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.