inside voice

It’s all too much

the rush of the calendar 

the dust of the clock, 

blue skies and bare limbs and

a house that can only grow 

colder, a name that doesn’t stick

on someone that doesn’t matter,

an argument that begins and

ends in words. They always say 

you got to go for it, they say

you do you, they say live it

like the last day then

the last day shows up at your door,

champagne and fireworks and

all the fixings. You hold

your breath so close 

it feels like love, it feels like

falling, like you could

let loose, this saved up sound

a shouting like a celebrant, 

rending garments and 

wailing— gone, gone

this one, never to speak

again aloud, offered up to

stars that never change

while we all keep counting 

down to the drop.

paint the wall

Never mind the way

the wind will move, forget

how the light keeps 

changing the frame, you’re not 

a piece they need. The extra

parts aren’t a problem,

your little wishes are not the world 

we live through like a movie,

hiding from monsters, hunting 

loot and clout, the guy the girl

the roundabout, somebody forever 

sentenced to just be themselves—

the long awaited alone at last 

outlasting the conceit or the plot.

So what if you missed your mark?

You were never great with punctuation.

These stops and starts, all shouts and 

stabs and moving parts 

best left to sharper minds and

better machinations. You know 

now the words won’t stop 

no matter where you put them or

which blots and scribbles 

you throw under their wheels while

the real insists, awaiting the inevitable

call back to the act one gun.

open stance

It’s not what you know it’s what

you’ve learned through brick and

bone and the all alone when

the sky falls down and the heart

dies from the ungodly cacophony,

the way the world is only here

until something chases everything away.

Mostly we won’t let our limits 

tell us our truths, the facts

helpless before the faith we go 

all in on. It still falls as hard,

the equal of any storybook hell 

smacked right on top of us,

the mountain without the invitation.

History arrives at the insistence of

a telling, this witness 

lost weeping on the road.

Everywhere thieves and murderers

work their angles unopposed,

so we turn the world offering 

an empty hand to controvert 

the forces that would destroy.

So go the gods and monsters and

devastations of that ilk, defeated

with one long breath and

a simple step to the side.

shtick

It begins with me choking 

on the bones of my last breath,

the other shoe, the old one two,

relics of rhetoric rising from the grave

as if a given, as I cough

until I see stars and sparkles,

the wheel of fortune somehow 

always set to resurrect, 

the compass of a past iteration,

the punchline another round of jokes.

It ends in the guts of thrift 

and privation, the poverty of things and

soul that sets in the mettle 

of a certain type, turning over stones

searching for the words to make

it work, all to take a spill

the slapstick to ring your crown, 

cartoons all have their form—

to try and tray so hard

hilarious constellations appear so fast

it hurts so bad to see stars.

I was a lover

Hungry with nothing but a toothache to chew on, the night works its way into my lap. Something wrong with the body, the body language follows suit, leaning into one pain to avoid too much of another. It’s the sort of thing the animal knows, gut and limb and the untithed mind telling stories out of school. It’s the sort of thing the ghost will tell you if you get too reckless with the instrument. The flame may pass in inferno and in spark, jumping from vessel to vessel, abiding in the unyielding dark. The flame still burns in feckless ember and bright conceit, though the temple has long since burned down. 

A second cigar, the street gone dark, quiet for the night before garbage day. The same scene as the cold closes in, cold fingers and dimly lit screens, the ghost always closing in as the words seal the circle and the story goes again. The same complaints of blood and bone, of love unrequited and the same old song. The same refrain of memory and fantasy, lovers returned despite it all, a cloud for a cloak and sunflowers for a crown. Working the ember through the leaf, all my efforts to end in ash. The attendance of the station of the altar of the unseen.

We all live in some sort of story. I’m not saying I’m exempt, it’s just that my stories are part of a world that’s all but gone. It’s part of the natural order, the ending of a branching, the blooming of the new. It’s the other nature— not the stroll through the majesty and the mystery, but the pop gone weasel, the brutish tooth and claw. This senescence mirrors my uselessness, a young man’s skill set in a broken down old man, limits that I never expected to live long enough to meet. Only the wisdom of the fool that touched every fire twice, a busker’s patter and a juggler’s touch. An embarrassment of letters making claims the ass never had to cash, mistaking boredom and poor choices for the hand of fate, going all in despite the deal. The spaces left in a life left burning. Only assorted scorch marks and smoke spilling up the eaves.

little bird

I’ll admit I haven’t given it my all. I haven’t even hit the books, ordered by silhouette, revealed in color photographs whose colors I don’t always see. The little bird in the city tree late in the afternoon, flitting from branch to branch, browsing deftly in the late season greenery you get after a California storm. The dusty deadfall yard at once lush and verdant, the brown shrubs and drought starved dirt alive with the kiss of rain. It looks almost like a wren, it moves not unlike the red breasted nuthatches I see patrolling the pines. I couldn’t tell you anything about its colors, as is my constant cross. 

I missed a lot of acts I loved, always broke and with a pronounced aversion to crowds, I never was much one for making any given scene. At 16 I saw Wall of Voodoo, Divinyls, Missing Persons, and the English Beat, but was sick in my car with sunstroke when the Clash went on. Laurie Anderson, my first big art crush, canceled a show I had tickets to in San Francisco. I saw Tom Waits during the show that became the concert film Big Time, despite a prophetic dream that came true during his performance. Shane MacGowan ditched me twice, his own adventures leading to cancellations nearly a decade apart. The second time he slipped me was at a Guinness Fleadh where I managed to catch both John Prine and Elvis Costello, so it didn’t sting nearly so much. There are acts of love in the witness, the attention owed to the beauty that touches your heart. The list of sins and infractions always greatest in omission.

Dusk has come, and like my father while he lived, I smoke as the evening arises. I live in my father’s house, stare across this devastated legacy while I wait for unseen stars to bear out their constellations. I care for my mother as she sinks into further dementia and senescence while the foundation cracks and the firmament reveals its less discrete portents. Life goes on as this branching withers away, our devotions only carried on haphazardly as the earth receives its own. A devotee of the open stance I take what comes, everything coming down to where to put my hands and feet, the rest too great and reckless to reckon. A little bird, at work in the world, the open yard spitting green as the leaves decide their fate. Last words buried deep in the turn of the soil, this witness among the words unasked as life strives past my days. This witness all I have to offer to the end. 

another song about the rain

It’s been a while since it rained here last. The next one forecast is a chance on down the way. Cold and clouds and the waning moon is all my skies provide. The night and the ministry of memory, some old song and a dozen lives disappear, returning to the earthquake rattle of the window by your bed. A train, a trace, the draught of grace minus the trickle through the beard. Drink deep enough to drown the dreaming, smoke long enough to bend the memory to the will. The heater goes quiet and the house takes a chill. A heart full of things I can’t live down, and the long road down from the going wrong, 

It early when the room closes in, crowded with song and smoke and mean old me. I’m crawling on the bottom, getting one breath of every three, beset with this burning ache from root to crown. The heart staggers though it’s bursting, a clumsy man beset with countless stairs and an unfortunate tumble, the sad provocation as it races to the basement. The shadows sift and soften at the beckon of the light, blue plumes and the shifting skins of screens in this amber elder pall. Dust and unsettled bones, a stirring in small circles. Tears and the portents of the coming storm. 

It’s not even ten o’clock and the front door’s locked. Midnight still a skip and a hop off, and the gates are closed. The broken clock, hands always straight up at twelve, sells the same old lie without a tick or tock. The table is laden with books and dust, the ones I’m still reading to the ones I gave a rest. There are words I won’t manage to see, things I’ll never think to say. There are letters I am longing for and letters I never sent. Something I want to say to someone I never knew who’s long since gone. Something I want to hear that I wouldn’t believe if you swore on a stack of blues. Just a bunch of stuff I think I know from so long ago it may as well be a Bible story. Just a lot of words so heartfelt they might as well be from a song.

beauty

We are the mark of the unique threaded through our inheritance, the distinctive iteration of factions of proteins stumbling through the chances and utilities. Brushstroke and handwriting, fingerprints and the culture added to the culture that carries over, the stitchwork of the distinctive strings. We speak in the minds of the times, plus or minus decades or days. Those now extant and unwritten, crumbling into memoir and saga, that wisened eye always a little ahead of the telling. The last thief to sign their name on the hapless galleys, the tolling of the eternal. All the heavy lifting goes unnoticed save for those wagered in the vagaries of the game. 

Watch as the phrases share bandwidth and trade breaths. Watch as the enemy changes shape. These are the tricks of the trade, the tried and true lies every devil you know thinks is your due. The service of hard longings and secret wishes, the deep machine in the monkey mind, a series of dots and dashes and a few tripped switches. The fields full of the legions of the empty cupboards fed scraps for the honor of dying for the contemptuously laden table. No matter who crashes the vehicle, it’s always the enemy at the wheel.

These are the drums I tire of hearing, the rattle of the saber, the favor of the flag. Perdition is built on the bones of grasping ghouls displayed in crown and epaulets, the drift into gaudy abstractions as all the treasures fill a few castles, with a few words strategically scattered sparsely over the gardens of the dead. It has been a disease in the soul of this failed state well past the limits of my memory. To be of this tribe that preaches murder as freedom, so sick with evil that we resist justice by reflex. Born into this violence, I long for beauty as it is destroyed by habit and fiat. I dream of beauty, however foolish my dream. 

in it

Dusk comes, but the dark came earlier. Night falls, but the bright blue sky hit first. I know where my feet are supposed to go, but still I miss my mark. I step dutifully to the simplest of chores, but I fail to meet my standard. The old ideation, blown brains and swinging husks, the heavy handed hyperbole of the de facto narcissist. The doom laden brow of the dimwit too frustrated to know where to drop the hammer. I sit, thick with this inconsolable sorrow, like I have so many nights and days. I sit, deep in the labyrinth without a Minotaur in sight, hollowed out from these decades of hard thoughts.

Doors keep closing, people leave and keep their distance, I keep cleaving away the possibilities. The broken habits and the strange compensations slow to a laden grind. The power is still on, but there’re more gaps in the magic than completed circuits. It’s an old saw, a quaint waltz in a bombed out dance hall, this tired banging of the drum. It’s even worse from this end of the words. You do what you know, and you take your licks. Each of us a one off, a candle among billions of other flickering flames. The self you can manage, the self you’re left to be. The light will find its way.

Last night I surfaced from a drowning dream, the fear upon me and death bearing down. I woke gasping, clinging desperately to the tether of living breath, bodily pleading for my life. The weight of this dolor heavy on my racing heart, bewildered tears at this being of no reprieve,  the mad gnashing at guts and bone awake and alone. It is an act of will and the epitome of this cowardice, arms folded tight around the empty, the next day the fustigation to be. As sure as the fall of the swallow or the phases of the moon, I take whatever is dished out like the played out punk I am. Kicking and screaming, scrawling words down these imaginary walls that won’t stop closing in, the distance trapped within. 

report

It is as loud on the last day as

it is at the latest, the city tree

clinging to greens and reds

that might be imaginary,

limbs dozing and dreaming out

old seasons. Bright and 

haggard as it holds

high the sky, so far as it knows,

telling a story that is over.

All these letters shed over

the heart’s many seasons,

love and salt and the radiant

half-life of madness

blazing down the page,

wants and wishes and the romance

that just needs somewhere to go,

these ashes returned to affections,

the earth forever in love.

cradle and all

It’s life, so sometimes the sirens slide under the saxophone. It’s life, so sometimes baby goes boom. There’s no telling what’s coming around the corner. There’s no telling who’s getting hurt. Hard bones bumping into things that are harder still, the mind never really ready for the lessons matter has in store. All the things that didn’t kill you, didn’t kill me either. We’re all immortal until the hammer comes down. 

Sunup, sundown, the day keeps dragging around. Nightfall, it’s all wolves in wool, how we howl and slaver at our secret dreams. Comes the chalk, comes the clock, comes the lady with the alligator purse. We strive to stay a step ahead of the devil or to knock god off their throne. The world we built around the world is a centrifuge, built to concentrate graft from our common gifts. Stacks of tricks, words and wicks, things to sling wildly and burn when we’re not feeling too terribly bright. All this labor without a word from the savior.

I was cold, and I was beneath the moon up the tree. The night was sotted with broken clouds, so I’d see a star here a star there, but not enough to get a sense of the constellations. I stood hands in pocket, looking at the waning moon, turning phrases silently on my tongue. I had stepped outside in dull resignation at the insistence of a car alarm, a little gander to go with the what the fuck, but I stopped to stare because what was there was there. The sort of thing I write about, if I write about anything at all.

plural

It’s an early day, but they’re all early days lately. I’m in bed for warmth, but what else apart from sleeping would I be doing? I think I used up my lifetime supply of company, no new takers, and none of my old romances want another shot. We’re at the long count now, though it’s only me doing the counting. The days drag as time goes flying by, not even looking where it goes. I’m a little closer to the end than I was yesterday, come tomorrow I hope to be a little closer. I’m a little further from everyone than I was even a few hours ago, come tomorrow I’ll be further still. Empty save need and want and whining, the clock keeps plodding away.

About now is when I would pad out the page with a few neat details: the tiny white scars on my knuckles, the ringed halo of the shade of the reading lamp, the recorded voices singing todays hits. About now I’d lift the melody or plays some scales. Wasting everybody’s time and patience because I have a hard time letting a habit die. Wasting word after word because after a long dull life of vanishing I am suddenly afraid to disappear. This wanting something once the nothing takes ahold. This wanting something because of the way she said your name.

Days go by and I barely speak to anyone. Months go by and no one’s checking in. I suppose I took it all for granted, but I guess I was always the uninvited guest, the unspoken plus one. The incidental plural, not with or of but somehow along for the ride. Everyone was going somewhere, and now everybody’s gone. I get up, I go to bed, I walk in small circles and repeat myself. The world turns and turns. I make an early night of it. There’s more to dread tomorrow, and tomorrow never comes.

sweet nothings

It’s the hour of the ever after. It’s the hour of the words that never were. The channels flicker and the song you speak in a hush beneath your breath plays on and on. A greedy touch and a bone deep tremble, these memories muttered in gusts of breath and clouds of smoke. I would tell you but you already know what I wanted. Everything you had to give and all you had to do was ask. It’s a story within a story, local color before the sign off, the anyone else that’d do. It’s the night left on read, the simple assembly of the ache from every step you take away.

I wish it was as simple as the whisper I would use to wake you, something fluttering in your blood, my lips so near your neck. I wish it was as simple as what I wanted, then these words could take their leave. It will always be my hands upon your hips, staring into your want. Or at least that’s my story as you burn away the bridge. I know it’s nothing like the way I write it, I’m another dull flame readily extinguished. I’m the stranger you wished you turned away.

This is how the night goes, promises passed like notes in class. This is how the night turns, towed by the lost dog moon. It’s a little cold and a little lonesome. The dogs are honestly running amok, though it’s between them and the neighbors now. There’s little comfort in the laughter allowed as payment for the proud contumely, Sun Ra headed to Mars with a rumor of percussion following the steps. This tripping tongue, this downward spiral, this lump of wonder why that has all the answers. Did you write this down before you erased it from your memory? What kisses await telling, this skin and your lips? 

bask

Comes the tired eyes, comes the drifting tinsel, these clouds around the moon. Wandering in the darkened yard, blackberry bramble and redwood fence, caught off guard by the halo framed in the pine. That beaming brush against being, seeing at once moment and mystery, knowing the brief kiss of wisened bliss. It goes quick these days, just like time I suppose, but oh that moment— oh how we glow. Touched by the myth through the quick, body caught in the meeting of the abstraction and the matter, the sort of glory where I long to bask. 

Fretful corridors waiting around each corner, old doors that don’t bother keeping out the devil, every wolf welcomed as a guest. Still chambers full of dust and expired charms, this haven of spores and spiders, the rituals threadbare and mostly smoking. Magic will make it, whether it should be so. Most of us are almost there, on the day side of the dreaming, going to war for these oases that are the foundation of the principalities of the long mirage. We spin ourselves into almost anything with a word or two. Imagine the damage 8 billion of us can do. I sit indoors tapping glass and plastic, turning pictures into prayers. 

Life is the roots and the branchings. Life is the dive under the lowered slab with the panache to grab its hat. Life is turning dust and ash into soil, the grasping at every aspect, the trying of every trick. It’s that thick chunk of code that we carry in common, it’s every variable and phenomenon rolling as lands. We are the teeming unknown in the depths of the ocean. We are the river as long as we run. Tired though I am of the bastinade of these daily drubbings, bitter as I am in the desert of my soul, in these instants of beautiful impact I can see how it’s worth it in small doses. Whatever becomes of me, something will become of it. 

that old feeling

It is the hour of the crowded absence. It is the moment of the cold reaching in. No blown kisses   or chance encounters, just the drab day to day and some aimless sense I just can’t slip. The ache slowed in through the skin touching an atmosphere ready to even things out, every song a sad song as the attrition intensifies. Crawling into bed in a house gone toward the stillness, this dull grind into steep decline. The heart saw it coming, the spirit a note on the door. The difference between an exit and a way out made clear.

It’s the position of the pillow, it’s the angle of the shoulder I am lying on, it’s the tangle of the blankets or the cat across my knee— there will be no rest. The moon weighs in with haughty fury, the stars don’t even bother to show. On my side with the window open, the sky poking its nose in without even a how do you do. It’s the songs on one side, sleep on the other, and neither of them trying too terribly hard to win me over. Say what you will, a fellah wants to be wanted.

The month wears out fast with nothing to show. The worse keeps exceeding itself, entropy working hard and well ahead of schedule. The season of the unwanted people has begun, where the friendless and estranged are reminded how unloved they are, parties and holidays where regular types gather together and every corner of the transmitted world covered in tinsel and fireworks. Those of us who have run out of places to go and people to see, loners and outcasts and dead enders feel especially keenly the mark of their alienation. This crush of night, this lonesome plod towards dust. Sick to the stomach and cold to the bone. That old feeling of all you will never know again. Begin as an organism, end as the space where the words trail off.

whenever it comes around

The light leaves quick on the deck of the great distraction, all at once the sun on the run and the moon holding court as it rises. A glimmer of albedo bright behind the front yard tree, a glimpse at the mercy of limb and mist. The satellite gathering gaze and rapture, stirring the oceans and the earth, pinning the wings of every angel to behold. Another altar to the becoming, light ripe with the air of imminence, the unseen schemings below the on high thick in our acclamations. The sense of that sizzle, the drag of the static dancing lightning crackling from your touch, this arrival of our once and future creators buzzing from our brains. Always something that wants to sell you another set of chains.

Indoors it goes a little different, the gift of Prometheus, the passcode of the Morning Star. The doorknob and carpet combo calling forth that semblance of the cry it’s alive. Reminders of the relative, ink of the aspirants, the glitter glued to the ceiling. The moon adjusts its grip, the heart held fast in reckless divinity, the mind in thrall to the magic that it makes. The moment is a mortal thing, leaving the claws in the back of the next instant to pass, the path of ten million fuses in the grand burn. We carry all the weight of each collapse up to the next breath taking. All these tabs left open, the hubris built in, this seeing every which way at once. The wait, the want, the next one done. 

This is me, working on the engine. This is me with the parts all over the floor. The myth behind my mind watching the way the sausage is made, these dreams that answer every demand, the places where the symbols touch the meat. This sloughed and sallow construct reworking all the wounds, stars from the fire, tattered flags for the fall. You could solve it through devotion, an aspect known through the ritual of relentless intent. You could find it in rune stone, star, or card. It isn’t a ghost to go to, but the echo down below. It isn’t a goddess in the sky, but the riot she makes of your skin. This could be the prelude, it could be the marginalia. Whenever it comes around, I got there first. The spell cast clean through the roof spilling down the page.

cold to the touch

Time builds it up to tear it down, the wheels on the bus, the six white horses when she comes. Sodden with songs, smothered in stories, every road always going off on its own. At the reckoning of her glory, this distance slowly seals the deal. Letters kissed with Os and Xs, momentous oaths and sloppy sex wrinkling the pages. Here we go with our hands in our pockets. Here we are with nowhere left to look.

It’s the hour of the least interest, the songs from the service, the lights always about to give up the ghost. The world of this waking, the world of this want. A muted sun, a peekaboo moon, the sudden violence of startled wings. The things you said and the things you have yet to say, sleep the solace left to seek as the room dies down. Day and night and every hue too good for you, the same old scenery from that tired old show. A brick, a heart, a clout from a cop. 

It’s not the ghost, it’s not the corpse, it’s not a hey nonny fleeting folly flag. The dull wit residue stretched across the drumhead, these phrases that sound of a beating about the brains. The misdirect of the intellect, the symbols where they send you, dog whistles and the impoverishment of the palette. The meal we see posted, the love we’ve been sent. The harder colder left to go.

static

The thought arrives with the windows all a flicker, billboard and brick wall and goat barn, the scent of coffee and the racket of the club car. A negligible sense of direction and a penchant for showing up alone. Waiting for the long side of the bend in the rails before sliding open the door, momentum meeting up with the feet. An unyielding stillness, a ship in a bottle. Wandering cabin or car in the imprecision between departure and destination. Unboxed expectations, a similar phrasing of the feel, a grubby room and a screen to fill.

There’s no such thing as a pristine memory. You scuff it up every time you take it out of the box. Some details drift, some scenery changes, you better believe you get the better light. The cross wires of cognition and confection, the placing of the panels, the hanging of the frame. All these thoughts moving from one thing to another, the stories racing us to keep up with our fresh selves, as we work our way through the elements. Every day a costume change from the inside out. Our memories are lucky not to be left on the bus.

The season leans in, the entity encumbered by the swell of shadows and the hinted light. Thoughts swarm and string along, flashes of bright and lively distractions strobe, the flutter of sentience a bird beating against the blinds. The words chemistry and recipe, the words ice clinking against the glass. This stir of dust, this stretch of static, the tenuous accommodations allowed by the now. This moment almost close to some lost long ago, a train only remembered by the tracks.

perpetuity

They all wind up love letters, no matter what I say. Invocations and incantations, hint and rumors, the words weighted to touch you just so. It’s the gist you get from the ways we play our worthies. It’s the unknown and the way we take everything as puzzles, it’s the shapes you make between your eyes and mind. I guess I write at everybody, but I mostly write at you. Now you see em, now you don’t. It’s that hint of mystery, that turning in your tracks. So they’re all love letters with no particular place to go. 

The evening is on its feet, the body is closing in. More senescence, more pain, from the ache of the cat encumbered hip to the burn and sharp through gut and bone. The lonely hours spent beneath the declamations of the world of hurt, the mind ground to ashes and alarms. A medieval city ablaze in the middle of the night, a sense of fleeing by the light of the inferno, this set of disasters caving in all around. Appetite and isolation, the on and on portion of this far gone.

If you’re reading this chances are you don’t love me. If you’re reading this, the chances are you didn’t read this far. If you think I’m doing this for posterity, that fairly preposterous. Not much good in your name ringing out if you can’t leverage the come and get it. Not much good in being remembered after you’ve gone to earth. I only ever wrote it to make you look. It’s the way I always miss you more, the romance of the becoming moon through the fog, the star you never mentioned that I know is yours. Passing notes to the perpetuity, each one saying there was a woman I nearly knew. 

relic

Sword to stone, the form is rife with fire. The worn down bone, the torn up flesh, the burn about the being as the world runs out. There is the consideration of the materials and the hanging of the frame, the body billowing in the winds as it collapses brick by brick. The days add up and the deficits carry. Pain the pin that holds the remainder to the map, grief and ghosts and a quiver full of I love yous. Pain the shadow cast by the light inside, arms folded around this fragile ache.

The words settle like dust, they drip and drizzle like water, they bless and they burn. We loose them like splendid birds to mark the moment against the sky, celebration all feathers and lift. Words we long for and words that hunt us dead. Would that there were pages to contain them, would that there were tongues to wag away. Discard the grail, dump the chalice, the quest is in the telling. Breath by breath these steps are swept, ascending the holy held close in your heart.

The song disappears where the stylus would go, another song starts where the needle would be, the spinning somewhere in the algorithm. The music spooking through the room, the music beckoning to our lost and dead. The wrestle in the paper bag rustle of these thickened breaths as the music plays and plays. This object an affectation owed to phantoms and lapsed lovers, the apostasy of the declaration as the flesh falls away. A power awaiting intention, the initiation of mind and hand. That radiance inside your mind, the longing that reaches back towards your grasp.

a little left to dream on

Sometimes the night will tell your fortune. Sometimes the night won’t give you the time of day. I can’t tell you what to believe. I can’t keep track of the running tab let alone all these worlds of nuance and sharp edges. I’ve seen enough to know how little I’ve seen. What words, what witness, this second hand chair, this lamp of the antecedents. All slow fade and long fall, I doze and stir and stride. Adding up the aches and the deficits, my last nerve all burning flags.

So there’s rough smoke and ice water, coughing as condensation drips down the glass. So the big black cat is in my lap and the old bones hurt like the dickens. A tuft of hair floats past my face and the music is louder all the sudden. Not so much a shift in genre or intensity but the luck of the shuffle and levels of the masters. Or so I sit and imagine, the songs winding one by one, far away and long ago and the heart here and now. Too many fresh hells, not enough jezebels, and the rough ride around the clock.

Someday I’ll get the story going. Someday I’ll get caught up. The letters that I should have written, the letters that I lost. Given up to the course of madness left to its own machinations, going down the road of all frail flesh, and the haunts of hungry ghosts. Old wounds mutter, growl, and wail. New wounds stand up and harmonize, down to the punitive rounds. The sentence served to bridges burned, the lonesome that has gathered, hands in its pockets and whistling away. I have a name I find hard to say, I have a number that has long since been up. The world is riddled with sameness and thick with difference. There’s no telling what might go your way, whatever you think you’ve got coming. 

the devil and the deep blue

Another day back into the bellows. Another race lost in the stretch, the length of limb, the weight of shadow. A little something to keep beneath your pillow. This little taste to get you through. All the sorts of salt we sort through and we miss a few molecules. Even as the eyes tremble meeting your unwavering gaze. Wings clipped back in the design stage, we are all lessons of the fall. The words go wandering, the mind all moonlight and the deep blue sea. Fingering the details, our devils on demand. 

I only know the imaginary and the ache. Your smile split between ghost and show, your eyes telling me all the things I want to know. There’s no question it’s a story, there’s no guessing at the gaffe. The way we wish so hard on the bones of some moment we never really met, the way we long in the languor and the loss. Another slow assault of evening, another failed campaign of night. I sit and spill over in wastes of weeping. I sit and ache after life and limb. I say it waking, your name on the tip of my tongue.

What to make of these lavish embarrassments of mistaken equivalence? What to do with these bodies worn off the rack? The compass of least resistance pulling out your path. End to end, this vast magnetism that compels you, the word unto. Some assembled pleasure, the watchmaker in the dark, a evident deftness revealed. The belt and the blindfold, the confinement of the stricture, the hand directed to the flesh. The plead imperative a whispered prayer, the oath imparted lips. Another night of imagined attentions and bowing by the book. 

blessed

Maybe I lit a candle, maybe I burned some incense. Maybe I made peace between me and the great unseen, rain falling all at once. So I spread my action around these wants and wounds, the tin roof patter almost a balm amongst these banes. Where the word touches, where the word turns, the way glass grays with condensation when bound by lung and lip. So the world is wept over, so the moon marks the whispers between blood and spirit. Threadbare and strung along, the fabric and the feeling. Oh the way you mark the morning. Oh, the way you bat the lash.

The sky is seamless shifting, story after story all the way to the stars. This tattered flesh, so worn and weary, wails and wails. The fire in the socket, the gravel in the gut. On and on through endless takes of enough’s enough, this prescient imbalance of being and burn, this haloed absence this earthly return. I am a flag for the tatters, I am an unfurling fit to the wind. Alone in the raging night, served by kindness and coincidence alike, I serve the witch’s shift. I bear the brand of heavy blessings and abandoned campaigns. Propped in an armchair, reaching up the skirts of the dreaming. The day ends again in ruins.

It’s the sort of flame that can’t be extinguished. It’s the sort of midnight that shows up all hours. Once consecrated, the altar’s always on. The signals it receives, the static of the constellations dragged down the years. Shards of pottery and burnt bones, postcards and fetishes and the power of intent. Write something down, let it yellow into irony or feed it to the fire. Whisper the name of your beloved kiss close against their neck. Once we are gone, we are gone for good. Blessed once, the savor never recaptured, not feast or figment. The benediction an aura clinging to the enduring bereft. 

unitard

There’s not all that much to who you end up caping for, with your heartfelt speeches and careful hair. Arriving preened and polished, wrapped and ready in the armor of your fuck me lingerie, ready to play to the empty altar. Glittering there on the showroom floor, painted in your colors, pressed into flesh. Squeezed between the hopes and dreams, you wake with the name spilling out your mouth, the meaning drizzling down blood and breath. This the way your wishes make it, the color and the claim. This is the way you want to feel it, naked all the same.

There’s the way you stirred the stars, step by step in stylish pumps. There’s the way you called all bluffs, falling hard into the concessions. Here the flickers, there the rumors, there’s that way you’re hair is pulled. There’s the ring, there’s the rigging, there’s the gaffed slapstick. The carnival logic rigmarole, the baiting of each breath, this note you hold and hold. Maybe I might tag you in, maybe I will dunk you good. True heart or heel the outfit will out, come crawling lovelorn or turned worm home to roost. The way you are fitted when you’re bound to go all out.

Maybe this was meant to flatter, maybe this was a mood on its own. The storm sorted into strip and bristle, a measured spanking from the stratosphere, livid skin shameless and taking it at a run. This flicker of my salacious gaze on the devil’s details, the burnished bouquet a burning branch, want turning every touch to fuel. Look upon this, my cape, my role. Look upon this unitard, clown sad, fool bright. Here we go, spinning through the hay, O here we go reeling through the fields! This is the song you plucked me from, this is the proof as you play.

a taste

It’s like it’s late, though it’s really all a blur. The waking and sleepwalking, the calendar on shuffle as I scuff and crumble. I’m bedded down more for comfort than sleep. Alone in a cold room, with the pain of the beatings and the ache for old lovers warm against my skin. Oh, this ancient craving. Oh, this first falling always waiting on my lips. My world has gone to unread threads and run on blues. Thinking about the way you kiss, missing the taste of you. 

The night is always hanging around. The words crowd around polishing the want, the words pile on reaching at the ache. Fitful and ridiculous, I cut quite the figure for the tools at hand, the outlandish dreamer tilting windmills in the toss and turn. The stars are out there if you look. You looking is what I think of when I see them.

It’s not as if you’re in my dreams: you need sleep for dreaming. It’s not as if you haunt my days: mostly I’m my own ghost. A pronoun for the apostrophe. The way I am always sitting close, saying these things out loud, the sound part of the story of the ways we’re found out. I sigh despite the artifice, always half down for the count, half in a trance. The sticking of the invocation, the waking to almost hearing you speak. The distinctions in your breath, the ending only what you do next.

clutches

Mostly these days I wish I was dreaming, at least when I’m not wishing I was dead. The hours gnaw my bones with languor, savoring every wince and ache. The days amble past with spit and sneers, snuffing last lingering hopes, seeding pain between blood and ghost in lazy strings, the sharpness of the sun leaping off the windows of a passing train. I am sick and I am seething, beaten to pieces by being, torn apart about the soul. When I sleep I am brutally alone, stuck in the cage of my own clutches, bony shoulders and cold hands. Dusk and dawn, the curtains drawn, switches turned off or on. 

Look, I’m sorry that I ever met you. I’m sorry that I ever got this far. Nothing tender even in the dreaming. Nothing much but numb or hurt. The little that I’m left with and the whole lot harder to come, the calendar another dog, another galaxy. The snakes and sticks we reason with, the perfect illumination of every emptied shelf. Now all I am is out to sea. Now I’m only time doling out the sentence in bruises and in breaks. Staying where the words don’t work, front row for the train wreck that’s assured.

So I lay me down to sleep, curled on my left side, pillows pinned down by my heavy head and the crick in my neck. I pull my tatty blankets up around my sore shoulders, the worn out sleeping bag and the consolation quilt, all cough and huddle wrestling down the relax. Once I held a pillow tight, placeholder for my misplaced lover. Now lovers are over, and I clutch tight my own flesh and bones. Oh lost love, oh great empty, gathering chasm and gaping nirvana. Now the night comes early. Now the ache opens up its heart. Hold tight this fearful creature, hold close this inevitable end. 

gazed

It’s right here, the moment looking you in the eye. It’s right now, the cunning around the curve. We sway and change and set our sights, we burn our hearts in effigy for the ones we began at the gone, watching the road and thinking about the next one while the one we’re done with chatters and navigates. You already know I miss your eyes, the crazy way I gazed at you. You knew how much I’d miss you before I was a glimmer in the eye. It’s been gone so long, it’s hard to know how hard the going has gone. I’ve been nothing for most of whole thing, ready forever for the bad I got coming. There’s no going back, there’s no going forward. Just the sound of now bumping away in the night.

It doesn’t wait, it doesn’t ask. It doesn’t explain things along the way. You sleep, you wake, you slip between aspects. The music rings out and sends the mind a reeling. The music rings out and a body might like to weep. So isolated and readily disposed, a turn of phrase, a wish to a djinn. The devil shakes your hand and checks for fingers. The tide arrives as you empty out your breath. I bear the mark, I wear the mark.

The future is headed straight at us, and hindsight isn’t helping a lick. You are here forever distant and aloof as all the lights go out. The thunder rises from the gutter, rattling windows and shaking walls. It isn’t that you do not see me. The truth is you’ve seen me too much. Nothing left but vile repetitions. The flicker on a bedsheet as the film flutters off the reel. The story photographed between the scenes a string of emojis. Not even laughter left to cling to my husk. I have been extinguished, smolder though I may.

hex vector

I sit among my ills and idylls, sinking light and soft smoke, mortal aches and open eyes. The time trails my foolish heels, the little dog having itself a laugh. From horned moon to horned moon, a sky dyed for every moon. The skulking up the rooftops, the ducking into ditches, the reel and dirge and carnal urge ahead of the accompaniment. I grit my teeth and breathe a life into the ember. I hem and haw and add another log. There is magic in all I miss.

Ask the ravens, ask the stars. Ask the card you cut to as the fire danced. It’s all above board from a certain angle. It’s one hundred percent legit if you word it just so. As you occlude your intention, this separation of word from will, playing the subtext instead of the scene wears out the spell. Count the breaths, watch the seasons burn away, the whites of your eyes to the depths of your ichor. Swallow a little of what you spit, set the trap and sharpens the stakes in the pit. A presence in every observation, a phenomenon gone in every moment met. Anything can happen, working against your words.

I ought to get up in a minute. At least maybe I should think about it for a bit. Another day behind the mule, another never under the belt. There’s always one or two more things to do, and nothing much to them but to get them done. All these years run straight through me, these tatters everything the wind and worms wouldn’t take. These devils and crowns all lying around, the sharpest of weapons, the softest of shrouds. These bones beating a dull tattoo as I rattle through the rituals, this face held tight as I am covered in the dust of dreams. I long for a separate say in a different world that’s gone well past ghost. Hanging from the branches of these attachments, dangling over this magic missed. 

hallowed

Maybe I will light a candle. Maybe I will cast a spell. Clinging to the tangled smoke, kicking every tire. See it before it slips away, say it for the blood in your breath. We walk the high path above the precipice, we linger on the details, house of stars and luck of number. We watch our step and count out blessings, the sediment of sentiment, the mantle of the ancestors. I speak your name when I at last surrender, for there is nothing so true and treacherous as the heart. Though you wear sky and moon upon your brow, I name you among my missing. I visit you among the dead as the night rises.

How the old bones travel. How the light persists, the flicker of a candle, the downhill slide of every shine. As still as stone each ghost in motion, the caress of the shadows adrift in obliging brightness as it canters and trots. We open these well worn trails in the strobe of remembered sun, and the treasured touch of warm hands long after the power and the heat got turned off. Time strides through us as we send our whims rippling in all directions, intent and instance slipping off shoes and swapping skins. The holes long torn through yesterday and tomorrow. Open mouthed kisses between the living and the lost.

It isn’t that your charms elude me. It isn’t that your enchantments have gone soft. I am seized with the immediacy of my intentions, your light in my mind wild kisses and tangled limbs. I follow the carnal hungers through realms bereft of heft and flesh, burning each attachment into me like a brand. A face at the window chasing a train as it pulls away, your face fixed upon your destination, never even giving this keening a glance. We move on as our dead are settling, our courses continue on against the angle of our loss. Tomorrow ahead of the itinerary, eyes set firmly on the opening road. And so all velocities are holy. And so all love is ghosts.

machined

Gray for gray, silky shadow and sunken sun, the season has its say. Dawn slows and dusk lingers, the stars strut and stroll, occult through cloud and moon. The animal laments the cage bar by bar, singing its wounded song. The entity is mystified as its words turn to dust, suffering the incarnation and the many errors of this iteration. And so I arrive, a steady keening into the empty, a lonely smoking in the dark. I suffer at the culmination of the consequences, dead to the world but still plodding on. Worn out and obsolete I rattle on through the depths of the night. Only able to hone these hungers, fit only to resonate this one fixed want. This is how the pieces work. This is where they left the parts.

This is the B side of the life of the mind. This is the spill of shadow, this is the press of light. Stack the bricks and watch the clock, the world is never still, shifting gears and walking between skins. The earth a tumult of furious iron, seething to the sky while every mote and molecule makes its move. The soil breathes us in and out, every tribe and legion abiding by all the law that is, stardust still dust just the same. The sky we burn that first breath, the spirit loosed, humble clay and brambles crown. Each of us an effigy fed to a different flame.

So I’m smoking on the front porch, as lights incant and shadows bow, a fixture in the evenings and a fool on display. I fulfill routines designed around factors that no longer exist, clunk and clatter and sputter and fume. Simple facts become conundrums, the world you were built for never having come to pass, you serve out a sentence delivered by your head and a universe that doesn’t particularly give a fuck. I ache my ache, I imbue further static into the abstraction. Conversations curved around the gravity wells left by dreams collapsing, letters to once were lovers and past tense friends to encode and magnify. More and more, it’s just me talking. A skip around the maypole, a soft shoe on the grave. The depth of night steals this last quintessence, the candle resigned to the futility of its flicker.

red [aloud]

Looking, you lean

outside the window,

gaze reaching past the glass,

sprouting grass after

longed for rain turned

the dust and detritus into

earth again, red shoots

the due of this broken 

instrument, perception pared 

before you first opened

your eyes. Green is near

the border where the bandwidth

confuses, blues and reds instead.

The spectra that you separate

cling quiet to their frequency 

while words parse that

past what you can know.

So when I speak of the greens 

in blade or leaf I lose

the truth in translation,

my every thought approximation,

each expression an imitation of

the things people see and say,

so happy to greet each other,

so warm and freely they speak,

every color alive allowed.

read [allowed]

There is a crackle of cognition,

neural rivers run wild with light,

open eyes at once identify 

here amid the wheres ready for

the drowning all around. You

the story from root to crown,

the amble on from stone to star.

Pretty like a witness 

smiling to slow the time,

knowing only the past tense

once the notion mounts the gate.

Maybe the words burst

all the senses in one dash—

starlings in the crosswinds,

sparrow stippled heavens—

every wing at once. Maybe

they slow as you approach 

fear or fascination the thusness 

you hustle with your cards held close.

The savored pronunciation,

the hinted allusion chosen

the heart of your arsenal 

the murder of your every darling

lingering in each I love you

these letters read aloud. 

take this waltz

It’s a little past the golden hour, here at the moment of long toothed sun and tree clutched sky. The crows call out their signs and affiliations, setting to assembly. The usual suspects take their stations, traffic darting in dots and dashes, time and destination no doubt part of some grand code. All I get is belted by the sounds of indignant engines and waves of drive by bass. The heavens are painted straight down the bandwidth. Rumors all that I have to go on, and even the rumors won’t reach me here.

You can read it in the settling of ashes. You can see it in the gossiping stars. Any beat the feet will follow. Any wings sent to sweep you away. The great ball reels whether lover or dancer, the dance takes no prisoners. The show ever and always going on. Only I never had a dance card like Leonard’s, a wallflower from three walls over. I stumbled through the chorus line, here and there a solo or maybe giving some diva a lift. Mad for the theatrics but wrong for the role, I stuck to warm up work, and busking well away from the venue. My notices are poor, and few.

Inured to the outside, I’ve turned for the worse. I can’t seem to keep a heart, or work the words well enough to get a clue. Haunting these passages through the shadows, watching the numbers as they wane, steeped in the oblivion of the conversations had. I thump along without a partner, I spin along with the tireless skies and the fickle seasons, love the only reason and it shines so now that all reason has gone. The years fly away while the days plod on, the ringing of the rhythm through the empty of the room. All that I want there is no waiting for, all that I have this waltz hanging from my neck.

template

They barrel through here like it’s damnation alley, they drive like they were whistling through the graveyard in a panic. Driven by the ghosts of never good enough, driven by the tremor of the forever too tiny to face the night, cradled in the headlights as the end comes hastened in the rear view mirror. I hold my breath at the dash of a cat caught in the shine of the oncoming, its live still scraping by at nine. I commiserate with my traffic cursing ancestors, though I never shout slow down. Between the gravy and the gravitas, I am careful of commands. You can never know what the world might do if you tell it to.

I smoke like dusty incense upon a desolate altar, I smoke like a volcano indignant at faint praise. I sanctify moth and spider, the holy always heaping it on. I bless this mess with the tangle in the streets and trees, with the avarice of every mouth slavering for a circle of salt. Every taste and tongue is holy, the sacred is using every part of the ghost, the sizzle of each sacrifice the poem of every prayer. Every rope and binding a tether on the tension, one move and the lash becomes a leash.

Don’t mistake me, I’m smitten by the intermittence. I crave these kisses from the depths of a life long drought. My intellect is threadbare and my pockets full of knives and holes. I lean hard into the momentum and leave intuition to rule my footing and my hips. Like a story run down to  the cliche of just the facts, the myth appears as if a vision the moment I step into the quest. The words all up in arms as I chomp down upon this burning branch, this happenstance gathered as we are turned into this kiss. I am only the oldest ache dragging this flavor through field and star, that touch of tongue, salt and flesh. The magic that we lead with as the world slips away.

pilgrim on the road to nowhere

It’s not every day the rain hangs around, it’s not every day you get to feel the sun. It’s a story that was old before its first telling, it’s as fresh as the song on your lips. An old man laments and longs, wanting a world where it worked out once. The broken record skips and repeats the ancient prayer. Love me like you mean it, love is all you need, love waking you in the morning, love trickling down your skin. The years where we romanced the radio, where we planted flags on the dream of the moon. We long along ley lines and immortal hungers, we dance our ecstatics down to the devotions of our bones. Well below the shoulders of giants we bear the astonishing weight of the world. Kisses and incantations, copulations and the transit of our blood, this fever first in the ministry of the soul.

I am only fire bearing stories, I am only dull passions and the procession of the breath. I want how I want and I wish like I wish, though my steps are staggered and my welcomes all worn out. The world remitting untold pleasure, someone to hang around and watch the stars all fall. Simple, greedy, and unimaginative; a hunger fed by animal fear and moral lack. The knowledge that I am always arriving to the knowing, unable to follow along to these unsung songs, reading in forest and speaking in tree. Smoking lonesome in the night long after the fire’s gone died out.

Unknown by the words I claim or for the water I carry, I am still below the dusk. I write in clumsy groupings of letters, trying to favor Charlie Parker over the truck’s backing chimes, leaning over screen and cigar. I mouth out words and flecks, spittle in my whiskers and a knife in my back. Artless and unloved, creepy and unplacated, astir in the dross and filth of admission. The words follow my lead and take a hint, going nowhere with little purpose and meaning even less. A crow dropped a feather once and I caught it as it fell. I went to the crossroads in a George Herriman comic, blessed askew by the Pilgrim on the Road to Nowhere, phrase left like milk on the windowsill for the fey. Serving the great unseen with beans and a bindle, the foolscap all that fits.

interlude

I’m supposed to take a load off, but here I am with gravity in my lap. I’m supposed to rest up, but instead I work my wounds. No sleep for the wicked, no respite for the good, I try to idle below this tide of mind. Thinking up one side and down its corollary, the ball thrown at the wall comes back after its counterpart. The boundless attachments that tether and tear the claw and tooth of the continuity, to abandon the tree as the leaf leaves the limb only a virtue to the overtures, the unseen the shape of every self. Tossed upon the abstract and painted in the distinctions that they learned me, I ricochet around the affects while holding to the form. A years of hard taught pariah has left me fluent in adversary. It takes a lot of work for me not to take it wrong.

It was only yesterday this got started; I’ve been doing this for a thousand years. We work over the moment with wants and words, forever on this precipice, falling harder with every step. My heart flies south and I switch towards the rhapsodic, serifs prettying up the penmanship, the heights all rapturous about the statuary. It’s a low that stays hard put, no matter how you shuffle the say so, a story we all know about waking naked in the night. The urge to gather around flag or fire, the commiseration of weeped in beers, the company of bellies against the bar. Instead the devil takes a pasting for trying to have a word, the abyss gets an earful. All this age old sorrow, weary from the war. 

We go by the roads we travel, we go by the names we know. We grow towards what light we are allowed, shaped by hill and stream, laden by the mountains and the sea. The breadcrumbs are eaten by unseen birds as the bull mounts the moon. We arrive in this land of familiar strangers, hewn by work and tools we will never know, as if told in a story. As if sailing by the consent of the stars and with the wind on a lead. There is a heated argument between plunder and dissolution we show up in the middle of where we are urged towards teams and gods and flags. There’s not much to it unless you never learned how to play along. When you don’t get it, you make it up on your own. You can turn out to be anyone like that, even no one at all.

emeritus

Used to be we’d leaf through the obituaries, surprised and assured by who went when, counting down from the markers we hold when left behind. Used to be we’d split the paper, reading passages aloud. There’s a gravity to a habit halfway to how to be. There’s a something that awaits the work. The eight to the bar or the old one two, we echo out of range. Taught nothing like that’d learn you, wondering when all the accolades went home on their own. The moment traded in an instant for another round of what might have been. 

Now the words come rushing at you as wait with all your yesterdays, graybeard in the bug light, smoking like a tree struck by lightning. You see the stories as their odometers turn over, the mileage that going nowhere gets. You see the spiders work their beats despite the season’s trend. Stillness sews stillness, the once and future lost. The mark missed and the measure forever. The clerk at the liquor store calls you Chief. Indignant you know exactly how you earned it. Waiting like there was something coming, tending embers in the night.

It’s not as if I shed attachments, it’s not as if I picked my peace. The color of duty and the long walk in the dark. The crowd around helps to heap on the all alone. The work in blurbs and least devils. The barking dog at the heels of folly gathers around the carcass past the fall. The open hands, the emptied appetites, the rituals there to hold high the roof as nature takes the lead. I weigh in to the atmosphere on all manner of confident incompetencies, resting on my laurels of pratfall wounds and scattered ashes. I smoke alone as the hour grows ragged, wondering where I went.