There’s no telling the tension left between a soul and a song. There’s no tellings the depths once the falling is all that’s left. The thick air of cloud and smoke and heat lingers long after dark, the passing traffic pushing shadows and trailing light. The new moon night muggy weighted with every stone ever sunk into the sea, hot with every torch ever carried to the bearer’s incendiary end. This carbon burden all the chickens coming home to roost, the depths of our collective intransigence a furious beating long overdue. The music creeps somewhere between breath and flesh, somewhere between the wishing and all those impassive stars. The song something awakened from the dead. Wreck or reckoning, it beckons just the same.

How we lumber in the shadows. How we huddle in the sky. The dark upon the ground and the bounce lit heavens, the stars blotted by the backwash, the glow captured in the clouds. Would that there was shelter past the structure, would that there was home inside the house. Cracked lips and fingers and soaked through clothes. Punitive moves by the grotesquely wealthy to hurt and murder those without. The motives of extractionist ghouls the worst sort of evil, monstrous crimes committed on the whole of humanity to exacerbate the crash. We struggle and we suffer, but we see. Standing beneath brutal cudgeling, we take it like hard rain. They loose their goons and killers, we think we might need to bring a hat.

The night is full of silhouettes. The street is parked up with cars. The song drags on, soft and small, like the ember of a distant cigarette. Like a pillow full of prayers. The words won’t rise inside me. My heart can’t catch its breath. A cargo plane rumbles to the east, another secret born aloft by math and fashioned flesh. The night cools ever so slightly, just enough to feel a breeze. Just enough that the clothes don’t stick. I am what I am, I’ve lost what I lost, I miss who I miss. There’s no getting over this. The hoping is the hardest part. It’s so simple that you can see it if you look when the light’s just right. It’s so easy even I could do it. That means you can do it too. We have the wingspan to lift us above this coming tide of hell and fire. We have the heart to hold the heavens. We have the strength to break their surly bonds of greed and servitude. We only need to use it. 

slow learner

The thunder rumbled, the lightning flashed, the pit hid in the shower. The dawn broke hard, dappled droplets of rain and jags of electric flash and low roaring from on high. Strange for summer in California, at least as the old climate leanings go. The bedeviling heat, the shifting shoulders of the firmament, the prophesied trends coming true despite what you’ve been told. It is wearying, the maddening rise in heat as fate gifted me with all this labor, the lack of anything resembling help or support as the days melt into shades and sentiments. Wake in daylight, wake in night, sheets soaked dead broke and nothing landing right. A creature of habit with every habit all but demolished like an old fence struck by a motorcycle, the nights and days just wash over me. Everything is afoot as the world begins to buckle. They just keep beating and I won’t quite break. I’ve got nothing left, inside or out, but I can’t stop swinging back.

If it ever mattered, it doesn’t now. I move in slow circles, I empty buckets, I serve the meals. Guilt over missing my father’s dying and my mother’s broken hip drove into a corner that I knew I was unsuited for. My immunity to cognitive dissonance means I can’t paint it into pretty pictures. My life was a shitty zero even before I moved back to my hated hometown, when I absorbed abuse and shed my blood for twelve bucks an hour. One job where I didn’t fit to the next. Beats working I suppose. I wouldn’t know. I’ve never worked right, and it appears that there isn’t a fix that fits in this life. There isn’t much I want, and most of what it was is lost to me, lovers left and fields gone fallow. No one listens, and anyone who looks looks away pretty quick. Weaving fantasies with words seems pointless now, even if there were an audience, the imminent collapse of civilization suggests that my hat would be a little late to toss in. As for sticking to the facts, the market for that died on 9/11. 

At least I didn’t have any children, the proffer goes. At least I didn’t marry any of the poor dazzling women I made miserable with my madness and affections. So the caveat to being terrible goes something like “at least you never managed to achieve any of the basic human comforts that you longed for, you monster.” They’re not wrong, these hypothetical people who speak to me the hard truths most folk have given up offering anymore. Friends have long left me behind, cutting their losses as they headed on for halcyon fields or fresh hells. Bite off a few heads, you find there are fewer advisors sticking their necks out. So the days burn on and bleed into one another. My world contracts in a vastly expanding universe, still beset by the gods and devils in my skull, and the murder apes that have always had the floor. I am beating concrete and brick the same sad futile way I tap away at these dumb dead words. Incessantly and impotently. Nothing new, just empty animal rituals in the vacant hours of this dying night. Nothing new, just teaching lessons to my bones that my head can’t quite learn.  

stars

How bright the day, how hot the night, the long tumble over and under as we are tugged and tossed by the sun. How heavy the heart when the cut turns dull from sharp, the pointless longing stubbed out in your eye. The sky goes from blaze to shimmer, from burn to bitter as the stars simmer on the tongue. The porch light beset with wings and spiders as it stripes the yard, the weight of bombardments and the altar of illumination wrestling the shadows within reach. The remembered and the rewritten mingle in the miseries of the mind. What we said and what we say, as the world all slips away.

It all falls away. The names of the constellations, the secret identities of superheroes, the taxonomies and soliloquies and the name of the authors for attribution. If it isn’t used, it’s marked lose, and you do. Years drift by and it becomes strange to return the call, it seems suspicious to write back, all the go go go gets gone. The love you knew runs out of juice, picks its next neck, or turns out to be mistaken or lies all along. There’s a lot of same ol’ to this song. The star sign aligns with an old sock full of adjectives, and isn’t it just like you. I mean, I see Jupiter leading Saturn to the southwest, the Great Bear lost in wisps of atmospheric mist to the northwest, but the rest is just guessing if I even bother to look. Lost so long I seldom bother to navigate.

Sure the fault is in myself. Sure, I just can’t get it right. Rage and confusion, paranoia and just plain dumb have marked my life well past the remainder shelf, out of the bargain bin and into the trash. I’ve never had much, but this last destitution is the deep impoverishment. No help in times of crisis, no one to listen and to listen to. This last labor is failure after failure, day after day. The failure of my waning strength and withered limbs as I beat my bones against iron and stone. The failure of my intellect as I am stymied by half a hole and a full blown week long inferno. The failure of my humanity to have kin or friends that come to my aid as the slings and arrows are hard upon me. I am past providence, past prayer, past any ending other than the one everyone expects of me. Forecast by this looming silence as the world rightfully turns its back to me, the self slaughter they’ll say they saw coming all along. Fate and god share a cab with all these foregone stars.  

the dark

 I pass the blazing day in a soaked stupor, the heat melting me down to stillness and sorrow. Grease in the skillet, news on the morrow. The night arrives but the heat gives no quarter, the stifling sky smeared with smirking stars, the hubris changing state as the mortality flares up. Now it’s hot black coffee at 1:30 in the morning, lit by screen and the heavens obscured by silhouettes, music in my ears as I sit out back with my growing lonely and the buffeting of bugs. It is almost cool, it is almost quiet. Worn flesh and bone sitting out alone in the dark.

I face the west, watch the glow of the town rise above fence and tree top, the light pollution that cuts the night and dims the stars. I stare at the air and feel fool wishes run wild still, the longing leaning hard on this dismal existence. The dark plays tricks upon a hungry heart, tells it stories that play dress up with the facts. You weren’t even here when you were here, why would you be here once you’re gone? Reviled by family and friends, it’s as if my sad selfish soul goes all in on some fool dream where the way things are and have always been do a 180 all the sudden. It’s like planning for the afterlife while life runs off the rails. It’s the tired tale where the maligned orphan turns out to be the chosen one. In the dark my heart tries to tell me I’m Harry Potter. 

The night continues, the shadows loom, a little dog barks and barks. There is no respite left me. Tiny moths scuttle madly across the screen as I tip tap my thumbs along the QWERTY keys, crazy cursors run amok on the electrostatic glass. It feels as if there is a momentum gathering, a devastating reckoning due from a lifetime of deferred payments and dodged shots. The work ahead seems unbearable, lacking tools and aid, but it will be completed one way or another. Once it is finished, I think I am too. Let the bugs and the dust follow me into the darkness. Settle the last bet with a bullet or a belt.

shook

It doesn’t matter that the moon’s not out, I can feel it in the rising. It doesn’t figure that your love is gone, I can read it in the stars. The night holding the heat in its heart as the dogs rip the yard apart and the rats run the roofs. The words won’t come, the words don’t quit, the pleasure in the paradox in the looseness of the lips. Sickened with the supernatural, sticking to the storyboard, the bled out labors and the report of spent shells. A lifetime used up being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Every adventure trying to make sure the threat is shook, always in the one where, wishing on somewhere else.

You leave it by the curb to disappear it. You kick them to the curb because you want them gone. The gutters are full of trash and fools whistling away the pain that hasn’t caught up yet. It’s the middle of the night here, or the very early morning. Dull as dirt, reading lamp and fan, old man music shuffling around the room. The trials are small and ordinary, the standard time of heartbreak, the lack and the luck holding hands. Cuts and bruises and the failure of systems and organs. Work that don’t pay in anything but wounds,  an empty habit that digs me in deeper and leaves me on my own, an absence I can’t stop wishing on. The dumb longing for a love that don’t love back.

I am the ghost in the kitchen window backlit by the stovetop light. I am the slouched shoulders and the slack jaw of the local Boo Radley, rustling around in the dark. The running gag and the inside joke whenever I go outside. I stare at the horizon where Orion will soon be rising, I stare at the spot in the tree where the moon used to be, the I’ll Be Seeing You moment where my imagination got stuck. A phrase, a line, a photo from your present where I’m some slip of discarded ephemera, an outgrown moment left to the ravenous past. I slow as the world accelerates, shrinking into nothing in the rear view mirror. A name checked off, a face left to memory, a feeling that has faded from blue to black. 

pick and shovel

There is no grace to the day’s labors, broken sweat and burning sun. There is no satisfaction in place of compensation, no good hurt to the feeble form. Just another story of chance and frailty, the hands available only these two. There is neither strength of back and thew, or that of will and spirit. It’s just another last labor, a trembling unto death. The fearsome heat and the withering shadow. The betrayals near and far.

The night cools with the moon still waiting. The night comes with open eyes and empty hands. The fan pelting marbled flesh, the coffee cooling in the cup. The music is on shuffle, slipping around on the floor in its socks. The portrait above the laurels of the patriarch outshining its dull subject, a brilliant work of heart and art by a casual heartbreaker. The picture squinting its eternal lean of contempt, the reminder that this is indeed how you’re seen. The nothing much stinging with every glance.

You live long enough in contempt and derision, you mostly take it in stride. The fortitude to take arms against every ocean that arises to rub you out long gone. The power has gone out. The love all grit and gravel and the boot to the teeth. Torn flesh and wilted limbs, the old songs slide on by laughing and shaking their heads. How funny to think there was a way in the world where the music was for you. How sad to think your foolish life would be worth something all the sudden. A comic book or a cubist masterpiece left in some attic, wanted despite all the years of disinterest and neglect. The light of recognition after so long in the dark. Your only value whatever is left to extract, blood and sweat to the last ragged breath. Sledge and bar, pick and shovel swung beneath the uncaring sky, without any aid in sight. 

the numbers

 The line that’s there is never straight. Space and time assure that it’s up to something. From rhythm to rictus, from fruit to dirt, there are more than roads and travel to getting here. It’s in the way you read it, beats and breaths and good intentions. It’s in the way it sings to you, moving with the burning air through the blood. The screams and cries and triumphs of lung, tooth, and tongue. The shuffle of the deck and the numbers you assign your meaning to. You are here, and then you’re not. You are here until you aren’t me or you. Repeat until no one is anyone anymore. 

We sing the songs and the bridges burn. We sing the songs of stars and martyrs and the least likely explanation. It was there and it was fancied by some ancestors or some other antecedents, it was brought out and dusted off beneath some winter tree, or read from a book at some elder’s burial. The words don’t care for what you meant, or their phonemes, or the opinion of the dictionary. They are there, written or spoke or waiting in the songlines unto their becoming. They build up and pile on and laugh as we use them to chase our tails and tie our tongues into loose change and dumb talk. They press us up against it, kiss us until we cough and spit them out. 

One thing leads to another, something always awaiting invention, something leading us by our invective and our broken bible stories. The poem of bare skin and singed hair, the poetry of the embers and the flesh, your eyes at the moment the words and your will are one. Bare feet sinking in the sand to find the sea between your toes, the blind sun and the gibbering gulls, the wind another tide keeping time in your voice. This love and its ending, that love and its ignition, the steps leading into the forest followed in full credulity. Every moment going one way or another, every misstep still stepping, every mistake taken as a given in the calculations. Love me, love me naught, the same fate for every petal, the same way of all flesh. The math the tongue of the swallow’s fall, everything always happens at once. 

slapstick

 Heavy is the head that sees the stars, eyes aimed skyward while the road is strewn with rocks and glass. Hard is the stone that breaks the crown upon the tumble down the hill, water lost to gravity, bones bouncing down the slope. It’s in the fall and the landing. It’s where the bucket stops. There’s always someone bearing the brunt of all the sharpened laughter. The joke measured in blood and bruises and the sweetness of not being you. The face plant into the lamppost, the walk into the open manhole. It the funny you had to be there for, funny as long as you weren’t too close. There is a distance, and it’s on the inside.

Heavy is the crown made of thorns, the better to bleed you with. Supplant the grace of fragile life and limb, replace the strength with nails and crossbeams and a spear in the side for flinching. Nobody cares if you get the joke you’re living. No one cares if the sufferings aren’t their’s. Beat black and blue, and still you struggle through, the moon on the outs and the many miles to go. Every Christ an invective, every Hell and oath, they only give you so much rope. The world is always hotter and harder than your most savage determination. Frailty is the price of doing business in this human veil. Broken burned or buried the only promise the future carries.

Heavy is the heart of tomorrow, heavy are the stars that you parse. The chart so certain and the path so poorly lit, almost as if they were awaiting your stumble. A crack on the shin, a smack to the skull, the platter clatters as the glassware is dashed. The scattered laughter, the smattering of sarcastic applause, the foretold and so it goes. God snoops around the blood of your brother as you give him the old heave ho. Marked up by the business of sinning, taking every punchline in the chops, you are left to wander the wide world of wonder with little but wishes and scars for your troubles. Scuffed and mussed by all the hilarity, you wake to another day night after night. The laugh track your theme, tumbling through these wounds and words.

eight months

The day dawns like days will do, a band of bright, then all hell breaks loose. The window is still cracked, open to the sky and the wind. The bed even more broken, the dresser and the shelves in their familiar disarray. The time hasn’t flown, it has dragged and drawled over glass and gravel. It has bent the law and broken oaths. Outside the day has begun to fill in the colors, blue sky blue, and the pine boughs green evergreen. I rub my head and work my jaw. Little that would peak pique your interest even if any of your interest remained. Nothing really much at all. Just a stillness and a crawl and the same old nothing much.

It’s another set of insults and injuries. Another cup of what counts as coffee after a night without sleep. Artless and aching and making nothing from a long night’s labors. Scraped and scuffed and never enoughed as the day takes it away. Sore from crown to floor, putting on the old what for as the show just goes and goes. Hexes and charms and noodles for arms as I race the alarm. Head on my pillow, heart in my throat, that’s all you wrote. Everything but the kitchen sink. Everything thing but the straight dope. I can’t even look, you loom so large over this continued desolation. I can hardly breathe, and still you shine and seethe through the fabric of the firmament.

I was broken before this started, broken before you ever made your entrance. All that might and magic, all that ardor and lucre wasted on this wretch. This latest labor has already floored me a few times, cracked me several good ones and loosed dozens of curses down for good measure. I know it doesn’t matter. I don’t mean enough to those I work for now to rate a mention, so the less than nothing I mean isn’t a surprise. But it needn’t be surprising to hurt. The fire doesn’t burn you less because you know it’s hot. So I waste my dreams like I waste my words. In dribs and drabs, in floods and torrents. Salty tears and wished out stars, and never the only promise kept for true.  

Blood/Ghost Ratio is on hiatus

the curve

 Don’t believe everything you hear— the crazy can know they’re crazy. Don’t believe everything you read— sometimes a fool knows that they’re a fool. I’m always a few dollars short, I’m always a couple steps behind. You tell me straight out, but I might not follow. You read me the riot act, all you get is the riot. It isn’t like it’s a competition, everybody can be wrong at once. It isn’t really a contest, I’m just pointed in the same direction as the doom. Entropy spilling from my fingers, devastation dripping off my tongue. Neither a name or a number, I’m just a beggar that won’t do the asking. The aspect and the animal, the sooth that goes unsaid. Cast me out or tag me in, the gutters run red whither way I turn. Mostly I do the bleeding, but who knows when the flesh will relent? Mostly I am way behind, but you can never tell until you measure the curve. 

The day is so thin at both ends it begins to buckle in the middle. The day is so overworked, it can’t help but to fall apart. Beaten from the cement, pried from the grip of root and earth, dug out from under the waning moon and wasted stars. The night rises from the grave of the day, the rot from my wounds sunken into my stuttering heart, the steady already leeched from my spindly limbs. Time gallops past with me grabbing after its tail, time rattles down the tracks as futilely grasp and stumble. My back bends and my bones bleat, fading from their labors. All the blanks already filled out, despite my never having read them. Fate falls fast upon your crown once every possibility has been cut loose. The turn of phrase, the loud report, the reckoning of the arrow. 

It rises and falls, the shape of the data. It rises and falls as the probabilities spread. Ahead or behind or in the heavy handed middlings, we all take our places. Sooner or later we all meet our match. We race to our reckoning or fall to our means. It begins with time as thick as honey, it ends with the years thin and slick, barely speaking before the breath gives out. Barely living before too late is at the gates. I have been nothing but a waste and a curse, a blight before my ancestors, the antecedent of a thousand pains and ruins. Missing the mark with every aim, losing the point before I even get the drift. I know I’m done, I know I’m finished. These pointless words going nowhere, this wasted tale only wheels spinning in the mud. Making it all worse while waiting for a place to put the end.

senescence

There’s always a separation to that old feeling, and feeling old. The longing for the lost versus the complaining of the bones. The descent of night into the deep forest against the wounds that now heal so slow. Loosing spirals of smoke toward the heavens while the last dragonfly of the day darts and gleams while the dusk settles in. All the old grievances to take arms against as the new order within me show me where it hurts. Separated from the solace, dwindling in a dodder beneath the waning moon. Watching the children work the world as they play, unaware of all our unforgivable betrayals. There is no end to this dissolution, there is no doing enough.

I stick to the travels of shadows, I carry the fire and harbor the flame. The green leaves sway and bow as the night brings out the givens. The wind does as it pleases. The predictable passions and the sorry complaints of age as my beard grows back not salt and pepper, but maybe sugar and cinnamon, the reds gone brown as the flesh trends blue. The flies that try to make a meal of me give way to the mosquitoes that take me for a snack. A young man walks two young dogs, headphone oblivious to their course. The Monk Quintet swing Locomotive somewhere from the long ago as the night comes calling like a shroud.

It’s a sad transition, from the vital limbs to the contrition of the flesh. It’s a sorrowful passing from are to was. Tense beyond the past or present, spitting flecks of tobacco and blistering invective while she mends the world, one hand in the earth and one on the moon. The star stippled night a blur beneath the cloud of streets and rooftops while she stitches the stars and salts the oceans. Tires break traction, spinning donuts in the intersections as the junkies and the tweaks plot their fixes and capers while the woods flourish in the very beating of her heart. The magic doesn’t miss me, the feeling isn’t mutual, I decay with the crumbling ramparts all around. The weakness underscored by the labors left, the end always in sight. A shell released from the barrel, a rope reaching down from the rafters. A story always over, the night always near.

mistaken

It won’t do to make believe, it won’t do to want and wonder. It was never what you thought. No one ever told you otherwise, mistaken from stone to star, the difference between the dreaming and who you really are. A lap full of ashes and holes scorched through the sheets, the knowledge imparted again and again, the same old record played from end to end. The tried and true dies in you day by day. The one you want doesn’t want you. This will fill your nights and curse your days, walking in your skin, the ghost in your own haunting. The warning label on a discarded box.

The music is negligible and the coffee a disgrace. Nothing to celebrate, just the lines you’re used to coloring in, just the way you make it fit. You’re not enough to go around so you play it tight and close. You never were much of a sender, never a sight to soothe sore eyes. Just a puttering about the edges of the day, a scraping at the sides of dawn and dusk. You know the habits of the birds and beasts, you ken the placing of the stars. There goes Saturn, there goes Mars, the Great Bear and the leaking moon. You reach the bridge and sing the chorus, faking all the rest.

The night lands hard upon shaky legs and slumped shoulders. Old wounds have opened again. The fan drones on battering the air about, mingling breath and dust. You want it one way, but it is only ever the other. The words move through you, and they only move one way, time tripping over its heavy feet as the day slips away. Eyes weighted with unspent sleep, the gears shift and grind. Bones complain under the fat on the frame, muscles grumble under unfamiliar efforts, the window gapes and the cats yowl. You wish without thinking, the same old wish for the same gone one. You keep on, mistaken and undone, the day spent save for the dreaming.

the collateral

It’s the beating wings of the butterfly that dreamed it was a poet, it’s the one crushed flower right outside the time machine, the incident and its attendant ripples reaching out through the world. These plumes of smoke, this tide of sky spilling down, the dopplered song of the unyielding train washing over brick and asphalt. The heat that lingers in the tarmac, the albedo bouncing the wavelength back to the stars. You move one piece, every piece feels it. One person falls, the world is lessened in ways both obvious and unnoticed. Everything covered in fingerprints, everything spewing consequence. The ice cream truck plays itself off, everyone singing along.

Star stricken I stir it around, the moon full in abundant beauty. From the day before to this last let down, I descend again. The dust and grime in double time, silverfish scatter as ants reform their ranks, where there once were structures now space and debris. The wounds grow worse as the hours grow shorter, the night wanders on without. Here today, gone tomorrow. Life’s like that goes the recipe. Oh, impoverishment amid all this plenty. The fallow fields, the fecund moon.

So it’s another cup of coffee. So it’s one more sunset as it comes undone. The winds on high, the stars out of focus. This flung stone unskipped, forgotten but for the ripples. Mementos and tenders, letters folded with the dust. Bit and cut and full of splinters, nothing certain but more and worse to come, I sing and hum along. The night is full of stolen voices, car doors slam and race away. The chimes chatter and the houses blink and stare, the rats in the attic and the cat on the roof. My heart gets broke one last time, and all these empty words are the collateral. The price always paid twice, never for the better. 

demolition

We move along among the skies, waning from wound to wound. The earth shows in stone and bloom, the night goes full on moon. The catch in your voice, the rudiments that fail the truth, the world from end to end and turn by turn leaving behind these overwrought ruins. The madness catches like a fire, it spreads through these unhinged hearts and microwave emissions. The game of telephone in transition, while wood and aluminum continue to teach the merits of the flesh. Scuff and scrape, glue and tape, splinters and gravel as it all unravels around. 

It is the nature of the beast, the dust to dust volition. The ramparts all in disrepair, the damage suggests the fixing. The dream of needles pulled from feet, the tetanus cuts come running. It’s the repertoire of accidents to go wide for the collateral. A kid picks the wrong angle on a motorcycle, I’m suddenly on the job. Shifting the debris, disassembling the wreckage, while the 

labor keeps time in blood and bone. Moving from pile to pile, putting a crowbar to my departed father’s work as the day and the deed double team my gumption. Taking my resolve out in flesh and pain, the world wins again and again.

There’s more to do that is yet undone, more undoing to get to before construction can begin. I am already a tattered banner, litter slapped around by the wind. It isn’t only the demolition, but the demolition is by far the worst of it, wrong man with the wrong tools what could go wrong. Another one more thing, a question from Columbo, a date on the farewell tour. It’s not the sort of thing I had in mind with my endless asking for more. More grave than gravy, and the chains keep on coming. From stunt work to stagecraft like I was even in the union. Each day taken to task, each day a little worse for wear. Hoping for the curtain as the whole thing comes down.

sleep

The day wanders as it will, all hot and bothered, graceless and aimless and littered with glass and shrapnel. I sit and smoke with my insignificance, thinking about all the things I don’t want to think about, full of want and lack. It isn’t the day’s fault, I’ve always been like this, maybe more so now that the manic doesn’t happen so often. It isn’t as if the night has my back. The drift to drowse and dream a toss of the dice. The moon either a blue sky scar or a gravid taunt of lost love and babies exed out of existence. Flies light upon my head and hands, creep along my blood sugar wounds and my open sores. They are way ahead of the game, as the elders tend to be. 

The moon was little less than rapturous as I woke last night, my attempt as sleeping off this dismal blue only a nap to wake to the big black dog heavy on my heart. Shining bright with Jupiter and Saturn in august attendance, the remainder of my reminders of the last abandonment, the consort of her heart of bloom and stone. My own coterie of anhedonia and ideation keeping me company through the rat gnawed night. A little toss and turn, some tobacco to burn, while the symptoms get worse and the way out seems just the big one way. The moon crowned the scrubby pines and stoic cypress, as lovely and unconcerned as the last heartbreaker that left me in her wake.

Sleep eludes me still, and when it comes, it never lasts long enough. There’s always some alarm on its way, some bell beaten with a bar, some clanging to rouse me from my corner towards the next cheap shot to my chops. I doze in the early morning, I nap in the afternoon, I get a few winks in some nights only to wake in the darkened affect of my consequences. Dreams rarely bring delights or respite, just the wandering through imagined trails, or shuffling through the crowded hallways of the dead. The occasional nightmare that threatens death, but doesn’t deliver, or the return of a lost love to hate my guts and liver. Too poor for the insurance that supplied the antipsychotic that allowed me to get a solid four hours, to broke to manage the magnitude of self medication that will drop me like a brick. I would stay in my lane if there was a direction, stick to my strengths if I had any. Instead I am swarmed by words that do me no favors, left to idle on empty, waiting for an end to dead. 

at first there was nothing

The planet would not recognize a pure hearted man. The universe is always up to something. You matter, in the sense that every ant and bee matter. In the way that every bacterium and virus matters, as part of the squirming, seething, motion of the whole. You look to nature, you find no kings. You look to nature, you see the way creation plays out without all the extras. The hats and gloves and guns that we claim makes us special, even as our hierarchy and specialization makes us less, on an organism to organism level. The cosmos burns at ten thousand hells a second. Our species is due a brushback, and we have achieved the distinction of having one hell of a reckoning in the chamber, our collective itchy trigger finger firing at everything at once.

I’m out here smoking all my consequences. I’m out here watching the workings of the world without. The crows fly west, the geese fly east, none of them checking out my theories as to all the where and whys. A bumblebee briefly checking out the sorry agapanthus before speeding off to better blooms doesn’t bother with an explanation. I sit with all the in the way words, the aphorisms and platitudes that keep spilling from our yaps. I sit amid the aggregate art and music inside the lines of this negligible architecture, an iteration of the species that somehow fails both the biological and the cultural continuity. Not so much an aberration, but the outcome of the numbers at play.

The swallows do their Shakespeare bit, swooping and startling their way through the sky. The measure of the probable in the possible, the song written before there were songs. We spin upon the cooling sphere as we keep adding carbon into the gathered atmosphere, listening to the idiot, useless thieves that we seem to think deserve a say about our common resources. Word stupid and acclimated to our own hollow agency, we mistake all sorts of made up things for reality, reality disinterested in our opinions. So we die and starve and are beaten because of some spells cast by priests and wizards, claiming freedom with every stolen opportunity, claiming cleverness and courage for the cowards who keep us around to beat upon and steal from while we pull their plows. Hubris in our own individuality, pretending that we make the world out of the ether. Gulled by those with only the short game in mind, we play out our betrayal. The sun sets and the stars we look to couldn’t tell the difference, our distance the only thing we know.