feeding every fiend

 Sunset and the day closes shop, balls up the leaving light and tosses it aside. The atmosphere spills, shadows spill like sand through clumsy fingers as the fist of night slowly closes, the shining sky squeezed until we see stars. Smoke spills into the husk of heaven, the crow swept winds soften and still. The break of the horizon, the magic of the becoming moon, the tug and tension within mind and skin. The moon unseen, a call a hunger a prophecy. The card you cut naming you now. 

The dusk swells, the forms fade and fill. The tongue of telling lolls, drowsy with smoke and summers, the road runs down the street. Every night the cracks in my heart. Every night I wake and unwind. This story of bones and beatings, of stones and glass and sorrow. This drift amid the days and the dead, feeding every fiend. The fire burning hotter and brighter as the night arises from whispers and twilight. The flame the moon the feast. 

Again the night comes unattended. Again my station is all prayer and paint. The ache and the drag and the dull report of this native frame. The grumbling joints and the jealous guts, the old engine, the broken seals. And all at once, the moon arrives, carefree and casual and offhandedly divine. Through treetops and above the architecture she beams and beckons. Smoke curls, a paltry offer for the plenty of the show. Shining through the measure of the spread, a slow read for the long of night. 

crush

Once there was proof,

dusty letters and precious art,

your love in your own hand,

deft and clever and 

never there to stay. Once

the words flowed free,

stickers and cartoons and

the poetry and promise

infused into the art of your

passing fancy, paper

hearts and emoji strewn inboxes 

the crush you held between 

tooth and tongue

dispatched with familiar ease,

a love you rose and bedded 

down with another oversight,

something dead and brittle

crunching underfoot.  

anima

It is the faintest of kisses,

a lip smack blown from a palm,

a breath behind a mask.

This flavor that lingers

between the burdens of breath and 

sky, this tremble laid in

the loamy bed beneath 

the heart, this stirring 

in the earth, blind root and

subtle fungi casting a line,

setting the spell, the shine of

the moon, the glow of the horizon

full of the runaway sun.

It is the mirror gray with breath,

the tincture of seeing and self.

This kiss of wings filling,

the press of the atmosphere blue

boned before the weight of evidence 

fills the glass, eyes fixed upon

the eyes reflected, at once

the birds burst forth

wings tearing through heaven.

the crow calls closer

It is in the way the crow calls in the distance, gathering clique and kin. It is the way the soft blue sky is pieced and parted by leaf and branch, a puzzle to ponder and nudge. The day again ends, the sun all giddy up and go against the glowing west. The blind dog walks in circles, all bump and muzzle. The gray skips a few shades to paint the streets, a crow grazes it’s wings in the dip of sunlight and the permeable blue above a house. The crow calls closer, still saving up for the night’s flight home.

The atmosphere shifts gears quick, the sun in retreat, the retread of old eyes working the read. The joints begin their chatter, aches opening through the map of the meat. Cold fingers tapping at the screen, the startle of a crushed fast food cup reporting from the street below. Traffic passes, engines rev and tires whisper, the tarmac read aloud by the restless rubber. The bones catch their breath and carry on, anchoring the fickle blood and breath in their ceaseless sojourns. Steam and stones and this sloppy solitary. My heart calls out with the night coming on.

Show me a sign, give me the word, leave me a little luck or loot. A grace to fold the night around. A blessing that sleeps over. Neighbors walk their dogs past while Gilda dances growling at the fence, a bone in her teeth. No play, no respite, no words worth the sharing. The world turns, the sun slips away. I say it so it was said. I say it in case we are together in some expired never. Whim and want, the dusk fills in the rest. Street and tree and negative space. This fire plain to see. 

spectrum

The drear hits hard as the days grow dire, the chill in the wind, the slow in the step. The world goes on, never a wonder for my want. The world goes on, as bad as they can get away with. I lie on my bed and stare at the lamp, trying to temper bone and flesh with a flex to flush the blood. I ache and wish well past my station, watching as the good’s ground down by murderous buffoons and tiresome demons. Illness in the house and sickness in the streets. Doom comes thundering and I’m just getting warmed up. 

The lonesome grows sharp and hungry, bares its bones to the looming season, smiling like a skull. Hour after hour of wish and word, whittling away at the staves of the day, shaping sunsets around clumsily stepped circles. Pressing kisses against the heartache horizon as the sun goes away, watching the moon glide by towards your mind’s eye, looking to the constellations for a clue. How sad we stay, how hard we hurtle. The least wind a savagery, the night named now.

The stories I tell myself never quite scan. An exchange of words, and something happens. No more words, and everything ends. I know I won’t ever quite get it, not when my heart gets started. The gone says so much more, but I hardly ever listen. I set the steps in place as the wind whips and the sun runs off. I wish and want, I work the words but the words don’t work, the awful empty night rises. I see past the horizon, I see through the earth, but there’s always more bandwidth to miss. I would ask you, but I’ve already been told.  

dread

These winds run riot

while illness crowds the walls,

banging through the dog door

sweeping clean the roof.

The animals huddle here

the light so soft and low.

We listen as the sky speeds down,

listen for a stirring or a sign

that the sickness doesn’t sleep,

some sound to replace this dread

gone to bed sick to wake up dead.

loner

 I smoke as the day runs down, the sun on its errands and the wind with its teeth. Music plays, and I read and write and exhaust my portable diversions. The moon is out and is a mood already. Birth and bloom and reflected glory. Halfway to the big reveal, gravid with ache and intention. I sit alone, having missed my mark a million times, and fucked up more than a few good things. I sit alone, a loner in all the readings and in the real. Like any other name, it was given. Like my given names, it is no gift.

Blue smoke and the becoming moon. The chilled wind in rests and riots, leaf spun notation and the turn of the words. The neighbor children shout and whisper as the day leans deep into the shadows, fitful and wild in the climb to night. The dogs lie, glum and defeated feeling in the cool waste of the front yard, fallen leaves tangled in the chain link fence. I fill my ashtray without interruption or remark. Audiences with old weirdos are seldom sought, and I lose friends like an autumn tree sheds every leaf. I man my station beneath the uncaring dusk.

The twilight brings its sunken light, filling up each crack and crevice, bunching in the corners and hanging under the eaves. The sky still struggling with color, the moon passing on its stolen glory, the trees all shimmer and shake. The night closes in with its insistence and its stories, reminding me of the company I am keening for, telling me what I already know. All the missed chances, and the chances I imagined. The silences that have gone on too long to disturb, the conversations now too strange to start. A name given in passing, pointing out the flavor of stranger, judged and sentenced and doing the time. 

reach

 The day shoved its way across the sky and the sun had had its fill. The brittle yellow leaves flutter and bow with the meddlesome wind as turkey vultures catch updrafts against the becoming blue sky moon. The streets dance with leaf and litter, whirlwinds and the wake of passing traffic, the train wail scraping the walls right on time. The front porch yet again, smoke and the day’s end every day. The tree tops reach for the heavens, sunlight rustling bright upon the celebratory boughs. I reach for you, just words and want, and all the knowledge needed to know the unlikely of it to my bones.

Moon marked, wing swept, pale bones and the insistent smoke. Pine needles in the gutter, spiders in the eaves, the night is whet with greens and blues. The trees move as if each was attended by a separate wind as it dashed and it spins. The laze of the setting sun as the leaving light climbs up roof and crown. The idle attachment of eye and tongue, bird and child and flickering painted shadow, the words just running down the surface. Just here and there and the news of the moon.

In my heart there is rust and ruin, but there are still all the silly Christmas wishes and redemption narratives too. Simple palaver between the entity and the animal, the drift between deed and form, the distillation back from language. Dusk swings down from every branch, dusk goes skipping down the street. The trees do what they can, falling asleep in the gauzy starlight. The trees do what they must, swaying from the crown on down. There are words, neither mine or yours. They wander through the world beyond and between us, working their way around. The day goes with the last crow calling. 

roots

I have visited the graveyard, but not the grave. The grave happened later, as it so often does, after death come down the way. Long after the last cold kiss, and the bequeathed ashes, and the many vivid dreamlike reckonings. It was a lovely, small hillside plot, in the shade of a well tended grove of poplars. Kin and distant cousins and the blood that bonded but never took. The times attended, the deeds all done. A small parcel and a modest stone, the earth again receives. The journey over and over, over amid worm and root. 

I don’t know if I’ll ever make it to the grave again. There’s a lot of ground to consecrate and the hoofs don’t hold up like they used to. The goat has gone fallow for a long unnamed season and managed to wake up late. The trick of tending the days ahead all but lost in this glut of all tomorrows, a need to redistribute the adoration from the symbols to the soil, a blessing that lends a shoulder to the burdens. The magic moves from mouth to mouth, the first breath and the eternal breathing, each one fuel and bloom. The fire awaiting the blessing of sentience. 

I won’t linger long in this latest eternity. I won’t take up the mantle without it offered, and this time around I must have missed the ring. The yard you paced for ages, the work you took from the earth and air, the press of hands and mind are a disarray though your ghost still walks the property. I hold onto old debts and lost obligations, taking the brunt I may. I tend the other end of destiny, the scars and the sharp parts, the boxes and the bones. I sink my husk into each season, turn with the moon and sun, the depths always reaching out. The road rises up from the roots. 

recipe

The days come upon us, either ragged travelers or outlandish bandits, bowl or cutlass brandished in advance of the latest onslaught. We bow out, we battle on, sometimes both at once. The dance is fierce within even our most day laden weary, the struggle ever all we are, the deep insistence of life. The dance is on us even in silence and in the still. This turn of dust and shadows and sparrows’ wings. This pot always on the burner.

In the beginning, the soil ascends. Others crept and crawled and split in the sunlight and the soup, but the soil was our consecration, it was the covenant and the recipe. Stones beaten down for a billion years, while fire rained and rain and the heavens boiled and burned. The web and the weaving, the whispers running through root and gut and earth, this is the foundation of all the us there is. Life still runs on those ancient engines and first words. Meat and magic and the turning dirt.

I remember before the silence, before the lights went out. The ancient light aglow somehow on these vagrant horizons, the repetitions and the net benefits. Your hands at once a continuity. Your eyes the only tomorrows I could see. Now this breathtaking vacancy, and a soul on loan from life’s long game, the beauty bright in the distance. Now the nameless hunger given a name and blessed face. Another ingredient surrendered to the dish.

lore

 I hanged from that tree for years. Longer than the magic would allow. In the gray and in the green, my being ruffled through like a pocketed pick of cards. The redeal is still in the works. The old ways always have a say, in our breath and bones and words run astray. The meaning moves around a lot, the gods aren’t who they say they are, the names got it all wrong. You called me up, you cut me down. The forest is all a whisper. The world is turning fast.

So we trail our shadows. So we gather our dead. My father’s ghost in my father’s house, his grave three thousand miles and going. The shape of thoughts left as shelves, as plotted fence and trained vine. My mother’s life all glimmer and dwindle like the stars just turned out by the dusk, this house full of bad dreams and detritus, this house of years long gone. It took a while to learn that living in a tomb isn’t being interred in one. It took awhile for the magic to do the math. 

I can not say what the world is intending. I will not speak of other’s duties or their days. The moon has drawn her bow, pacing your fickle heavens. The night is loosed, sparkling and hiding, streaking up the sky. The rhythm there, heart and breath and the wheel of life. The fire there as you breathe in, the machine turning over in the language of stunned stone and flummoxed water, grace flowing between the gleaned powers and the acknowledged appetites. I fall in step with the dance and the night, knowing no lore. Just words and names, and the ache that endures.

evergreen

Oh, but it is so blue

above it all, this sky blue sky

up past these branches,

strategies to gather the sun

even though they show

these shrinking graying days 

in the push and pierce

needle and bough this ancient 

mechanism to translate 

the sun into the reaching will of

the earth, stooped and staggered 

before the heavens know

where to begin and end

fingers splayed, the sun beaming through. 

in smoke and spit

 Of course the heat held out. These were the hours of melting ice, the time of the rising tide. The words would wail and wail and the days went by unchanged. The long lonesome in smoke and spit. The turn of wings in a burning blue sky. The wait of want and the wait of truth, and the place you save that no one’s going back to. Some old man to sit and smoke, staring down the difference between the days. Some old man to wait and watch, never missing who you are.

The afternoon is all rushed traffic and slow shadows spilling from roof and tree. It is heat and a clamor of birds, a stir run through the innumerable sparrows. The rumble of a quarter ton truck and the hush of a prim electric like plastic caught in its wake. The dogs laze and pant, though the shade is aged and thick. The world ends in slips and slivers, lapses of etiquette and service outages. The world ends when you can only speak of its pieces, once it has stopped not being one thing and has become its becoming. Only word and witness in my keep, I witness mostly the outtakes of other lives. I see you, but I don’t know you well enough to wave.

An unseen falcon calls, then flies away in swoops and slices and the power of invisibility. The song and the thought caught in my mind at the time round it up to something. Here like a tree or a chair or a cracked foundation. Here like words on a page, drizzled with lapses and punctuation. The where and the why just what after what. Another cup of coffee, another cigar, another fantasy. The love tends the stones and the ashes, another day to burn away here on this faraway shore. 

altar

Someday it will be that branch,

the dead leaves all a flutter

brushed by the sweep of

raptor wings you think,

that branch laden still

with leaf and lichen,

the sky blue and bare and wingless

the heat still seething through

the stillness of things, dripping 

with the intimacy of peace of mind.

Some day it will be that prayer 

written on the atmosphere, coiling

intention towards the ever other,

the wadded napkin tumbling 

down the curb, the gutter 

dry and silent as we melt 

moment to moment, skin to skin

busy in the noisy nothing 

fitted to our slights and fevers

our blessings always burning up.

the licks

 All these sand swept parapets in this desert of another’s dreams. Brutal dunes and burning winds and the bright feathers of some beautiful bird. Another story of depths and breadths and the epic stretches of existence. Bright stars and cool oases, a song spun from the dross of every song spilled along a traveler’s tale. Time has a way of wearing you down. Bright lights, big city, the way you look tonight. All the roads at once, your twilight glamours, my rusty misdirects and my cheap reveals. The story keeps going, beyond and between us. I settle into a sad magnanimousness, love like the loves says, whatever the licks I take. The dreaming runs thick between us. The days flock before us.

The shadows brace the steeling sky, breathing its blue towards gray, the weird patina of this startled atmosphere as the sun ducks and covers. Dogs barking and the bassline giving way to bongos, sirens and strange birds and the breeze groping around. The stillness as the light appraises the stations of the hills and houses, clinging to a yellow, tugging at a green as the last glimpses are offered up. I burn leaf and flower, I smudge the sky, and feed the ashtray. I brace for stories and stars.

The sun is gone, the streets go grim with traffic and stray crows. The surrender to shadow as the twilight clasps us tight, the dog that barks and barks always in the dusty distance, the last gathering of beast and bird as the gloaming blooms into night. Cars that speed and slow, brake lights all aglow and the wonder pressing in. I stretch in the crush of all this bone and skin, gravity and gravitas crossing wires somewhere in the so and so, this pushy tomb and these glib enchantments. It goes gray as the earth turns away, flinging us through day and dream, laying out the labyrinth each night. Alone you go, and I will always go with you. All X and no map. The new moon paves the way. 

refresh

 I stand with my back to the sunset as a crow calls the dusk, the wailing labors of a train cutting through the cyclorama, the day thick with heat my heart thick with smoke. The shadows scramble as the sun goes down, all at once tree tall and crowding the architecture. I settle into my tumble of spells and appetites, burning slow in this iteration of the earth, breathing through the passageways and corridors of the world. I lay out the footwork to a dance that hasn’t stopped for a billion years, thinking of bright blooms and brutal days. In interminable circles and deep machinery I offer up.

You turn and turn in your rips and healings, moving from the heavens to the prayer, moving with the old ones moving with the water. The wears and tears. A hundred geese just turned northeast, and I think of the windows awake in your direction. The bath time battles, the streaming retreats. Spin a little chrysalis, stitch up a few seems. You attend to what needs tending, your leaps and pirouettes aside. The earth that you nurture has not forgotten.

I smoke just like in all the pictures. I love you just like that cartoon goat. There are places I will always be, things I will always breathe in as long as the breathing keeps. The names aren’t ever so much that you need to say them, but saying them helps somehow. The work of the earth is all of us, we couldn’t keep it to ourselves if we tried. As I carry the torch, so shall I tend the flame. As you mend I feed the fire and the earth. Through the aimless days and towering nights I burn unto. 

scale

It was a furnace even early

hot especially for the fall

the trees tall all around you

the lore left you by the trail.

The dreams spill like champagne 

popping off and flowing over

though the clean counter and

the tea cup keep company

the words walking through

your open door. One moment 

all skin and kisses, the next

all bones and breaks. At once

you wade the ocean

clothed in clouds and tresses,

the waves barely above your knees,

bridges and cities beneath 

your windscaped being

as you occlude the burning sun.

Or nested awkward in a pocket,

wrestling with knuckle and thumb

caught in this urgent bloom

breathless before this weighted gaze,

this greedy fist pawing

at your every moment, the light

warm and plain upon your wrist.

skyward

 The crow slows the air as it jumps off the roof, swinging down the sky stretched out in the fists of its feathers, holding the atmosphere as it lands beside the curb. The day is hot, and thick with wings and miracles. From the rustle of doves in the pines to the tall slow spirals of wafting vultures, the flocks and feathers knock and tether the stirrings, the birds weave in the words to witness. Simple acts of flight followed by a bottled blue stillness. Black coffee to witness, words to loose skyward.

Time is a river, time is a tree, it’s a spell when I tell it and a catch when I call it. The grace comes free and changes skins like in a dream, the turn from beast to bird, the tree beneath the sky above. The streets rumble and the music drizzles down the glass, the stir of bird and bone the song of stick and stone, as the names wait dark and wild. Hot coffee by cup and pot, the day by truck and fly. On the other side of association, like a pile of greeting cards unsent because you got stuck on a postscript. On the side of the conversation that’s gone out.

This is the beating of the breath, the stirring in the atmosphere of our millions of essences, the work of wings between frame and sky. The heart holds on, this fire, this foundry. This heart holds out, old magic, ancient lore. The crow calls sharp across the tilt of shadows and the blazing west. David Bowie sings from beyond the beyond, his hips strange and slow to the dead man’s dance. The earth turns as it tumbles, staggering from day to day and night to night. The press of each breath as it fills and exhausts you. The feel of your elbows, sharp in your arms as you hold yourself tight. Every word the work of wings in your sky, every word tangled through your roots as you rise. 

conversation

There aren’t so many bolts from the blue, there aren’t so many you don’t says. I’ve been talking to you without your help for so long that I forget how far apart we were, and how much further you are now. How little I knew, how much more I do not know. Words I say each day to your radiant absence don’t amount to much in the world that is ravaging away all around us. Words I said to you never mattered all that much. This untended distance, this one side style was meant to leave me low. It has, but it has taught me what to hold.

Hold my tongue, don’t hold my breath. Once it goes south, there’s no resurrection. I am no longer welcome in your world, as I am not welcome in many worlds that were and are yet to be again. I was never invited, and I never will be. The more to the story I imagined or you missed. Clothed in devotion, looking for a way back out.

It’s sorry that it’s still you, and you aren’t even pretending anymore. I’m sorry that I still add to the embarrassments. I stick with your blood, I stick with your breath, the bones of your clever hands hanging beside your scuffed knees. The travels of cloth against your thighs, the troubles that come calling in your night. Your genius and your aspirations, your ravening direction and the self deception of your muddled intent. You among the bright and the beautiful, as it should be. I love you though you have turned away. I love you the way I should have all along. 

unless

Unless I look you dead in the eye

all my words are useless,

too used to the shifting red and blue

as passions heat and cool,

too used to the pretty birds in a row

to realize there’s a target

on every heads or tails, the pressing 

sentiment or hard knocks taught

obsolescence of all my tricks and treaties.

Unless you tell me straight to my face 

all the words are mysteries, 

too used to the preconditions and qualifiers

as the rhetoric goes from soft to stick

too used to the stirred crown and

the raptor’s shadow telling 

your truth, your strong wings

the tearing of the very air

the treatise on the ministry of the swift.

Unless I am shown I won’t know 

all my hopes are dashed,

too used to the ebb and flow of

powers vast and undisturbed,

too used to the blood inked

blanks and the startling marginalia 

to realize the story’s not for me,

the attendant of rot and ruin,

the conversation over long ago. 

the golden hour

The last light as the sun

closes shop and makes its excuses,

the early day, the places to be,

going through it’s pockets,

checking it’s keys the way

we used to look at watches—

that spark to the start,

the when we began, the long reach

across the table tossing 

all the shadows around,

the blinding bright before the curtain,

the moment where ancient forces

rewrite the world in Plato’s caves.

There in the knowing, the as it

happens always going off,

the breath staggered magic

the story always looking for

a start, the once upon or

so they say, the light

so bright as the light is leaving,

a wearing of all your ache

and want, the meat and the mystery 

there at the crossroads,

showing the old three’s a crowd the door,

all at once something to be said—

just this, this too. This too. 

steam

The heat only has a few ways to go,

to punish the flesh of tongue and lip,

to sulk together in the stubborn steel,

or step between matter’s stages,

ascend from the hot black coffee

into the wind whipped 

nymphs of playful, dancing steam,

tickling gray beard and

rueful smile alike 

ever the coquette, the delighted ingenue

spilling her traces and stirring 

her hair and her skirts,

the lilt of a just brushed lip

a kiss of condensation and 

the bright gaze of unseen eyes,

the breath of being easy

lingering inside of such beauty,

the loveliest belle laughing in your lap

knowing she’s yours for sure,

knowing for sure she’s gone—

this kiss, this touch,

this glimmer, this ghost—

this leaving that you love the most.

shake the tree

I take a swallow from the steel cup, forgetting briefly that the coffee has cooled, the cup beset by nervy flies and the ruthless breeze of autumn waking up. I take the rest as time spent if not time served, a punishment befitting the life. Always aggrieved and put upon, the thinking pours it on thick. The cherished voice becomes a relentless quiet, no other to bounce the signal off. The precision instrument wears out gears and uses old software, until there isn’t prose or poem left, just the letters unsent and the fruit of the wrong headed decision tree. I pour another steaming cup, stuck to one that long ago shook me off. What was once no longer suited, the move so flawless you could hardly see it happen. From a long dead branch, I am slowly catching up.

It is in the way language lingers on the tongue, the root so true, the ghosts still warm. It is the oath and the intention, these lonely intersections and closed scenic routes, these long empty hours burned down to hunger once the anger was rendered into flesh. It is an alone I fail to convey across this desert of sounds and symbols, the graveyard of the lexicon, hoping the reader has an ear for bones. The absence so fervent and demanding, a tantrum of feelings banging around the box, all four chambers chomping at the bit. The absence so natural and right it lands like a body shot. No longer want to is a hard reason but plenty reason enough.

The words, these words, won’t let it lie. They take the hammer, they take the pick, sometimes they even push the broom. The dead leaves shake, ripples in the wind, the atmosphere changing shifts. I drink coffee hot enough to steam my glasses, hot enough to place a mortal kiss upon my lips, swallowing embers and sparks. The world moves quickly, but I move slow, dragging out the slippery glimmers and the ravages to the traveler. The season to the last leaf, the earth to the root and stones, the held breath and blinding star. I love you for who you are, missing all the checking in. I have been this way for eons, kiss the earth, shake the tree. The words swimming through your blood. 

keening

Time is told from either side

the clock grinding on the wall

the time until and the time since

turning over together

in the compost of your thinking,

from the dazzle mechanic to

the bride of the sky, from dead pet to

dead pet, with the dead elders to

work the earth of days and dreams.

The word itself arrives a great bird,

high and sharp against

the dark parts of heaven, a sound

too soaring and sinking at once,

as if itself a placeholder 

part of some unnavigable inheritance

left over from the syllabary of seafarers,

a word to attach to the sojourns of

the albatross or some sailor’s salty longing 

gazing at the moon drowning as

the ache for another halfway ‘round the world.

It is to say that my heart

is a ravening animal and

a faithful flame, it is a wing turned

into the cold and brutal wind,

it is a letter sent towards uncertain shores,

a voice sure and sudden,

a weeping through the evenings seams. 

remembrance

The small things come hardest—

the fragment of geode,

the obsidian shard

muddled in the dust,

the stacked books and

favored feathers, postcards 

and lovely works, art

crafted in proof, oh proof

that once I was loved

or at least time was served,

this ravaged sediment of

labor and skill, letters left

to their tenses, gifts strewn

across my life. Nothing

so treasured, nothing so

beloved as the little glimmers,

nuzzling the nape of your neck,

forever’s thrilling shift to never.

sweetness

It isn’t only the labor of the honeybee or

the sacrifice of the sugarcane,

this sweetness 

I seek, it is my work

through this world and the words

I founder in, the heft of these wishes,

the hunger of a love-starved heart

bidden to the hopeless and

the gone, clinging to the wheel

as it turns and turns though the sweet

comes as strong black coffee and 

the burn of the cheap brown cigar,

smoke rising in plumes and coils,

the hard head of a problem dog or

the ghostly tread of the rooftop cat

deigning briefly to sleep beside me,

though the night is too warm and 

I sweat fresh constellations at all hours,

this sweet like the cactus flower awaiting 

the tiny bat to pollinate, the wild

laughter of the children when loosed 

upon a world that is more than ready,

all concrete curbs and the glint

broken bottles offer up, blood hungry

geometries upon black asphalt.

It is your healing hands in their ministry,

honey sweetness as they gathered my love.

Sunday Song

It isn’t mine to sing though

the singing isn’t stealing,

the song picks its own

team, not just the sparrows 

chittering in the pines,

not just the dogs

raising hell at the neighbors 

shuffling down the driveway like

lords of the earth, haughty about

the home. Our voices raised

like the shock of defeat,

raised like the baffled revenants 

beneath some Christ-y craft or

muddled magics, we sing

down the crisp leaves, we low

the bright out of the sky

sad machines that function with

all due gravity and the green that’s gone.

But the sky is blue and the black 

crows choose their riots amid

the clamor of cars crunching leaves,

the late flies, the blinding sun

bowing on its way out.

We sing and sing

wash us clean, love us true

our Sunday song loud and strong,

hand after empty hand, the long day 

lost as I sing and sing.

no one’s calling

The sky goes blue for a breath or two, the last lashings of sunlight stirred into the heap of smoke, heaven always holding out for someone better. The day is heat and habit, all the young folk loosed past the limits of their patience, as I hang around with the dregs and drags. The sun will set, and I will again be erased. I will be erased.

The day never loved me, the day never does. The night won’t abide me, too much left undone before the setting sun. The smoke sits thick inside the skin, dirty lungs and squandered heart, fire sale soul flickering behind dusty glass. Time is unkind to the ones that never fit, disowned by our life’s loves, cast askance over steel and stone. I’m the name left off the list. I’m the one that remains unclaimed.

No one’s calling back, no one’s looking up. This day burns down, the moon waiting in the wings. There’s nothing to be done. An old man with nothing to say and all the words in the world. The party already running riot next door, glasses sliding down my nose, long past the age of invitation. People tend to their children, their tomorrows thick with family and friends and all the reasons that they will. I sit on the porch, missing someone that hasn’t missed me in months. I sit here, no one saying a word. 

breathe

 Again the night comes down from the eaves and trees, shadows filling up the scenery, the day done at once. The day came and went without any help from me, things ever as they are always. The sun swinging by without asking, the light comes and goes, leaves me to my notebooks and my catacombs. Around in sick circles I carry the ember, the torch I bear, the flame I keep. The west just a whisper, and I speak your name. I breathe the wicked atmosphere and I say your name.

I swallow the black coffee, I smoke the smoldering cigar, I hold close the roots and the radiance, the linger and the light. I dwindle down to the vigil, I take the moment to my heel. The heart settles the rhythm, the blood breaks upon the shores, entity and organism. The animal and its eyes. The night falls fast, buried and burned and stirring in its tomb. I tie blessing after blessing to the tail of the moon, awaiting the invocation. Here for the slow unfolding, waiting for the invitation.

The hours slow, thickening in the smoke and shadow, gaining their depth in the dark. Cars glide by, the trembling reach of headlights, the taillights hoping no one looks. The flesh shines in slips and slivers, the turning car, the garage lit and tumbling white into the night. The breath struggles through the stones and gargoyles strewn about the atmosphere, the landscape of the badlands clambering through the lungs. Lonesome, I crave the devotions of adoration, the magic of the stations met and the ritual kept. The empty seeps and pools, the animal anchored between earth and moon, the entity awaiting your shine. Eyes open wide, all for the asking.

full

The moon reaches down

through the iron of

my roots, shining

soft amongst my crown of stars.

I cup my hands to drink my fill,

then I drink again,

we talk the days,

the nights we tell

our secrets and our spells.

Oh becoming One,

oh declaimed radiance 

amorous upon the hunt

the heart takes wings

while the rest takes time.

I look up, eyes unmet meadows

wet with forest breath,

sparking with stellar salt

the moon every blessing met.

punctuation

 The indulgent magic back about, the mystery running free, sink a stone behind the earth the shine that finds the moon. The book broken at the spine, the ash a second coming of the sin. The smoke and stones in equal numbers, the numbers plugging in, it is within the becoming. The story at its most, as we bathe in the ricochet of sun and cinder, everyone with something to say. The crossroads blur with traffic, the center all around. 

It is a boast, it is a blessing, a passing of the flame in the gathering of light. The burden of the repetition to keep the beat. The silken rocks of ritual, the press of flesh and bone, the pathways at the intersections. The tensile strengths of steel and skin. All the rapture of the arrival passing through, another emanation of the station while the passengers change. The words behind all this wanting and the way each word becomes you. The containment of location in the entity you breathe out. 

I am just the notation of intention. I am the sheets to bear the score. The shine climbing the drear dying tree. The figures you see if you stare. You sing out and the song is there. You listen and the music looms. The gaze when the moon goes looking, the appetite when the hunger speaks. The drowsy bloom of shape and languor, the body there and gone. The chorus that joins in your least inkling, the orchestra that lets loose wild thunder at your whim. Your heart beats out its ellipses, your breathing knowing the score. You at once all want and will, the magic in your mouth.