knot

The crow perches at the foothills of the firmament, still atop the teetering cypress as the day gives way to dusk. The rest goes as rote, the muscle memory rituals, untended threads strewn all about. Clouds obscure the sky, crows and motors and the abstraction of appetites fill the air, breath by breath and from wing to flight. Oh but the light is leaving! Oh but my race is run! I keep time with the hoop of my tumbling heart. I work on the stitching, I let out more line. The smoke rises, the spirit runs through.

It is the dogs lying down with the leaves. It is the bouquet of rain gathered by the reaching earth. The twilight grays and old man blues crown the bounds and leaps past seeing, dusk getting in everything. The things you can’t say, the visions you can’t see. This flesh manifest in rumor and habit, the entity an average of spark and spit, a set of stacks and punctuations. The rest the shared breath, the vagrancy of matter, all this wanton wandering of joined hands amid the reel. You feel it and you know.

The night comes on and the ghost gives out. The closeness of smoke, the burden of breath. Abandoned to ash and ember, the flame lingers on. Life happens all at once. It goes on and on, shifting from foot to foot, wandering from root to crown. This is it— the light that you remember as the light is lost. This is it— the earth at your feet the wind on your skin. The iteration and the amplitude, the hustle or the hunt. Comes the rain, comes the snow here amid the come and go. The words as you turn them into what you are, this is it.

feets don’t fail me

Once it starts to go, it goes slow, then all at once. The glow of the sunken sun, the deepening of the rush of dusk. It’s already dark, though it’s been darker. It’s growing cold, but it’s been colder. Stiff limbed and limp dicked, the husk stumbles and staggers, what humble strength there was spent among the earth and gravel. A misused marionette, awkward and without intent, always close to collapse. Dragging ruined blood and dead flesh in these foolish, shaky circles. The routine of light and lock and shovel more uncertain everyday. The blind dog staggers and spills, gathering indignities, heading towards the end.

Swaddled in colored cotton and polyester blends I feel the rotation of the earth and the turning of the wheel. The mundane fire and fear of sudden sharp pains and chronic aches, the bad hip becoming the bad leg, the busted toe and the open wound becoming another limb lost. Mood swings and common core madness feed these foolish failings, too poor to get treatment, too crazy to adequately make my case by filling in the blanks. I’ve never been able to explain myself to doctors or bureaucrats, never been at anything more than one third power during daylight hours. The things I want and the things I need either elude me or come in not nearly enoughs. So I have resigned myself to this dumb slow death, wishing it wouldn’t hurt so much, or at least that it would get on to the dying part a whole lot sooner. But you’ve probably met wishes before.

The horizon still glows a gray blue hue as the sky inks in the night. Covetous shadows grasp and cling, dripping from the trees, shoving up against the limits of these feeble electric lights. The cats begin to pace their beats, and the moon again rises above it all. Car alarms contend with traffic and dopplering bass lines amid the ruckus of the coming dark. Windows gone blind from inside lights stare out at the once and future roads, awaiting travelers to transform them from asphalt and concrete. Bowie is singing Changes though he’s been dead for years, and there’s nothing left in me that wants to sing along. I sing just the same. Nothing but words on a screen and a bitter, spat out name.

cup

The coffee steams and dribbles as it pours, leaving brown bubbles clustering, swirls upon the hot mirror black skin. You take it black, small sips between blowing through you know how to whistle lips. You like it bitter, something sharp to put in your mouth, something hot to burn in trickles down your throat. The sun unseen still blinds, calling its shots as it banks the bright off cloud and vapor, any surface available to reflect off. Albedo and refraction as the train sound swallows all the engines and incidentals, a sip of coffee, the spirit a fog upon the lens. 

It is the work of the earth, it is the price of the sky. The lively colors give way to the muted blues and bruise black end of the bandwidth, the lingering whiff of petrichor and the burdensome language of stones. The meat wading through the mud, the monkey mind stinking up the stars with the flung dung of its stories. Irredeemable we creep on, never mind the turnover. Dishonorable we lie and lie, these late epoch villages at last large enough to support our endless deceptions. It runneth over and still we keep on pouring, lest our neighbors get a sip. 

It hurts to walk, it hurts to breathe, as life goes on the pains close in. Each day a gift, each day a gaffe, the monkey’s paw and the god grift. Once it is broken, no king’s craft can mend it. Once it is busted, it is gone. The bread they break across your back, the community they grow from your exclusion. Secret rituals and flagrant prayers and a thousand curses spat in your face. Still they tremble and gibber away, the teeth closing around their hearts of the demons of their own making. They pace their immaculate floors in fear of the death that is the only certainty, the night so black all about their rotten tooth souls, terror always waiting behind each locked door. You swallow the bitter, you live in the dark. Death comes and you fill your cup.

no worries

The day makes way for the becoming moon, pushing through the burdensome late day blue, ever rising above. The cold wind looses whirlwinds, dead leaves dervish up the walk as the dogs rush from one emergency to the next. It’s the last cigar and the fleeting smoke and the small pleasures that aren’t any pleasure at all. The laws of you get what you give and that of diminishing returns the only rules at play, the others that have been done upon paying it back in spades. All cant and consequence, all bluff and burnish, the low lows ever lower. The ephemera of plans made never lasting long enough even to make that tin eared god chuckle. The light leaves like everyone else, keeping to the transitory traditions. The bones sing out, as bones are wont to do.

It’s all bare branches and graceless pavement, cheap little houses and shiny new cars. The cold spreads its gospel with magnanimous abandon, the world seeking equilibrium down to the least molecule, as all us motes dream of being the material that matters. The flesh dissolves slowly, meager gains and shocking losses barely registering in the day to day, as the old joints and busted knuckles cease to trouble the busy blood. Flecks of tobacco spit from tongue and lip, this sorry post erotic tactility all that’s left to offer as the shell is exactly as it appears, the depths spent in abstraction now loosed into the cooling atmosphere. Fingertips clutching the last burning ember as the wind chimes herald the arrival of the merciless night.

Seven crows fly high above the low glide of a turkey vulture in the soft blue sky, the moon now aglow still higher in the moment of deepening darkness, the edge of day as the sun wanders along its merry way. It’s this worn out format, prose poem in three shaky paragraphs, the dirge of this constant despondency documented as small worlds slip away. The language of loss and want and dreams as life goes on unworried by the way it’s playing out. The language of sloth and sorrow and the signals sent off into the expansive empty barely reaching past the cold fingers and the lapses of abstraction. It didn’t matter then, it matters less now. Some will fall, some will rise, the rest will stay the same. The alarm sounds, the sun goes down, and the moon is terrible and glorious as it rises. 

say it’s so

It’s a hard road down to the bitter end. Either sudden bumps or unpatched holes to bust an axle or blow a tire, the dings and dents accumulate until all that’s left is the wreck. Eventually even the rest stops offer little respite, a pause to let the engine cool, a moment to get the sun out of your eyes. The circles paced looking for a signal, the streets repeating as you hunt for the entrance ramp. Always a stranger when you finally arrive, you get to where no one knows you or wants to any longer. The path you took like a stone pressed into the palm of your open hand, some meaning that you missed, kissed goodbye then never kissed again. Home no longer home, enemies that scatter like rats, the static behind your eyes and the lies that never leave you alone.

The hours now only fit for longing, your pointless labors having taken your life and limb, forgotten heavens and stars that will never look you in the eyes. From the days of phone calls and letters to the age of no one talks anymore, the long shadows stretch in this twilight time, the warnings of the wise and the ways of the ancestor surrendered for the con so clumsy it couldn’t have survived natural selection. The world you built of debt and gilt succumbed to the machinations of the ceaseless tide. Sand swallowed by the insatiable oceans, humans forever out of their depths. You check your watch only to find your wrist, as naked and humble as the dead come judgement day.

Midnight draws near in your cheap room and threadbare vestments, a lonely light and the songs of the dead. Loved once and renounced, pound for pound and ounce for ounce never the contender, your hearts contentions all have met their proofs. Obsolete and unforgivable, pointless and savage and rejected by all the days to come, you wonder after the one that came in ones or twos, the fury of devotion and then the wall scrawled with sign. Strays and rats and spiders the only company that will keep you, you run the scenarios again and again. Tomorrow won’t have you and even the past has left you behind. You sit and stare, music from somewhere wandering by, staring at the pictures painted and the photos taken. Old and useless, left to the comforts of certain death and the drifts of dust.

blue Christmas

The smoke rises, though there’s nowhere to go. The smoke rises, despite the nothing that matters. The longed for rain a series of drizzles, the known quantities proving the prophecy true. No calls, no texts, just the motion from next to next. Fireworks and frightened dogs, rats scrambling through the trees. The old bones complain and complain, as above so below. Heat rises, but the cold just cozies up with the concrete. Not enough isn’t fucking around.

Even before the plague, this was a played out position. Even before the plague, there wasn’t anyplace to be. Just the watchtower of the unwanted. Just the stretch of shadows as the car pulls away. Just other lives and other worlds, witnessed but further than the long dead stars spilling light. Nothing to save, nothing to salvage. Just the long loiter until the curtains fall. Just the creeping light to get your ticket punched.

It’s a trap, it’s a tomb. One idiot day at a time, time and time again. It’s the trick of duty, the death by obligation. The next indignity always a little lower, the bottom left to the imagination of your tormentors. Even the words only here to remind you that you don’t belong. Even the words only here to show the joke you’ve always been. String some lights, kill a tree. All that’s left some makeshift gallows. All that’s left the choice of deaths.

winter crow

The sky falls apart at day’s end,

between the scattered branches and

inconspicuous clouds entangling 

the bitter winter blue, the cold

bite of bitter winds and 

the portents of the gathering 

storm lift these black wings

above the lit windows and

emptying streets. The crow on high 

taking one last turn,

calling its kin towards tonight’s 

roost, whatever home they make

at the last edge of daylight as

December closes dark all around.

Riding the drift of wind and 

the press of feathers above

all the driven stories and 

transitory architecture, its throat 

emptied over rooftop and 

tree crown, the enduring sign

that the world works

on a different schedule,

moved by black wings and

honorable appetites above

strewn tinsel and cheap plastic lights,

Christmas only different trash.

local

Driving home towards the looming mid afternoon moon I give witness and spread invective, the lockdown traffic surprisingly lively in this ghost town suburb, the blue sky brightness belying the bite of the ice toothed wind. There’s little evidence of the holidays spread through the old apartments and the humble houses, a string of lights, a manger scene. Just the squalor of a small Bay Area adjacent town, suffering from the usual effects of mismanagement and the dimwitted collateral of the Chicago School. Homeless folk shuffling through the shiny winter sun, their cart and bundles kept near at hand. It’s my hometown, the sort of hometown that you leave and never return to, the sort of town that was never home at all.

I smoke on the porch of my childhood home, holding court with ghosts and regrets, claiming space simply because it’s where I am. The moon slides through the naked limbs of the city planted tree, a relic of the bygone days of civic concern for parks and nature, a granter of summer shade and perches for birds. The homeward crows assemble their forces, their sleek beauty begetting a fixed dominion in my soul. I am a disciple of crow and coyote, student of the ones before elder and ancestors, servant of the first kingdom. I am of the ragged company, the discarded and the dissidents. The losers and the forgotten of your world and my own.

The moon clears the treetops, its majesty unaffected by the delving and the disarray. The icy breeze sips warmth from fingertip capillaries, knuckles stiff in fingerless gloves, numbed touch even number as I tap away at the screen with its slippery symbols and ersatz keyboard. All meat and mystery I fade and shiver, my old joints complaining along with the song of wound and the terms of the latest injuries. It all slips away. The notion of home, the hope for love, the claims of companionship as much ash and dust as any of my dumbassed dreams. Left to my obsolete devices and my own ineptitude, I stumble along with the same old songs, habitual words and natural wonders. Darkness falls on me like night upon T-Bone Burnett, the moon’s flat affect, and this husk touched by ancient flames and the star tossed mystery. I give witness, loitering in the bitter bite of the cold impassive night.

cannot

‘Tis the season of all the extras. ‘Tis the season of amplification. I feel too much, I go too far, I sink too deep too fast. Little things spark conflagrations, passing thoughts, fleeting glimpses. Most of the year I go crazy once a day or so. Come the holidays, it’s nearly every hour on the hour. I can’t let go though it’s all there is to do. I can’t keep looking and there’s no way to look away.

It goes and goes. The mood swings have always hit hard around the holidays, the wishing wanting nature of the myths and the sense of lost belonging that has beset me for decades the words that tag along with the madness. I cannot help the hurting, but at least can try to mitigate the evil that my words and actions spread. I know that you gave up on me, and that you gave up for a good reason, even though you didn’t need one. You have to go in the direction of healing. You have to follow your heart.

I kept finding myself wanting you to say something you wouldn’t say, or do something you wouldn’t do. Long after it was clear even to me that you had done all that you could. I realize I was a mistake you made, some side trip reaction to the road you were on and the poison you would name perhaps. I won’t know, and couldn’t believe you if you told me. Whatever the reasons for your little fibs and your sins of omission, they aren’t mine to name or know. My own madness is my department, and its containment and disarming is something I owe to all the non-combatants in the world, you included. All the things I want and need are a story to tell to the walls and the annals of sorrow. What comes next I cannot fathom.

druthers

The world doesn’t love you, but the world doesn’t know. It doesn’t pick the pieces it plays, it shuffles through the list. The broom on the sidewalk, the bird on the wire. The skin you were given giving in, tensile strength and the rough and ready. The rifle’s loud report in the cold dead night. The world only knows the dos and don’ts, not the struggle or the fitful shifts. You guess wrong just once and you are gone, recycled into basic elements and the seeds of the need to know, the hungry earth and the microfauna carrying on long after the ensemble has taken its bows and went off their separate ways. You make your bets, you take your chances. Maybe you get lucky, and get to have your say. 

The voice of fate, the curiosity of the furies, the call for a new deck and a knock on the cut. Empty pockets and spent gelt, the cherished ones disown you, and you gather up your guilt and your guns and leave. You can’t go home, you don’t have to stay here. Some of us here to punish others, some of us here to sweat and swing. The luck of the draw and the eye of the beholder, the path allows a few turns and swerves. We are weighted down in words that put everything in your lap, the laws and aphorisms written to protect kings and other thieves, these stories that are woven into the muttering meat of our minds. We all have our burdens to carry, but we were built to carry them together. Instead we live out other people’s lies, rattling around the maps we are given. Looking at the stars and taking it personal.

The words just spill out into the street, they slop over the gutters and clutter up the walk. The words get in everything, they stain your fingers, they get stuck between your teeth. There’s not much I can do about it. I’ve been disappearing for years. You go wrong for too long, that’s the way you stay, face froze in that strict rictus. Named and numbered, tossed aside like the trash you always new you were. The fight inside goes on, whatever the name they give you. The fight goes on, whatever the diagnosis may be. I have my say, though seldom my way. I can’t help it if there’s no one left to listen when I’ve got nothing to say. I can’t help it if I don’t know how to say what can’t be heard. 

porch

All the houses in a row, 

the cluttered gutters the color of

wasted tears and worthless winter,

weighed down with gray clouds and

blue sky broken by the paths of

branches, frozen for a moment, 

a portrait of intimate longing 

bare limbs raised seeking

the blessings of the divine sun,

my bare knobby knees and

slack surrendered flesh exposed

despite the season I sit and 

stare at the streets and sky,

sober and smokeless and

spitting every invective known.

I have become that old man,

hollow eyes boring holes in

everyone they touch, scouring 

the distance as if awaiting a sign

never to be seen in this or 

any life, a Halloween decoration out

so long it serves as a warning—

abandon all hope ye who enter—

poison apple or Alighieri. 

Some day you too will fall

heaven pressed into unseeing unseeing eyes,

your prophecies piled on like stones.

Bethlehem

Winters grow worse in

days of plague and war,

the next disaster and

the cupboards gone bare. Lights

strewn about the neighborhood 

burdened by the branding—

nativity tableaux surrounded by

Santa and Frosty and Mickey Mouse—

all the claimants to that gloried throne

crowding out the senior myths

as people bemoan their quarantine 

isolations in silver and gold.

A year of new names for each 

full moon and incessant astrology,

the biases built into cognition—

cock crowing at midnight,

the hawk outside the window—

gathered up like torch and pitchfork 

to mob the monster, like 

the slings and arrows insisted by 

outrageous fate while the hard

lonesome of the holidays kicks

my teeth clean down my throat. 

So the old wanderers encircling 

the stars intersect, gods crossing

paths to double down on

the fierce, faraway albedo alluding 

Yeats stamped into our dumb tongue.

Behold! The story sold to deny

meaning, our language 

littered with shiny baubles and

bright pretty lights so we never 

see the world we witness. 

Made up miracles,

heaven’s lies burning bright. 

untold

I’ve come late to the writing tonight. I don’t know that I’ll even write this at all. Who can tell what will happen to the habits once the habit has emptied out? The familiar that may comfort some is a necessity to me, the calendar and the clock and the angle of the sun. Illness and pain have thrown me off what was left of my game, and I’m still smarting from my fall from imagined grace. Suicidal ideation, the burdens of this world where I am not wanted or needed, and the slow dying of everything inside me that held my attention have all but finished me. The last betrayal, the body itself dissolving into this inevitable senescence, denying me what little agency a broke unemployable lunatic can manage is much too much. Pain and immobility and diminished vision pretty much my everyday thing. Like these sad, shitty words that grant me no pleasure or release.

We are what we are. We make our choices, such as they are, and take the consequences right between the eyes. My most defining feature, outside of my capacity for epic and unhinged rage, is my ability to choose wrong every single time. I’m bad at a lot of things, even the things I used to think I was good at, but I make decisions driven by guilt or hope or just plain old stubborn contrariness. I keep that in mind when I’m pondering the noose, though it feels of late it’s more the pain and mess that is stopping the old swing and strangle. A dumb ending for a stupid wasted life. Things add up, especially circumstances. The deeper you get, the harder it is to recover. Of all the things I am bad at and unsuited for, being me seems to be the pig to beat. 

I remain uninsured and unmedicated, stuck holding up the sky and pacing my cage. I remain treated generously by people who by any reasonable standard should never speak to me again, more or less fed and sheltered and granted what small indulgences of time and treasure can be managed. But most people had had it with me ages ago, and, though I still bitterly miss them, I understand why they’ve finished with me. I certainly wish I could be done with me as well. It’s no fun being this crazy and isolated, burning with murderous intensity and drowning in my own dead flesh feelings. The chronic pain becoming less intermittent and more hickory stick rule is the bow atop this heap of untold aimlessness. I expect I’ll keep going on, at least until America kills me at last, but things are worse everyday. If this was my last day it’d be okay, though it isn’t so much dead I want as different. If these were my last words, I’d gladly punctuate them with a bullet.

name

It is there without so much as 

an inkling of thinking,

before all the dreams are gone,

before the work of waking has begun,

your name like breathing in

some wondrous lilting bloom

thick with heady pheromones or

that hook of a song repeated like

a mantra, the phrase clinging 

to the muddle of being, a righteous 

ringing out. Your name, then

the litany of rebukes and refusals,

swallowing fresh sorrows spitting 

those small soft syllables, nevermore 

nevermore, the grasped truth that

the heart doesn’t heal and 

the hold won’t relent. So I speak

your name aloud to starless night

and loveless room, writing down

these artless unread lines,

hope held as if by the grave.

dead bang

Broad daylight and nothing to see here. Middle of the morning, dying slow and painful. It feels like old news because it’s variations on a theme. It feels like forever, but it’s only been decades. The day all a haze as the earth exhales, house sparrows in the yard and Canadian geese taking to the sky. The words are running out, the returns diminishing a little more each day. What little remains will be shit all over and thrown away. It’s what it takes to keep me in my place.

The afternoon reaches up, the dampened earth, the bitter yield. It grasps the heart between its teeth and bites down, just enough for the sharp stab and the dull tremble, the pain and the weakness threaded through the husk. Hands that only hold each other, the light a little less as the vision continues to diminish, the ache and the ache and the ache again. Nothing is okay and nothing is enough and the next to nothing left me may as well be a bullet to the dome. 

The words written down say it all, the proof again and again. All for the echo chamber, all for the long monologue. Dying poorly is a spectator sport, though a meager one. What mercy do gawkers and voyeurs expect after the state and the corporations’ cruelties, let alone the goons and perpetrators of this violence? Nothing is off the table any longer, nothing is out of bounds. Tuck all your darlings in tight. Soon you’ll wake and they’ll be gone. Dead bang done.

carnal

The body doesn’t do much to

warrant the distinction,

the system closed all breath and bone,

the muddled heart beating away—

the closed fist, the empty vessel.

We think we know the where and

what, spark and spook and

a whiskered chin slick with

steam and spittle, the cracked

fortune cookie, the fairy captured

inside a punched hole lidded jar.

We cleave to meat and mayhem,

the soft palaver of the pine tree

sparrows in the winsome, waking

gray, the wish wiped from the lips

upon a threadbare sleeve, as if

the words we burble were a separate 

trust from these hungry hands and 

shameless tongues, the raptor 

flaying the dove on

the thick limb that reaches out

towards the garage roof

neither sign nor spirit, just another

worker on the wheel of life.

Spilling bone and feather below

the altar of the appetites,

every blessing an open grave.

come, curtains!

I dance limpingly along from song to broken song, the hobo’s reel upon the sinking stones, the fool cavorting in the lowlands with the waters rising. I take the sticks, I take the stones, lumping along in these lonely bones. The pain, the wounds, the days a waste of smoke and prayer. Ashes brushed off as the next station is taken. The past elongated with each clock tick theft, the act never much and now off key and missing most the marks. All the words are staged, at least if you read the notes.

It turns out, once the early reviews are in, that you are a bore, you are a churl. You’re the whole reason someone hates the world. No one is interested in your cool new take, no one cares about your best interests. They can sell, or spin, or quote tweet you. The heckling is the most practiced of the arts. They tell you to be yourself, just do it differently. They tell you to never change, and ditch you with the check.

A cloud stripes the sunset horizon, the visible bandwidth resonating, a rainbow streaked across the day. I ache straight through the resonant dusk, all the gnawing ghosts and nested curses hectoring me breath to bone. Strange how the urge toward the human is always mocked, the hapless oddballs that miss the cut, those undeserved of their story or its telling. Another animal to be scried as symbol in some big dumb self spun mystery. Barely a player and still somehow stepping on their lines. So much for joining a company, let alone partnering up to put a new act together. The show unwanted and unwatched. The lights go out, the curtains fall without a call.

reckoning

 

touchscreen

I don’t know if it’s that we ever said it, or that we never said it enough, or that the words ever even made it to that neighborhood in our proximity. I don’t know who we were, or even who we are. It’s more a device than anything else, but it’s the way we all speak now. Sticking to the fingers and the tips of tongues, heat and friction and something like the scent of blood there pressed into the plastic through the flesh. The conventions always weigh in until the conventions pass quaint. I know once we were words. Now it’s just me saying.

Now the sundown rain clouds spread out for effect, lighting swoony blue patches and the last labors of squirrels. The dogs track mud and action across the sloppy yard, dug hole puddles and runoff tides underfoot. The storm still swells towards the end of my senses from my fixed location, smoke fluming north across the back porch, cigar swinging between my knuckles sending benedictions of ember and ash flying. Smudged glasses and failing vision, the blood gone bad throughout the bloat of the organism, crows come home to roost. The cohort of storm and blood now another loser loitering on the stoop. The bearer of the returned star now another beggar with a broken bowl.

The flesh sets course through the seas and storms, the flesh relents tapping symbols into thoughts, cold air warm plastic patient smoke. The magic omits a few important details as you press yes after yes, unseen tumblers align, and trembles and temblors are loosed through the furtive paths. The soup is stirred and seasoned, the flavor drifting away from the currency of taste, the work of the burner and the bardo all in the pot. The flicked away ash reveals the ember as it turns to ash. The moment to moment until even this moment is lost. The wonder at empty left to ask.

flame keeping

 

this end of it

all about

It’s all about the ashes falling all at once. It’s all about the pavement changing color as the rain ensues. The cracked tooth static fuzzing up the embouchure, the fucked lungs, and the glacial rate of change meaning something different as the glaciers come thundering into the sea. Gray days and the goodbye sun soft and golden where the sun gets through, until it’s up and gone. Then it’s murdered birds and silhouette branches and the harbinger dusk taking things away, the night taking its sweet time climbing its throne.

The night arrives and the street is strewn with latent constellations, blinking lights and plastic facets offered up for whichever holiday will do. Branches reach like cracks running from some windshield impact, the absent piece of chucked steel or thrown stone inferred by their origin point, this dark and looming hole beyond the reach of word or root. The dark swells like movie music, always acting like something’s about to happen. Like the answer must be close with all these questions all about.

There is a rhythm to this witness , a broken rhyme to this report, the sound of cracked ice and broken limbs. The day goes, the night comes, I miss I ache I wonder. A few gewgaws, a few threadbare incidentals, the exit line or its disturbing lack. A little smoke, a little blood, a thousand shouldered burdens. Now it is the beating of helicopter blades, the gunshot punctuation, and the invective of strained machines. A song that goes off when a letter is reread, a name written and rewritten as yours is erased. It’s all about the blanks and what they’re asking.

nebula

You get a fix on the instruments, a place to hang 

the calculations, something to mingle with

motive and map, the slap down tabling 

the winning hand, the algorithm laying it on

thick to keep the machine busy, the star

at last found to further the reason

this sojourn continues sojourning along—

all these heroes minted to get sent stepping, 

the stories still warm around the fire

burning all these light years away, 

a destination for all those questions

left cluttering up the tables and rattling 

around the drawers. The kitchen

music, low voices and the clatter of 

limbs and dishes, all the missing

intimacies and unknown social occasions.

Listen, it makes sense to throw the stick so far,

the fetching made of generations, civilizations

spent in the time the keening is named and 

denied, pushing through the problem,

leaving the words to blind the eyes of

star struck posterity, the gazed on constellation 

turning destiny into destination, the empty stall

and broken tether found out,

history comes crashing down 

debris and exposition now

a fixed star halo, 

the dream folded over into pretty pictures 

adrift on the scent of the rain kissed earth.

extinguish

For a moment it is the combination of

glistening constellations beading 

cosmological swirls in the black coffee

surface eternity and the enchanted noodlings 

in my ears, that singer you favor

as the sciatic clench and the dead flesh

ache consume the remnants of my attention 

the lyric and the litany awaiting 

this next frustration, the next 

rat maze dead end to your weak

thesis, this slow burn the pitiful 

wishing makes all the worse.

the day to day

Again the thoughts go traipsing through the squalor, the spent senses, the used up feels. Again the glasses are smudged and the vision is poorly, the strain to see almost worse than the strain to say, the assorted pains and the day to day. Written off at last, extinguished in every realm. Nothing but the growing pain, the looming void.

Just another game to play, just another bit of gossip, something to pass the time in unfocused cruelty. The wicked ways as old as time, as practiced by ancestor and antecedent alike. Tease and shun and gloat of all your righteous ways. The reckless offender gets their comeuppance beaten into them, punchline after punchline. When it finally gets around to you, don’t be surprised by the blade.

Annihilation and erasure. Neglect and exile and disease. The days aren’t worth the waking and the nights are unspeakable at best. More words though the words aren’t worth it. Nurture never there when you need it, and nature never gave a fuck.

perennial

The bets all placed

the steps now staggered

reeling from feel to feel 

moving from face to face

this absent dance,

this scramble across the parkway 

the lights flashing out a four way 

stop on some rainy yesterday

the slide unto impact,

another day saved for dreaming.

It won’t return, that 

gleeful bleeding mortality,

that triumphal turn

fighting back from the incessant edge,

now fly the fists of mitigation,

this evil season sinking

into whatever skin is left.

untouched

The hands have their tells—

paint and ink and inadvertent 

pointing, lonely limbs and

the counting by the fingers—

but the dust is always telling tales

out of school, shelves devoured

by this pressing detritus,

heaped and layered and

giving away the game. I gather 

up my unused limbs and

fling the husk around the sprawl,

masked and tasked and 

teeming with irrelevance,

the work of the body the only work

we are allowed however 

we imagine the mythos and 

our magic of summoned 

threat and consequence,

the plague year outranking 

this inessential effort,

this unwanted animal

untouched despite disease or

custom, folded up and 

forgotten, dusty missives and broken poems

not worth the accounting of

every last finger left.

stricken

We start out where the day is spent, night fresh treads and the course of decorations. We start out with the cigar burning odd and the flower startlingly noncommittal. I pass around my unwanted jokes and unpersuasive poems, notes that never make it up the row, missives that a few cruel teachers might read aloud but mostly they just throw away. The night already knows, but I don’t listen. The night’s not saying, but it knows I’m over.

The sky is washed in unintended light, the city spill yet another strike, smoke gathers before going walk about with Mars on bold display. Fireworks and Christmas lights, inadvisable gatherings, and the spirits largely literal. My appetites remain unpersuaded, my appetites remain aloof, the word’s turn untaken in the rising night. So I smoke over the mutterings of blood and ghost. So I sit listening to loose belts and flattening tires, flesh hungry from root to crown. Stone to star, missing that much more.

Time is passed in the spitting of leaf and the stirring of embers, breath and smoke and all the unseen stars. A raised voice now and again, songs and snips of conversations, a conversion table for all the chattering ghosts. Fragments and phrases and credo written bold and clear. Symbols and incantations and sparks smoldering in the vestments. Time in tall trees and little fires, fleeting and filling in the blanks. The adoring and the adoration broken off at the root, endings and cinders and the breathing in the burn. Another one and done, and the night doesn’t even break its stride. The worn through words, the promised stars.

the givens

The nerves all run at a burn, the air stirred with ink and static. The dark and cars have taken all the spaces. Ascension II is sizzling through the atmosphere, smoke is climbing up the sky. It’s clear enough to give witness to the wanderers, cold enough that gloves ought to have been given a thought. Saturday night comes along at a reckless gallop, people off and people out. Coltrane rings out, rippled with the sounds of traffic and traveling music. Something electric alongside the usual froth and sparkle. The hole of the sorrow, the weight of the stone.

It’s just the sort of smile where the teeth don’t really care enough to bite. It’s the eyes checking their messages, the long slow stride of the deeper notes, the flesh beneath these festive lights. The gnawed up words, the empty breathed sentiments, the long look away. Out steeped in the chill winds and the insistent shadows, out of favored out of circulation, choking on the same old same old and circling antecedents. The dishing it out to taking it rate fearsome one sided.

It takes a long time for the words to work their way through me. It takes a long time for me to catch the drift. I do much of what I do poorly, though I’m not the one to ask. The reasons I had have long since turned to dust and charms. Looking at it now, when I thought I had little, to realize it is still less. After the givens, the sum of frets and gifts. These word problems come home to roost.

looking at the sun

Held too close

like the words of a ghost 

speaking clearly in

the crown of darkest night.

Left too long

the armrest of the open

driver’s side soaking

the whole arm for

the elbow’s sake.

Bereft at the direction 

the hearts says look

and the eyes oblige

despite the limits of the organism

and the capacities of the instruments.

Eventually it is all pieces

weighed and disassembled 

the smoke and mirrors 

traded for the bone and gristle 

the receptacle full and

still filled spilling 

ink and aptitude 

all the grays incorporated 

the image left unseen,

blind to begin it. 

recherché

It waits among the ornaments and the frippery, the word unsaid so long because it means something, the word gravid with itself. Something more than the style or the school, something deeper than the shop chop, something more solid than author or artist. The long toothed ones slumbering in between spines on the shelf, the arcane ones lost between the grimoire and the stacks, the technical ones still loitering in the language after the technology walked away. It is the purview of the seeker, the scholar, the priest and the witch. It is the last refuge of the fake, the posturer, the martinet, and the forger. Some become odd because of the redistribution of attention, the contraction of curiosity, the topology of culture. Some only grow odder with use. 

The words that need to be there never wait. They push their way up flights and to the front of the queue, roll back the stone, and make a mockery of time and geography. They slide up on their homophones and show up unannounced. They reveal themselves as path and labyrinth and minotaur, those foldings and kisses and spent breaths. Loosed in winds and sediment, leaking letters through the pages, carved into clay and stone. The slick ones, the secret ones, the unpalatable mouthfuls, the signals and incantations: they need coaxing to the call. At the very least they are a sort of punctuation, a visit to the dictionary or the author’s curriculum vitae. Maybe a rope to keep you out.

This would have been a tirade about a particular type of writer that was really about a particular writer had I gone off as expected. Though some of it was based on broad ideals and craft lore feels about writing, it was really another exercise in bewilderment and envy, there are just some turns my mind can’t get around. It ends up another hill where I’m left for dead. Some strange sad bent, the aimless archiving of these awful moments, suicide jags and the curling smoke. How little hay these haymakers make. How oddly parsed, how unnecessarily put. Some pawned off bauble, gaudy in the light. Some recovered relic, a glory again revealed. A stranger right there, spoken aloud.

monolith

I wake up early, but the wounds wake up first, plain and pure as the wailing on through train. The clock is on, the flesh is melting. Everywhere you look, animals are astir. It’s the stiff in the old bellows, a stiffening of the springs, the day to day and the thirsty work. We wake naked to the grace, stunned little pinky mice fed to the snake of fate. Something moves beneath the cursing dawn. Everywhere, something stirs.

The dawn is still thinking on it and the moon looms high above the waking west. I stagger through the steps, stumble on the path, trip and jig through the ritual. The signature and the clock to punch. The sunrise ache and the day to come. The sweep of the legacy shadow and the ringing of the sky. The earth amid the appetites, the bleeding through the blessed. 

Come to sing to the stone of your dreams. Come to leave to some pittance of an offering. The streets are full and the sirens sound and your in the thick of the rush around again. The love alive in the gutters and ashtrays. The love aglow in the surrendered embers. The mystery there to welcome witness, soaked in the bent of ardent shadow. The wounds awake, and I follow along. Air brakes and birdsong, beneath the labored dailies the world burns.

the misremembered

The moon is coming, but it isn’t here yet. There’s always a lot of inking in to do. The flesh is there but the mind is slippery. It’s best to take it with a grain or two. I allow for the inevitable, but I work off of landmarks and the ways of the stars. The map is in the making, the moment in the all, when you’re there there’s no telling where you are. The moon isn’t here yet, but she’ll make it by and by.

Every memory is an edit. Every remembrance a rewrite. It’s a structural problem, this abstraction pressed into flesh. The river busy at every bend, the tide nothing but discord and complaint. Those clips from kiss to absence, the report of every touch. The persuasion of cant and cadence, the stone smoothed by the insistence of each return, water on water with the certainty of stone. The burning bloom only old and alone. 

There are litanies of sparks and stars. The way the moon’s aura glowed around the crowns and roofs. The fire streaked sky above the car camp lake, peals of laughter and the sounds of reckless glass. The way the rumors lit the firmament, the terrible relentless presence of the thinker in each thought, the primal night full of witnesses and reckonings. The music as the score makes you smile. The piano when your fingers fully wake. In your skin, the motor mouthed geese headed south and west, the traffic and each breath. The window you always leave open, your belly as the moon arrives. 

blowing off steam

The coffee is hot and the air is cool. The steam relents briefly and returns, the instinctual soup spoon gesture built into the ritual. The bright uncaring sun, the you know how to whistle lips pursed just so, the ripples unfurling upon the ink black surface loosing vapor with every huff and puff. The little pig ache a blade in the belly, evergreens and birdsong and the same story all day long. I lift the steel steaming cup to my lips, and almost without thinking, I blow.

Again the calendar turns without a kindness. Again the moon is full to mock and loom. I am all scratching and habits, Mifune as Yojimbo, Bogart as old Dobbsy. More craft than method, more muscle memory than sight read, I run my lines constantly. Every step I take, every table I turn, this vacancy awaits. The hole where my humanity should go, the sodden dreams and the silky soul. Ask the ghosts that linger in the eaves, ask the dead moth that has fallen from your drapes. Ask the cards for the mix and the measure. Cut the deck and call it out. Repeat your threes and add a prayer. There is no safety there.

Some days the coffee seems slow to cool. Some days lukewarm seals the kiss, black coffee lolls on my tongue, these hollowed out intimacies choked down no matter how hard to swallow. The atmosphere tastes your every motion, it rolls and spills about you. It stitches itself to you, blood and breath and hot black mirrors with your mouth all over. The tea leaves and the table. The circuit burning in your bones, this tidal tick and tock. I lift the cup as the wind kisses my graybeard and savaged features. I take a sip of hot black coffee, the usual ablutions as the warmth fills my chest. The sun lingers in the trees, I lift the cup without hope or wishes to my waiting lips. In the long, lingering light, I blow.