into stone

The heart is reckless mechanism. The heart is an essential worker. The heart won’t leave well enough alone. Carrying torches and keeping time. Beating the blood red, threading the sky through through the flesh, stitch by stitch a tuck and a tich. Holding the flame and carrying torches, spelunking through the wheezing depths of the soul’s long dark night. The heart climbs the mountain, the heart gazes into the distance past your disappearance, the horizon just another line. Something drawn in the sand, something visible from satellites, something that the map pretends while the sky washes away.

The day has flattened out, the light clinging with a strange disconnect from the source, the cumulus clouds fitted in curl and scrapings. Dusk comes strolling along well before the sun goes down, the weight of an effortless day surprisingly heavy in the heart. Nothing unexpected, nothing even a little new. An old man thick with stubborn insistence, missing a whole lot of lost. An old man made of mortal wounds and no tomorrows, missing long gone ladies of inconsistencies and fonder absences. The heart wants and wants, that’s what keeps the motor running. The heart plods on, despite all the bitter curses leveled against it.

Oh for the tender and the true. Oh for a little sweetness to take away the bitter’s bite. Living is okay for a certain type. Living goes on long into the epilogue, the common cruelties and the steady descent. The light goes out, the windows turn from mirrors with the advent of the night. The cold carries even on an unseasonably warm day. It works its way into the bones, it sings out in every lonely ache. Leave a light on to find your way around. Leave a light on so someone knows there’s somewhere to go. The joints go stiff, the fists grow hard, but the heart is caramel soft. Marshmallow fluff in these drear days of the growing alone. For all the tender taken away it should have turned to stone. The sundown comes without a fuss. The heart beats on, sticky with hurt and hope.

the moon as it moves

It comes at the uncertain spin of the spell, the benediction by owl or crow, bright atop the tattered crowns of fall. It comes with the weight of the season, tinsel and turkeys and the faith to follow stars. The crisp air turns without a word, at once stilled and startled, the ancient aspect always revealed on sight. The moon treads the boards, climbing up the scaffolding of tree and roof and power line, ignoring skeptic and worshipper alike. Breathless and bared with the wax on bright, the albedo all the onus the motion requires. The moon as it moves, the night as it falls.

There is the point in a dream where the dreaming comes up, where someone shifts skins or the place or action speaks to the husk in such away that the distinction between awake and asleep becomes moot. The flesh and the mystery part ways for an instant and the dream slips out for a bite or a beat. The moon is the traveler of that path, the mundane and the magic mingling in the depths of the machine, the push of the dreaming through skin and bone. The sky, the moon, your eyes alone. The gates open between the heavens and the heart. Blood beating this becoming goddess through the dirt and fever of your knotted flesh.

The moon wanders west. Soon into the tangle of the pines to shine and loom. Soon into the slender ingress of my open window to gossip and to beckon. I hone my alone against the night sky and the scrabble of rat and root. Watch the firmament, watch your step, there is nothing that the night won’t take. I’ve given up on not giving up, so the enchantment hits hard. The moon plants its hints, the moon plays its hand. All my want and lack, the lonely bones, the dreamy seeming call of the impossible and the unlikely. I watch the moon as it moves, envious and aching from the promises it breaks. Between the words and the world we witness, the magic an aspect of this terrible beauty. The drag of this gravid moon upon all this unloved dross. 

innumerate

I tire of the calculations. The probabilities and the place in line, the countless reminders that I don’t count, the proportions and the dishes served best cold. The numbers don’t add up, at least not the way I add them. In tens and threes and multiples of nine. In ones and twos and black dog blues. There’s never number enough. There’s never a way I measure up.

Maybe it’s the medicine, walking in the footsteps of the burned down and broken, the high lonesome always howling it out in my head. Maybe it’s the blows and the blood, too many added deficits on top of the natural absences, concussed and cursed to the core. The holidays heap it on, all the ones gone missing from the rosters. The ones that wouldn’t be there if you paid them. Holes held open by the asking, the answer always in the hurt.

Time to close up the hoped for channels. Time to lock up the doors left open for words to get in. The math eludes and the good has gone uncommon. Graceless pablum served to unwilling strangers the only brand I offer, the offering all but spat back in my dumb mug. What I got either isn’t there or is the sort of thing no one wants for long. The long run of the short form is the contempt of them you counted on. The long and short of it is the same old damn alone.

you are my animal

scent and skin and giving in

when instinct takes its turn

breath and bone and coming home

when you finally close your eyes,

a twitch while you sleep, a howling

coming hard at the moon.

the fingers pressed into your hips,

the teeth with a taste for your throat,

a worry of eyes in the pitch of night,

a scruff for a heedless fist.

your meat is the map of my mind,

your mind the illumination to

the mysteries of the moon.

you are the boundless wilderness 

the nest I make in forests 

found in the ancient depths of

my animal heart. You are my animal 

the one I know is true and real.

medicine show

The short timer sun sticks a finger in my eye, rays of reckoning rubbing negatives into my retina, smoke unfurling from my fingers. Birdsong bubbling down to the roots from the crown, the stories they tell to soothe the skies and ward the stones mingling with the put on poignancy  the dusk is always hustling. Vague hints and fool’s prophecy as they put the day’s business to rest. Sights turned to silhouettes as the air cools and the smoke brushes my tongue with silk and cinders. Another day gone slow then done.

Sparrows burble and hustle, fitting in a quick meal before the long dark night. The nights run long of late, and I have been deep in the labyrinth looking for a Minotaur to take out my insides on. The tide of night washes in, the horizon still soft golds and drifting pinks, dusk filling out and climbing down from the rooftops and trees. I sit quietly and take my medicine. Thick smoke, black coffee, and beauty so far away you break.

I am the silt among the sacraments, the source of these sacred texts. Taking in that last bright sky, watching the moon as it looms in your night, written in some forgotten margin or spilling from the pages of a marooned book. I sit amid your garden, and remember where you put the stars. I am the map of furtive moments, the agent of the ink before it flows. Waking in the words that find you, turning in the cauldron of your bones. We will meet before and after, filling in every little in between. We will meet in all the places, though I am not there. The breath before it’s spoken. The medicine in the show. 

thankful

Everybody dies— what makes you so special?

The fear of the finality,

the sentence ends full stop.

The dot dot dash of the rampant heart

at long last parted with its purpose,

with the rest of the wreck gone 

derelict, kicking and clawing,

spurting and oozing as

this vessel is abandoned. I guess

it’s all a little overboard, all

messed up and nowhere to go,

embracing the outs when

the ins have all run out. Dying

the answer written on the unsealed

envelope, the question another

Carnac gag, the incurious 

portion once the pleasure plays

out of the nexts and maybes—

birds do it, bees do it, even

educated fleas do it—

we all bite the dust. So what if

you jump the line, take cuts

call it early? Anything to end

the pain, anything to beat the crowds. 

The fear of taking the leap and 

not making it stick the only

slowing left, still thankful that there’s an out. 

bird in hand

Without so much as a word the world turns the dew to ice, frost on the fields, clouds smeared across the sky. The stir of matter slows, only the earth and birds to witness the breath as it turns to steam, plumes of proof that the husk still lives. A squirrel rules the lines and the high branches, barely acknowledging the dervish dogs as they tear apart the shed. Just another rat to the dogs, they await the opportunity to dispatch it. The cold is catching, stiffing each substance, filling the joints with grit and ache. Wave after wave, each moment slips away. Hour by hour, there is nothing left that counts.

The night met me with contempt, and daylight has never loved me. Sunlight is not my friend. I hunch over the sickness of this spelling it out, sharps in my chest and shoulders, dull ones emanating from my legs and foot. The healing isn’t going well, having gone from doing little to doing nothing at all. The body all pops and perils, reporting calamities at every shift and turn. The mind all the signals at the switching station, the spirit literally a condition of respiration. Last night I saw the moon and it meant all of nothing. A turn of familiar words, a rock as dead as any drooled over diamond or the stone stuck in your shoe. Something to stagger your step a little. Someplace to pin your shiny star.

Black coffee and the daily burdens. Stuck records and the skip to my lou, dead eyed dregs and the endless impositions. ‘Tis the season of thoughts and prayers, winged monkeys and pearl laden gates. All the dumbest, most evil shit we carry as a species. These digressions into special circumstances, the lies we are urged to believe. Had I a quicker path I would settle the bet right now, against the wall of this crumbling house, the taste of metal and oil then the big spice note. One of these days, POW! right in the kisser. All we get is just this once, and I can’t salvage a bit of it. All my lovers turned to strangers, all my chances played out wrong. Just the birds and the squirrels and buckets of piss. This fading fury, this broken word. Another day that can’t be unseen.

the sorrows

Oh, these days of grays and blues. Oh, this sad parade of flesh and bone. The world has a way of not wanting the very things it has created. The world doesn’t sift and sort. We are as we are, with choices and facts and figures we can’t fathom. We are as we are, within our individual parameters, our modes and our leanings. We change or don’t in a place beyond our witness. The possibilities are many, but they aren’t without limit. We work best when we share the benefits and mitigate the ills. Alone, we don’t really work at all. 

The years have grown thin and cold, their hollow eyes, their morbid bones. The body gives way in sprints and slogs, weary organs and worn out joints, missing teeth and diminished capacities. The spirit goes more quickly, never much for ceremony and ready to fold out here in the dull abandon. Where love betrays and oaths break and all that’s left are tasks and duties to uphold while the roof comes caving in. Kinfolk and animals and the ticking of the clock as the world goes dark. The long night and no one speaks. The end years with no one checking in.

The sorrows won’t slow, the gone and the need to go, the begrudged kindness and the smiling curses. Here we go, another night a little worse than the last. Here it comes, the pain that won’t relent. All that’s left just words and weeping. A few more deaths, another betrayal or two. More words without art or merit. More free labor and hidden fees. Peeling the rags off one by one, the bathroom fan, and the bright bare bulb. Blood dried to the wound, a tearing sound— the sweet scent of dead blood and rotting flesh. Time is not my friend, but then, neither were my friends. I step into the shower, sick to death of me. Just like you.

envy

The heart grows old in

greens and golds, the gray

streaked beard and 

plans gone fallow while

the eyes look away.

At the end of the day

this gaze betrays the pettiness of

intention, empty hands

harden into threats and fists

while the gifted and the fortunate

course on oblivious to all

the slings and arrows living 

milk and honey lives have

aimed their way. The saga

woven of sweat and grit and 

God’s favor falling flat

never knowing the blood debt

they carry like their garish

frippery, casually lifted 

upon countless broken backs,

the green seared stare

that scatters the air and

fixes crosshairs whet with

spat out curses at all

the dreams lived without effort 

as if they were the ordinary and

the everyday, stricken by 

a distant star, starved of all

save invective, epithets, and scars. 

the rule

The day burns down until all that is left is night. Sirens and screen flickers and the piano swinging through the solo. Porch lights and lit windows staring out to the street. All the stars flickering through the tidal atmosphere, unseen ripples revealed in botched optics and the opacity of tendered clouds for currency. The hours spent below ceilings and between walls, warmth and shelter to mitigate the season. Recorded music and electric light and the shelves loaded with all that you long to share. The lonesome room with no exceptions. The gifted sorrow, the gaffed noose.

Lately sorrow comes a calling without bothering with an antecedent. One moment holding the course, the next crashing and burning. The cycling has accelerated, the depression deepened, the isolation all but complete. It’s how it is in the later stages of the sickness, the brain so beaten down that the receptors barely work, each day staring at that dread barrel until it seems the only answer. Relief doesn’t come, little respite and performative pleasure rule the day, until only the brief extinction of sleep provides any succor at all. The heart’s fondest longings only serve to harm. The night is cold and uncaring, the daytime brutal and cruel. Cry all night, rail against heaven and hell, do as you please: the bone birthed sadness is the only companion you have.

As madness consumes you, the company thins out. The awful that you carry, the monster that you are wears away at human endurance. People find better ways to spend the day than waiting on your better angels. People find people that don’t make them feel like murder every single day. What help there is isn’t there to help. Incurious philosophers and de facto pharmacists are about the best you can hope for. The ones you love, if you are luckiest of the lucky, will dutifully tolerate you. But to love you is a labor, and you will see how hard they have to work at it. All the never mores pile on top of your litany of sins, and the rules of compañero and kinship quickly become everyone for themselves. All your tender loves hopefully save themselves as you bide your time in dull torment, a little less each day until you find your punctuation. Full stop, dead bang done. 

sublimate

The days grow darker despite the bright blue skies and the warm heedless sun. One by one the fruits of labor show only rot and maggot, the long sought grace replaced with grim ideation, the makeshift gallows waiting in the garage. Fantasy serves little purpose when that’s where we all live, the poison of words sunk deep as bones, the lies we live puked up as platitude and credo. The cart overloaded, dragging the team backwards down the grade. Language the trick that seems to be enough to burn it all away, chattering like imbeciles as we gaily court oblivion. Afterlives and next worlds over. Saviors and suitors and all the ways hope is murdered on its tippy toes. Prayers and scripture while our lips blister and our lungs sear away. We shall see the light before it robs us of our sight and our selves. 

The first of the last, the line grows long, tomorrow more untenable with each ugly day. No sleep too sweet to be interrupted, no task so valued as to remain unscathed. The heart complains,  weak sister that it is. The strain of impossible furies and slabs of sorrow squeezing out what life is left,  all the heroes and healers scattering in terror of the truth of their avocations. The affliction a rickety ladder, the cord a halo to fit around a troubled throat. The day to day routine only possible with the eyes looking down. Watch your step, each and every last stumbling one. Watch your six, because no one has your back. The mood mercury, with little left to mitigate it. The soul something that has earned a choking out. 

The sun sets, drawing out all the ink and shadow, pulling the grays from every bandwidth. Dusk comes creeping, extinguishing most of the palette. The night to come waits, feeling its way around the wounds. The crow calls sharp, the brass swinging soft and low. Tongue bitter and head splitting, the empty ringing out, trailing tears and spent breath. Would that there was ever someone to talk to. Would that there was ever a place to go. A life only coveted when threatened, the enemy no bolder or braver than any friend or stranger. No distractions to derail the train that’s coming, no taste or tincture to dull the dread, night falls fast. All at once the ending all that’s left.

some enchanted evening

Sometimes it isn’t whether the magic is there. Sometimes it isn’t the mood or the mould that broke. The day spent dizzy and sickly, the consequences firmly camped out in my flesh, head split and mind pursuing strange angels and odd furies. The late afternoon dozed away, emptied like payday pockets, pain buying round after round for every ailment. The heart beats on, weak and sad and all but certain the end is near. The night falls fast, dim lit rooms, all cobwebs and corners and nowhere to turn. Fingers dripping with symbols, blood sizzling with spells, the truth is the magic doesn’t want me anymore.

Skill doesn’t wait around for permissions. You learn which shots to block, which strikes to slip, which blows to step into. You might not feel up to the fight, you might not want it more, but once it’s on you you know just what to do. So the words don’t want you, so the magic has abandoned your rotten little heart. The ghost gives up, but the body still makes you do the work. The meat understands it doesn’t have eternity. It’s the real it recognizes, let it do its thing.

Someday maybe I will feel it again. That thrill of recognition, the blush of creating as the spirit moves me. The surprise of love in another’s eyes, some attention that doesn’t beset like affliction, the present running downhill. But now it is only the enchantment of anxiety, another evening of the sad old madman banging away on the pots and pans of the improbable. A wee small Who infinitesimal upon this ephemeral flower putting all his lungs into this ugly yopp. Light a candle, burn a bush, say your piece. Turn the day over and begin it all again.

disembodied

The words won’t do, and the day grows dark. The words won’t do, and the rain falls down. We wait for a signal, we look for a sign, we smoke em if we got em. It doesn’t make a difference, it doesn’t work out alright. Every day the awful grows, misplaced and utterly unnecessary. Every day the end won’t come. Just words to spit and swallow, words to breathe and burn. It’s no wonder that I never learn.

Night arrives with all the fixings, rain and dread and sorrow filling the streets and gutters, hard cold truths sharp in the heart. The cacophony of this outbreak county, the lows where it goes, reckless and arrogant as  we call down false gods and nameless horrors. This sickness knotted in my nerves and braided like blossoms through my guts. Blood burning hot or drowned man cold, the wheel spinning and spattering mud across my countenance. No one to speak of, just the sound the shell makes when exposed to sound and light.

There are the blanks that don’t need filling, the words no one needs to hear. There is the hole that runs through the being, the artifice around the entity and the insistence of the animal. The smoke that rises slow. There is the incessant expression of the unwanted, the bad brain and poor form, the boulder born uphill each day. The body goes to seed, meat to feed, mind to fade. Only this voice, scarcely heard and seldom welcomed, that carries on. Wants and wishes and a sink thick with dishes. Left out of the loop and unloved, beset by the garish bump and grind of this tattered night. The uselessness of saying what everyone already knows my legacy.

goodbye

The late day sun still rages

despite the season and the time,

a balm before the calendar 

tries to prove it wrong and

everything is wings—

the bold sparrows and the fitful doves

crowd the feeders and the pines

as the field beyond the fence

reveals the translucent host

glittering in clouds and legions,

stubborn angels of the earth and air

alive and shining and unconcerned 

that the end is here. The clock

counts each of us down, birth and 

breath and appetite, life ever

the arrow loosed blind in

a world that is only touch and 

target, hands reaching as if

the wind would lift them too, 

these dreams our flights and feasts

with the bright sunlight

always leaving us to bear 

the limits we are given,

the endings we ignore. 

maladaptive

There is no sky to be seen, just a ceiling textured with spider silk and sadness. There is no respite, just squalor and de facto servitude. The body goes without grace or dignity, only disfunction and decrepitude. Walking about upon open wounds, propped up on ache and ire, every other interaction sick and tainted with sorrow and fury. The music flips around on the floor, dying slow like each listener. The husk prison and prisoner.

It is all but gone. The futile pursuits of love and literature never more comical or absurd when every word is a bullet for these addled brains and feeble bones. Geezer dissolving from frame to frame, stop motion trickery and the ministrations of liars and cowards for comfort. Fool tripping over his own fate, the only one unaware of the slaughter they’d send him to. Oh dear steel, oh faithful lead, grant this filth a fine extinction. The night, the night, and no one but this awful mass of meat and murder for company. 

Too little, too late. All this want and all this longing, the animal and the abstraction sick with pain and want. No one here and no one home one look into these eyes reveals. Just the residue of righteous rejection and habitual betrayal, a bunch of names that should never have been learned, a lot of ink and breath that never should have been spent. Always mistaken, always the one to blame when it all goes wrong, eating shit and sin as the curses settle in. The cowardice behind each lie, the cruelty in every kiss. 

field of vision

The geese fly by

at the angle my heart leans,

the love that didn’t make it

different enough, the love

I have to close my eyes to see.

The sky scrubbed clean by 

yesterday’s rain, wet earth and 

the ghosts of petrichor frame

these wild gray givens—

wings and trees and the runaway 

day trailing vapor, 

the thinking spread thin,

lore and pain and all the grievances 

gathered up in the husk

flitting through the imagery, 

coloring sight on the inside as

the words swarm and stick.

Migration, mitigation, the slow

sweet thrill of your approach 

invisible on the outside,

eyes wide to everything 

that remains to be seen.

precipitate

 Late in the day and it’s all gone gray, lashes of rain beneath a shutdown sky, headlights and the gasp of tire tread navigating the pavement. Traffic slow and accelerates, the shush of transformed traction carrying up through the open window, crisp above the steady sounds of the autumn storm. Mostly dry, I sift through the unspoken. I spend my treasure upon rumor and threat, all the lingering lovers long since left. The words all gone, the shun the moon and sun. 

I limp around the house, wounded limbs and a broken heart. The heater kicks on as the aluminum roof of the porch rattles away, the downpour sounding tattoos and paradiddles as the dust turns to mud. I close the curtains and turn on the lights. The rain spills, and I am still the stranger. Stung by apostasy and the fickle receipt of favor, I am listless beneath contempt as the night comes on strong. 

The words are less than useless. The words are poisoned possibilities, all trick and tether, the rope just enough. It sticks and starts, from the breathless beginnings to the dull brutish ends. The hours off and on, abandoned to homely habits and anxious repetitions, the litany of being cruelty and blessing unto death. Tears fall and the gutters swell, wishing I was more than wished well. The wear of want upon the instrument as it sounds and sounds. Keening for the gone for good, watching the rain beat rivers onto rooftops, wondering what this sad navigation has begun. 

libidinal

The lonely bed is broken

toss and turn, fold the pillow

to crush against my chest,

love letter bookmark 

reminding where I was,

the sleepwalk tv painting 

blue bias oases on the ceiling,

your flavor haunting my lips.

There is no sleep only

your overwhelming absence and

its presence in my every sense

the warm salt of your bared throat,

the ink upon your arm

your hips deft with ache and intent

the rapturous, trembling surprise of

your incomparable kiss

gone so long, still

strewn all over this wreck and 

the room, the book stack altar,

the wished out star of your love.

This lonely bed bereft, 

my lecherous heart, 

your effortless ghost. 

sky writing

Comes a time that the blue of

the sky meets the blue of the mood,

comes a day when we don’t 

write it down, the measures

that we keep for comfort, 

the wishes that we lose

among the clouds, the stars

lost to constellations, the moon

always changing its mind.

Still, I sit and stare

overwhelmed or unaware as 

the crows take wing or the sun

cedes the heights, noting

the spread of the stratus and

the accumulated cumulus,

light leaking out of heaven.

The words always waiting 

there in the firmament on high:

lift your chin, look up.

doze

The afternoon just showed up, the day half hearted and indecisive about the overcast,  a flag planted in uncertain soil.  I sip black coffee, the steaming mirror on its surface full of trees and ripples. The hands stay unsteady, the ache just spreads. I am a camera, I am a box of magnets, I am the engine running down. The season blows some leaves around. I wish I was sleeping I say for something to say.

There’s really nothing much to me. I am the resilience of nowhere to go, I am the crime scene left in the long term parking. A map crisp and crumpled, the legend rattles as you unfold it. The long slow dissolve, the tyranny of the continuity, the tomb sifts us down to dust. The glacial pace now a flickering frame by frame, the film unspools as the seasons speed on by. A box of letters clutched tight, the mementos of a time when I was human. Now it is pain and days and dreaming, the abandoned calendar and the broken clock.

I ache and I hunger, I want and I whine. The words stopped coming, but I write them out just the same. Stacks and stacks of symbols, thick in ghosts and transitions, laid out on the picture of a page. Beasts and birds and the shabby flora. Smoke and sky and those persistent goodbyes. Abstracted beneath the river, the silt and stones, I am word and witness. I am picture and frame and the hole in the wall behind it. The season brittle, the earth pensive, the wonder that turns you to a pillar of salt. Across this desolation I am obliged. The dreaming speaking through my flesh, dozing in blood and bone.

honey

Throw yourself upon my senses

with the simple saying of your name,

the light changing and the sidewalk 

witness gone to ground. Hurl yourself 

thick and slow, sweet and sticky 

across my thinking with

the clinging of your written words

still mingling with the grievous 

beating of my heart, the gooey

phrases and written kisses

all that I could manage,

all that I am made of now

missed hints and stubborn habits 

the wishing that won’t make it so,

the nickname whether it stuck.

loser

The leaves ignore the season, 

dying in brown bouquets

bunched in the fists of branches,

waving at the restless empty 

heaven always was, waving wild at

the clock watching sun.

Trees seeing with their

inward eyes smooth blue skies to

drowse below as you settle

between soil and sun,

vigilant limbs in fitful meditation 

the world in how it’s taken.

It all goes away, the luck

dries up and the roads 

all end up dead. The steady

chill enters the bones joint by

joint, the marrow grows 

mournful and coarse, these mortal

hours always counted down,

the fall comes faster and faster,

brittle broken branches

make way for fresh chances and

unborn buds yet to be while

time and love pare away the possible

watching everything as it goes away

on not

It progresses from the coffee to the cup, from the lip to the tongue, the steel to the sip. Something dressed in the rags of ritual drabbing up the pace. The rhythm of the instrument, the strumming of the lines. It’s the way we work our magic, down in creations dregs and wonders. It’s the way we want and wander, the way I lay my claim. From the edge of the intention to the saying of the name.

We go from shell to shell, from gear to hungry gear. The names and places all the same, just at different weights and rates. I rub my right palm over my scratchy skull stubble, a habit that feels like it’s something Tak Shimura is doing in a movie, a place where the words stitch the image to the ache. The cool clean water or the coffee sharp and dark, the way that I’d take it mostly on not, save sometimes the ghost in smoke or tongue. Something I’d have seen you sung, were I still among the witnessed. Something that goes on and on, turning over in the night.

I live out the path of the satellite, always falling towards the core. I live out the path of the mendicant breath by begging bowl breath. Lucky for the little I am given considering the awful that I am. The trouble with the restless reaching, the difficulty of working out of my depths. I play the songs and work the body. I burn slow, seam to cinder, fine print to the lithe periphery. I stare the ache dead in the eyes, knowing the gist is no. I open my stance and live out my demands. 

depth

The sun just sits there

saying nothing while

the sparrows rush the feeders,

the trees swaying wild 

in the dreams of the drive by wind.

The light stumbles down the stairs,

the day lands hard upon 

the humiliation, shining 

all akimbo awkward,

dimming and bright enough to

silhouette the scenery,

leaf and limb, wing and feather

as the distance dives farther,

away another word

filling in until the feeling 

finds us out, all the lonely 

stories in the world

all the clever words

driven deeper though

all it is is cold hands and

the absence of a kiss.

 

poem with the sun in its eyes

I try not to pay attention 

to the date or the hour,

the numbers never add up

and we’re stuck on today.

So I fill my belly and 

watch the signs,

the stacking of the dishes,

the raptor above the pines,

dogs pace and flies gather in

that long last light,

the afternoon a shorthand as

the earth bows and bows.

Doves and squirrels 

to rock the feeders, hawks and 

vultures to hold the sky.

I jot down words as

the sun worries away the west,

transparent chitinous wings

rise and dive through 

the ray streaked distance 

the blinding we were bound to

arrive at leaning over

us glib remainders,

us found poems. 

window

Halloween has left its thrills scattered like dead leaves, no tricks or treats, just a bowl of candy and a blue moon loosed. The days scrape and scatter, false flags and empty bags and the aspects of the season. Sunlight spills through a dusty window, dancing motes and the last deeds of flies framed with the weight of curtains and the warmth that’s all but gone. The day down the lane, the wheel of sky and breath. The ache ascended breath by breath, the daylight paints and pools.

The coffee rages its crown of steam in place, plumes unraveled into the sun striped air. The afternoon only so much at a time, until the time given overflows, vessel to vessel and name after name. The sore joints and bleeding feet of contrition, the body blows coming fast and low, the birdsong bother slipping in between the feel and the know. Each swallow sets of alarms, the warmth of the elixir, the belly full of fire. The light dulls and thins as the sun moves along.

The days rush by, the hours drag on. The light caught upon the overcast, the glow gone to heaven and heaven on a schedule. I am shards and splinters, hung up on the grim insistence and the last misdeal. Small blessings find whatever’s left behind, garnished with hearts and stars and wishes, while the numbers keep coming. Running late as it gets later, running down as the engine coughs and spits. A hand held open, waiting to be taken. A gesture left out in the cold.

sunshine eyes

 The days don’t do much to withstand scrutiny. A few spent words, a handful of receipts. The lyric repeated again and again as your heart raced your hands. The rapt horizon and the goodbye glow. Squinting west through sunshine eyes, thinking of your skin. Your shoulders in a certain light. The riot riding on through. Stories told to stories, down to the world in silhouettes. The wear and tear your truth.

Give me days when the sunset feels golden. Give me mornings when waking’s not a wound. This struggle seems too simple to those who who have pieces figured out. Another heart and soul set on steady. The comfort of living lightly in the aftermath. The devotion of living ferociously for what you share. Forms and stories and products of the dreams that endure. Birthday wishes without the courtesies of candles blown out.

Now comes the blithe horizon, aglow with that so long light. Now comes the winds without a witness, the curve to the wobbling sphere, the drag of stars and atmosphere while bright burns out. The wishful instrument caught on the shift of your hip and the nape of your neck. The cold gray brushed against my flesh, the dusk weighed bones, and my heart a hive of sighs. Stare as I want, all I can do is witness what is already gone. 

transpiration

It begins with the water blue biased 

sky quiet amid the still leaves

clinging dead to the loft of

limb and reach, the bright

beyond the haggard crown

this ancient engine turning over

water drawn roots on up 

this constant exhalation 

the work raising the water

above the earth, stretching

plumes to stir the firmament 

the trees waving as they dream

the earth at prayer in its sleep. 

done

These days the wind runs through me. These days all my deeds are done. I drift from imposition to imposition, shift from place to place. I’m only welcomed where I spend or toil. A thing to fill out the scenery. A factotum kept in dust and darkness, a fool to mock and taunt. I just fill the space between deaths, my mind going, my flesh rent and rotting. A weeping in the dark.

The drift from one dismal to the next, cheap betrayals and reckless provocations. A scribble here, a prayer there, the bench warm from my existence in quotations. My day was done many years ago, it’s just piss buckets and counting down now. Another note late in the life.

I started writing regularly again because the disappearing is frightening. The people I love can’t stand me, and the one friend I thought was true thought better of the deal. It was devastating, and continues to be so, and there is no cure or comfort or consolation for it. I am toxic and a monster, and this is how it ends up. It does occur that I probably should stop. Nothing good comes of this. It was the last thing I thought I had, that I thought I was. Now it’s just documenting the antecedents.  

dead day moon

It is crucial here to view the moon

as the dreaming sun, the soul

reached by a midnight stream

running through the depths

the woods reveal at night. Here

our arms are open, the stories and

the songs sung long ago, 

the moon the first steady stranger

the knock upon the door, 

the rattling of the knob, this 

relentless apparition 

naked in your window, 

shameless in your room.