mysteries unlimited

This is just me, and I’m no expert, but people seem to like to have a good time. The case I make is purely anecdotal, I’m going by the hooting and the broken bottles. The gutter tossed condoms and the discarded underwear. The moon shots and victory riots and the fireworks displays down the block. Spills and chills and varietal stimulation. I don’t blame them— I’ve been know to seek a thrill or two myself. I don’t blame them— anything to pass the time.

This is the hour of engines and prismatic light. This is the hour of aimless embers burning holes through the cloth. We lean hard towards the abstracted end of spacetime, symbols and stories always coming to mind, we see through the filters of our ancestors. A few steps ahead of ourselves and always lost in our thoughts, we are the font of metaphor, the magic just a few doors over. Like honeybees, we always seem to have a dance for it.

Me? I sit for hours trailing smoke and fragments. Me? I write out rhymless riddles and spilled guts rails. Considering it’s me, there’ll likely be lack and loss and missed kisses. It’s bound to bear the taint of a doom bruised brain, considering the source. I sit out in the press of light, the push of shadows, always further away from the shine. Part of it is the direction left us, time always working us from both ends. Part of it is the way of the mystery, hiding in the wide whatever. In this way I trace the shape. In this way I meet your mind. Somewhere on a Sunday, the taste of Saturday still on your lips.

goloka

The weight of the world is held by a single light shining on the ceiling, pressing shadows across the textured heavens with a steady shining kiss. The sort of kiss that shines so bright it reveals the essence across each moment, a lesson from all that it is and the legions it is not. The shift among the realms, the moon pulling clout from the firmament and the reigning star, the roots in pursuit of the crown. This held breath, this cat warm lap, this moment spiraling out into the next. The weight of the moon lifted off our shoulders, so we soldier unto the ends of our worlds. Smoke from temples and crematory furnaces, flags unfurled for the stars.

Branches untangle and roofs reach for the ground below in worship. The clouds take turns holding her halo. The moon reaches through us, cuts through our bones and guts like ghosts, lifting eyes as well as the whole damn ocean. Here I go, tangled in her tresses, helping myself to seconds. Shaving a little shine from the glory and a few more minutes off the clock. The songs of ancient orders singing in my blood. The journey of the world around the world, enough times so it can wrap its mind around it.

Here, there’s another train whistle. Here, the smoke unfurls above the ruins. The moon’s out there somewhere gathering thrall and enchantments. The moon’s up there somewhere fiddling with the gears. This is the rigor of the open stance. This is the prize of little consolation. Another moon, another night, another stumbling through the words. I think of them, I think of you. I think of all that I would do. The offering and the altar, and the placement of each prayer. Smoke in the corner, the remembrance of no one there. 

things to look at that aren’t the moon

The horizon is bright as the sun relents to the realm of dusk and rain, settling the clouds on color as the world goes away. The gray and blue catching feelings from other hues as the shadows swell. Shapes turn to suggestions, words to dirt. The windows watch but the power is out, eyes blinded no matter how wide they are held open, the light largely implied. These lines are strung along a different grid, they rely on occluded sources and rainy day juice tucked away in some bottle of acid and angry metals. These lines cling to the cusp of constellations and secret perceivers, they are hung from spark and sense and the way you turn the page.

There’s the line of the fence, the line of the trees. The dark clouds bathing in that last gasp blue. Smoke and plastic spectacles, a brief sliver of shine from a message on the phone. The rain is on recess and the dark streets still sing with textured remixes of spinning tires and precipitation. Soon it is all silhouettes and screens, the days afterglow and the sound of machines. Every day a fading, every night a bloom.

There’s always the drift of smoke, the shapes of things you think you see, the forms of what you’re thinking. The witness you carry, the sentence you serve. There’s no telling, at least if it’s telling me. Hanged from the moon on my way off the tree, leaned on by the weight of creation, caught on the merry-go-round by baited brass. Waiting on the weather, waiting on the moon. Waiting on the end that can’t come too soon. Smoking what I got as I get it, sitting in the gravid dark. Eyes open in the night, bound by the unseen moon.

winnow

I never quite know which camera’s on. I never know which machine they mean. Everything goes up in smoke, the moon reigning above the clouds, a rustling from the box by the door. Everything is making maps and seeking out the circumstance. The stacks you make to throw away, the stars you’d cross to have it back. I guess I’ll leave the music on, I guess I’ll do the dishes. The rats conspire in the walls. The rain comes knocking on your night.

Relax— you don’t need to what’s up to go on. The straining towards the story doesn’t make it true. It’d be nice, it’d be cool— you the one with the crown of hearts and stars. Some words are there to witness, some words are there to claim. How you use them is between you and the game. All I know is the rain is falling. All I know is the wind is picking up. The pills in my palm that look like belt of Orion, the vitamin I swallow that reminds me of you. You’ll be there where I don’t make it. You’ll be fine going with the grain.

Each night is caught in a current, each night a sample taken in small doses. All the feathers and    all the flowers. The unseen moon coming on to the core. The night goes on, the band plays on, the cat comes in from the reign. Some prince’s ransom, some poet’s price, as the bodies are stacked by the cord. The fleeting glimpse and passing fancy, then comes the weather and the ghost goodbyes. The old bones and the deep longings, the knowing I hold by the throat, the moment fitted to the will. The beckoning of the sacrifice, the wind summoned by the wings. 

nothing like the sun

The rain falls on all the usual suspects. No bees, no birds, no golden rule or noble words. It comes around to the tune of the body count and the plotting of prayers. Daylight muted by the spill of the dampened atmosphere, heart plundered and sunken in some sunset bay, all rocks and foam and the wilding waves. We want, we wait, we get served in backhanded compliments and just desserts. The patter and the badinage, all the workaday words and the mystic realms of connection spent as smoke and burn. My love always more the moon. My love a language no one knows.

The streets are slick as the storm settles in, the accustomed shush of tire tread haggling for traction singing out, the world always a moving target. The weather always alludes to the constant mutability of the receiver, the thick static of disfunction slipping through the web of sentience as the organism and the entity vie to tell the story, moon and stars and to crash like cars. Missing kisses and other missions of no return. Missing the hope and the meaning, another broken poem sealed like lips by a fingertip, the trauma of want and funky punctuation oozing from the wound. Even a muse of fire wouldn’t help.

It’s okay. I’m used to it. The mood swings always knocking it out of the park, the strange machinations of attraction and repulsion, the sickness tangled through flesh and spirit as I fail and fail. They seek you out one day, and revile you the next. I still take it personally, but it does seem to be all I am capable of any longer. Maybe it’s always been this, some slapstick amusement for the groups I cannot belong to, some unknown tradition of hunting hearts for sport. A life left to guessing and betrayal because of what the words don’t tell you. Alien and stranger, monster and scapegoat, toxic and mistaken and seemingly unable to right my course no matter the stars or the sun. My love another curse in a tongue I cannot fathom, my words another failure to communicate. 

romance language

Your letters still elude me. There you are— your voice, your wit, your virtuosity— all in the grace of your deft and clever hand. All your declarations and assurances, all the mundane traces of the day to day, the literary cool and the carnal heat of your craft folded up in your art. I read you and I can see your eyes. I read you and I hear you speak. You are right there, and I still can’t find you. I still don’t know where you were, or where you went.

Empires happen. Legions seize a people by their bellies and their tongues, they plant seeds in minds and skins, tromping down old ways in the name of new gods and stolen gelt. They write their triumphal histories, spreading words and misery, leaving monuments and coinage in homage to their august sovereign. They build roads and carry water, linger in conquest and dissolution, and fade into blood and memory. Cobblestones and graffiti and the mystery that absence instills.

It isn’t as if love didn’t always confound— a flower blooming from a crack in the pavement, a promise in the dark. It isn’t as if the words haven’t been spent over its grave. The lights go out, the heart is sacked, the way is suddenly perilous and thick with thieves. There are ruins, there are relics, little by little the language changes. You lost something in the translation, your gods fall in failure. I said it all and I said it wrong, another barbarian rattling your gates as you bear your standard, laurels laid upon your holy crown. History is your witness as you travel your path of exploration and conquest, as I disappear into myth. A last vestige of a mystery religion, lying vanquished beneath your boots. A poem and a prayer trodden into the earth, leaving shards and middens, a language no longer spoken in your realm.

chickadee

The small shabby room is crowded with books and animals, paw prints on the comforter, dust heavy on the shelves. A single lamp burns brightly enough, light spilling in through the doorway, the shadows shoved to the floor or up against a wall. The window is always open, and the cold wind hints and hollers as the rain goes away. The night walks through the walls. The night paces the halls. The night seizes my heart in its teeth. The days gone gray, the wings at work.

I’m always missing something. I always miss someone. It’s a lonesome way to be, a hard way to go. The mise en scène ever at a loss. This absence overflows, spilling into every facet that I figure, black clouds and blind furies. The world I observe and the world I feel too close for me to witness my own life reliably, each mood a different turn and a different tack. I am a stormy sea, and I seldom know what happened. My heart is full of holes, and my head is all angry hornets and bullet prayers. I just want to get my story straight.

Whoever you are, whatever you do, you miss a lot. The world is the busiest of bees. It’s hard enough keeping track of your own itinerary, let alone the schemes and doings of the sun moon and stars. We walk our beats, play our parts, hit our marks. We watch the wings we wish on, we speak of what we cannot know. The stories born of the story before. All our books and lore and the life we mistake for our own. A bird never witnessed sings a song never heard, the words come just the same. Pieces and parts and candy hearts. Why this bird? Why this sky? Why this hole in the center of my soul? The secrets I keep are the ones I do not know. 

written wrong

It falls on the wrong side of the reckoning. It misses the point of the illustration, this stifling ever after, this stunned same old song. The day ran me ragged, the night leans in to make sure it hurts. The slow unfurling of these boundless banners, the victories and the celebrations as the earth swallows light and shadow, left to the devices of the world that’ll have me. The heavy hush between the reach of music and that damned absent star, this hungry silence stirring limbs and skin. Written wrong, and everybody plays along. Written wrong, and no one bothers reading.

There’s no getting around it, hard truths and gray givens, the lonesome portion and the relentless night. Rejection and abandonment and these years without. The mind goes where the body allows, meat and the sedimentary soul. The mind is the watched pot at a boil. You fall and fall, and eventually no one offers a hand or takes a knee. It takes a while, but the world will tell you what you are. I do not recommend it.

The songs play on, the words go astray, your name becomes invective and epithet. You pace the cage, you walk in circles, turning with the merciless earth. Months without become years, possibilities fade, you learn to live with the stench of self and the lack of context. You begin to watch the sky and seasons because even though they don’t want you, they don’t want anyone.  Gone so wrong for so damn long there’s nothing left but this nothingness, hard days and troubled nights and no return ticket to be found. Another one for the record, another longed for last.

better mousetraps

It’s the next best thing to ink you think as you move to make your case. It’s the way you state it plainly in your actions, the way it spills out when you speak. The dull plod of daily betrayals, the sickeningly sweet scent of the flesh of sacrifice, the default move to escape. This altar of glass and ashtrays, the way the prayer takes the smoke. Knees grinding the grit into the rough wood, the repeated litany, the relinquish of command. You think I’m the one thing you know that I am. You say the words all the same.

We’re like an army, we travel on our stomachs. We’re like an army, it’s all hurry up and wait. From mind to moon, from wish to wound, there’s just no when to say. These writhing indecisions that drag us from door to door, these plot twists and character arcs and evil twins again, fiery sword and thorny crown. The rain to come and the hanged man cut down. Don’t wait for the moon to make you. Don’t wait for the call to come.

All the words aside, you reach from the roots. All roads aside, there’s more than one way to the sun. We make mistakes and replay them looking for the lesson. We make promises to weaken our very word. The moon is out and draped in mist. The fire burns, the star needs no witness. This is the way, the breath, the blood. This is the call. The waking to the word.

broken clocks

It the color of clouds and the sweep of the season. It the smudges on the lenses and the thrall of the smoke. The crows all work their home bound wings, twos and threes towards the roost, gray clouds taking color from the chemistry and the runaway sun. Power tools and electric blowers ring out, here among the aggressively swept streets and brutally attended lawns, this fierce false flag of home. Gates and gardens hard at work against the world, cars and asphalt and all these ferocious collections here at the foothills of the great collapse. I smoke as the light goes down and the cold comes walking in whistling a merry tune. I smoke at the great intersection of the ends. 

We go through the motions. We clean up the dirt and the fragments, we put things back in their place. We work as the wheel turns, as the wheel turns we turn. Our paths are placed among the patterns, our lives the songs of dreams. Reaping, sowing, smashing into things. So goes the life of our lot. The rut and toil uncoiled all around us, we hopscotch about action and inaction, making it up as we go. We gather what we can manage, we are laden with what we were given or what we can’t let go, we labor against the gathered sea of inevitabilities seething down against us. We’re always at it— we can’t help but occasionally get it right.

It’s not like I was blown off course. I got here step by step and death by death. It’s not what I would have chosen had it been essay instead of multiple choice, but that’s not how options always work. I’m not what I was, I’m not what I am, it’s another circus act outside my expertise.  Trapeze or wire walking when I was destined to be down among the clowns. I should be sweeping up spotlights instead of taking each leap and inevitable fall, but here we are. I grouse and loiter and gossip about the moon. I dance with the dissolution, clumsy reels and slow circles, tending wounds and rooms and the dead. The sky grows dark, I watch the moon, waiting until I am right again. 

brick

I want to say it’s the angle of the light, but it’s just that the sun’s in my eyes. I want to say it’s the breadth of the color, but that’s just moving the blocks around. I know it’s the sadness, I know it’s the smoke, I know it is the curse upon my blood and the mark upon my brow. The world as a whole is made of the breaking, the dirge unto dissolution, the spin around the old dance floor. The pieces on your party dress. The dust kicked off your heels.  It’s just me and the words and old mr sun. The brick to the bean, the luck of the draw. It’s the smoke, and the sorrow, and the lay of the light. 

Sparrows come in waves and hungers, in fads and schemes and minor invasions. The dogs dash past trailing clouds of dust. Crows loud upon the precipice of the periphery, calling their kin and comrades to plot and parley. Another may as well be May day, this winter of rain and small springs, this long toothed afternoon taking a dive. Here at the tattered end of eternity, with dead dog relics and the exponentials coming due. A day like any other with all these nevers coming on hard. 

It is the sun in my eyes, the refracted rainbows filtered through eyelashes, the intimacies of dust motes and sunbeams and the visions of childhood. It is the ferocious continuity, the slow drawled devouring time treats you to, the years all gone in a breath. The narrative continues without dialogue, the constant expository moving in a relentless litany, this then this then this and the building attrition. The ensemble becomes the chorus, the chorus just becomes the audience, the audience the witness, the witness the dream. Weeping from the setting sun. Weeping once the setting’s done. This sorrowful journey from the going to the gone. 

far gone

It’s the needle pointing nowhere. It’s the callus on your thumb. The compass busted, the deck broke open, the read long lost in all the cuts and shuffles. The eyes go wide, the body sets its stance. You hear a horn that would put Gabriel to shame, a little cutting by Coltrane. The world is always catching you up. Breaking bones and cutting deals between scenes, the catastrophe of apostasy burning down your senses, seething in the madness of the panic and the pain. The body shifts its balance, and awaits the next onslaught. Pretty as a picture, naked as the rain.

It all begins as navigation. The bleary alarm laden fumble to find a way back into the world, the phone on the nightstand, the cheaters by the tissue box. First the world, then the names given to my fitting. The action, then the lights. Monk’s hands dancing between times, the magic before the spell, a name before your own name is worn. But, oh, how they blow them horns. The flowers for the forests, the lion’s paw for the thorns. Black palate preacher, archivist of ancient ious, the snap of each lascivious lash. Goat and ghost, minder of the fire, heavy handed hoofer and keeper of the shtick. 

There’s no hope that goes with poet. There’s no gelt or gravy that’s assured. Just the late papers and the bitter dregs. Love letters left seething on the floor. Notebooks spilling uncut secrets and the fundaments of the lore, the way the world followed witness, goddesses and witches taking the knee at the crossroads parlays and backwoods reveals. The art and the aspect, the slow sail of the first quarter moon, the beckon of smoke and the prayer of fire. You leave it because it’s too far gone, you leave it because it’s lost. This thrall you are waiting for. These boots you’re going to use. 

broad strokes

It is a liturgy of fast ones, a recitation of questionable declarations and blistering threats, all these lullabies and alibis and mint condition world. It is a question of the efficacy of the whim wham, the juice of that voodoo that you do so well, how the words land on lone wolf and herd. It’s the magic you carry over without too much fuss. They always ask too much, they can never have enough. The details you can work out after its over. The devil’s deftly tucked away, waiting for his cue. The words do what they want to do, the way you want them to. 

Oh to be an organism! Oh to be part and parcel to the squirming earth! Instead of rules and rumors, some late civilization exhibition of the iteration of the book, poems pressed in the open hands of the cradle of signals. A stack of phrases to sway this way and that, sometimes the ball, sometimes the bat. Deft and breathless only when dressed in some strange imagination, sets of questions decorated as evidence, the only light shining your own. The written only ever the stones strewn with bone, blood and feather. Proof of yesterday’s feast.

There wasn’t much to remember, so maybe I remember the little things more. The lip curl, the belly tremble, the moan beneath the kiss. Maybe I make too much out of it because I mattered so little. My fragility well in free fall, my doom plenty nigh. Every urgency of sense and intention met in the imagined now, sunlight and bare flesh, the sacred always another hunger at your heels. Instead, I am only words that are not words, ink that is not ink. A spill of salt and breath in the swelter of summer, a hush of dust and prayers of blood and bone. The sun in my eyes and this flame that burns and burns.

litmus

It isn’t the reasons you are seeing, only the aftermath of the antecedent. It isn’t the fire you are feeling, only sudden sirens banging old Pavlov’s gong. It bangs away on the brains and the bones, the endless collisions and the joy buzzer shocks. The ghost is always a given. The blood paints the walls and the ceilings. There is an exchange of blues, a shift between street and sky, the entity spilling with glory and shadow chakras opening in threes and fives. The day draws the curtains, hanging heavily and spitting sunshine across the deepening hues of heaven. The moments pressed in paper, waiting to save their grace. The blessings of the earth and ocean, the bones of the ancestors and the animal graces. Remember to make the appropriate notation.

You step from void to void, formless and giving form, the senses shaken upside down to declare the there. You wake to the iteration, you glim the previously on cribs, get the gist as you again fit the parameters as you feel them. The limits always another skin to fit in, the dream always stains the day. The world a series of yes ands and say sos, the self a palace and a prison. You knew it from the name you’ve taken. You know it from the crown you chose. It never hurts to have a safe word. It’s always good to keep a code. You never know when you might need to know you’re the you you say you are, and not just another variation on the form. 

Me? I’m just the forms all filled in wrong. Me? I’m the answer to a question that was tragically misunderstood. The incarnation a precious obsolescence, the franchise never catching on. This premature burial, this rushed dissolve. An old man in the fade of day, sitting on a porch, all sermon and no mount. The stranger and the scuff marks of perception, waiting for a test of the word. A guardian at the gate of yesterdays that never were, an echo of a probability that did not occur, filling in the fuse box with heavy magics and vaudeville gaffes. Among the unlovable outliers in a crowded pantheon, defaced and nameless. The witnessed manifest dependent on the test. 

linger

There’s not much to be done with it won’t do. Wards and mottos spilled out the mouth, oaths and qualifiers there to stain the air while whatever happens happens. These spells and expletives we sling at the slightest and at the worst linger while the world keeps going. Words turned like compost to keep it all alive. You wake up and the corridor is open. You wake up and the scene is slowly set. Things happen, things don’t happen, the reel goes ‘round and ‘round. It is always now until it’s next. Then it is there until the winds are stirred. Then is now until the next now begins.

It is the difference between the taste upon your lips and the taste your tongue goes looking for as it licks up memories. The moment of heat and flush, salt and sacrament at once, the punctuation of that fervid kiss. The act of inhabitance a loitering in the sway of feel and flesh, the storm of language ignited as cognition and context take hold. Here I am being where I am not thinking of, a stagger and a stutter, the flicker of the film. Faith held only where the skin can reach. Passion only so much purchase in the press of intention. The story comes with the trip.

It’s the screen black surface, steel cup and billowing steam, the dream on down to the reflections stretched and swallowed. The black habit coffee to join the smoke. The dusty volumes and animal traffic. The open window and the bump and grind night. The shock to the system, the stain to the step. Living right there, in your ken and scent. This abrupt evocation, your fingers tracing plastic, your fingers finding flesh. There right now and there before, there in ways only to imagine. Eyes closed where the roads meet and paths begin and end. Lingering in the unknown, knowing just what you’ll find. 

luminesce

The crows go hard at it, black wings pumping against the gray cloud sky. The lean of the earth, the set of the sun. Turn around and it’s begun, this slow recitation of the incantation, the full press of every blessed sense. Home a once and future kingdom. The fingers picking out the chords. The song a breathless lamentation, the feelings released by weighted stone, the sinking as the surface turns to sky. Black wings and bubbles, heaven always on the rise.

The sun sets in pinks and golds, smoke rising towards the painted sky. The earth groans and mumbles, damp earth and busy dirt, the very air the stitch work of the soil. The gray day ends in shiny shards and puzzle pieces, undertones of myth and the scent sun warmed skin, the odd patois of the jagged end losing. Some thought passes then another, then you linger on something imagined or remembered. Then the words come, or they don’t. And so I betray your shine.

It’s always the end of days. It’s always the cusp of the new age. The busy of engines and aircraft, yard work and motorcycles blasting past, the melodic swell towards this resonant crescendo. Words of the mundane, words of the mystery, the hours go mumbling by. Your flesh aglow with blood and light, the spill from the window, the stir in the sheets. This ephemeral luminescence, your ghost a gateway between worlds, this constant notion a carried flame. Adrift and anchored to an image. Blind but for your light.

look out

It’s not what we can live without, but how long we survive the wound. It’s not all that is denied us, but how much we are owed. Clunking around in chunks of meat and well greased ghosts, hungering for some sputter or spurt, all this smoke owed to the grill and reentry. The atmosphere stuffed with our follies and our cataclysm catechism, our insistences and our all in wagers. This one, then the next. Always some passage towards core or star. The portion owed the fuel for ignition. The bright and heat of bearing the burn your one true name.

Personally, who knows what I might believe. This tide to ride all sides of, the breath we puff and pass, the seething in the stricture, the blazing rhetoric of of each rawboned nerve. Washed in wails and incitements, set to work the desperate edge of this sad collapse, turning sirens and piano jazz into the chatterings of this pre cadaver case study. The dull lessons on the edge of the arts, the way we play to the cheap seats and the holy fools we hope to learn by. The clambering of the thoughts and wounds, breathless wishes alight in my bones, I tuck away what I either can’t or won’t and wear the moment down to dust.

A dog put down on New Year’s Eve, a dead bird in my hands. The way the light reflects and the frame is stained. The refraction at an angle, forever always looking in, this light going this way so long it’s no wonder we don’t know what we’re seeing. The sky tonight before the garage full of Orion, that winter’s hexagon nearly spread out like a map on the hour of just so happened glances, this life steeped in staring at stars and birds. Always watching the flora and the horizons, always on the look out for a little of the same old new. The fires go out, and the sorrows gather, husks and deadpan hells and some beauty that can’t be reached. A shamble of names and faces, limbs and places, movies and meals. The period left hanging off a long line of lasts. 

laugh track

Again and again it is the barbarians at the gate. Again and again it is the fall of Rome. A lot depends on where you get it. A lot depends on how you’re tuned. Archival film on art school loops, a bent of lore and shtick, the words running every which way the moment they are spoken. The elders voice their opprobrium to present absences, the world already eluding their grasp as they fade to static and ether. The numbers game still playing out on our ever beleaguered youth, beset by their own problems and the problems left in their lap. Lesser evils are still evil, but sometimes there are laughs and snacks.

The ghosts come as long as we let them. The ghosts come back tailing the words straight from our mouths. Open up and loose this empty. Open up and fill the flame. The wheel of the world and the tides of time, the rocker off its rails. This breath one slow sigh. This breath one long signal. The set up and the knock down. Wiseacre rhythms punctuated with programmed applause and commercial breaks. Something that goes like something we know. The oracle of whatever’s on.

Each day gets misplaced in the replays. The lost apostasy and every day reckoned by the run. The business of sparrows and the remnants of the rain. Marked in bright feathers and cruel sparks, lives of great beauty and struggle stricken without a word. Adversity works it’s magic tongue and tooth, it stitches its intention to stabbed guts and the puzzle of flesh. The organism submerged below the entity, the theater and the script, ache and the endless turning of the phrase. The back cracks as the body stretches. It is the day again. 

ten nails

The room is full of dust and smoke, a little too big for the light in the corner. The room is clenched and crowded, mostly detritus and debris. The ghost and the guiding hope long gone, the house all but drained of home, the life left there the waiting around to die type. The nights are awful, the days untenable, and they keep on coming. Dead birds soft and limp in the dirt, wings done with the sky. You dwindle as the burdens grow. More and more you are less and less.

It is the season of gray and gloom. It is the season of mud. Days that are mostly dawn and dusk, days where the earth drags the rain from the sky in hints and whispers, days where nothing moves but stones and stars. Ink spent and ink imagined, roads of discourse only slips and silhouettes, all the oratory the on the inside kind. Skull hearted thinking smeared across the pavement, a radio playing softly in the atmosphere. Fewer tweets and tropes, just these sullen repetitions and suicide dreams. The short story? Never ask a hammer.

Count the birds inside your dreams. Count the wings while you sleep. The empty will be there when you wake. Look to love, look to beauty— they will kill you where you stand. The small comforts die hardest, though they’re the first to go. That cup, that slice, that smoke. The light in their eyes, that sound in your throat. Another nail in the coffin, another star in the firmament. Choking on the installment plan, flecks of spittle and a heart in alarm. The numbers running uphill backwards, the done where it’s driven. 

unraveled

The smoke doesn’t get too far before it gets settled, it curls it coils it drifts it handwrites epitaphs, and it unravels all at once. It doesn’t take much of the old huff and puff, home is already blown over, just a tickle of the ember sets the flag unfurling. Just a notion of a drag  and here come the clouds of the conflagration. The light leans in, the sun caught in the pines slips through the haze to find my eyes. It goes on, with spark and breeze, sparrow and crow and all the physical ephemerals. I sit and smoke, dull and old and aching. Other words that occur may apply. 

I pour another cup of coffee, squinting as the sun gets snippy, the sky a scraping away of sight.  Tumbles of smoke and glitters of wings flash through the periphery, visible things the failing flesh can still catch in passing, like a held gaze or blown kiss. I look down, there’s a conspiracy of filth and feet. I look down, there’s wavering symbols in ersatz ink and make believe paper. The words do their thing, grabbing whole hunks of consciousness from the minds cast across them, plug and play where neither blood nor ghost get their way. The words do their thing, I mind my place. Any knot that can come undone will come undone. 

The world walks through us, though it can seem so far away. The magic of the muddle abounds. Greasepaint to roar the caveats implore the flesh to feed the fire, those marked exits you never notice until they’re missed, the actions fed naked to the frame. A place to sit, a song to mutter, something to look at. The words left to stanch a mortal wound, the days left adrift in this mortal most, scenes taken from the wash of weather and persistent irrelevant longings. The tint it takes, awash in sad eyes and last light. The way all take away, the will unwound. 

a light shines through

It lands like flag planting Apollo, touches down as if deified by the occasion, the flesh the apparent heir to the pursuit of day. It lands like the twist off notes spilled from hook or bridge, a progression that frees itself from context by meddling with your head. The sky seeps slow and gray, spilling from the window, leaving by the door. The instrument growls and rasps, what complaints they carry they sink in the soil, becoming background and landscape upon insistent interrogation. Not the ceaseless ingress of the window, not the left open door on a day heavy and uncaring. Still somehow a light shines through.

It’s not parallel to the strut and the story. It’s not the divergence of actions into separate worlds one room over. The day has its way and the words follow their usage, torrents and showers and unearthly powers, worked into the just so skull in a just so world. The skin wakes to the spirit of the shine, the soul of the ordained sun a wash of colors, a swatch pad of earnest hues for would be walls. The skin wakes before the alibi, before even the appetite and the crown. A candle left burning, a prayer somewhere, the brush of earthly thought against your name. The brilliance you feel to your bones.

Out the gate the day outclassed me, I was out of the running before I found my step. The light goes missing and stays that way. I smoke on the cold brick and cracked cement porch, the coiled plumes climbing up the eaves, the dull day running out behind me. Meager wants that are unachievable, a reaching wildly against the facts as the ends close in, the writhing despite the done. Old man dithering at the end of a played out day, missing all the what if worlds and one sided loves. A story despite the epilogue. A lens is left if nothing else. A way the words once tried. 

dispatch

The moon seems to have wandered off in these days of wane, tripping off through the fog at dawn, taking morning ambles through the flush of winter grays and blues. Stray sparks and the distant virtuosity of the mockingbird running scales and ensembles, the bare blade of the morning moon casting texture to the icy mist. The time it was taken as strolling off the menu, seeding myths of heart and hunt in the dreaming day. It goes until it’s gone, then it waits a few and comes bringing it on. A light in the eye, a taste on the tongue, the beckoning being a broken bowl. The curl of smoke upon the brow, the bellowing being a wind like dirty glass. So much to say at the hasp of the day. So much to stitch my lips to.

It goes without saying that nothing gets said, this rehashed revelation, these lines dead on arrival. The duty and the hedonia, the hiccups and hackles and no take backs, the blood bound to show. The flames of burning bridges, the soot of ensued ruins, the gossip and the games all pass by without snagging word or eye. So this daily dispatch flails at its roots as it blooms, all black wings and bright stars. So the flesh chills and the old bones bare their teeth. Something burns in the crisp air, a cooking scent, seared flesh and fruit notes. The written a record, the words all flags and ghosts.

The cold nights still come, the sharp stars and the ratty tapestry of clouds. The long nights still linger, the lows so bad they beat it into the bones. Nothing much happens when the moon goes missing, not a lot of magic in missing your mark. The earth at an angle and the sun hits just so, a story always saying something no matter what the story is, night and day and all the usuals. The lists and the litany, smoke in the sky and sundown any minute, the words that stick to the ribs and the songs. How ever long ago heaven, how ever far the star. Skin in the game no matter who’s playing, skin in the game even once the game is gone. Squeezed until the blood is dust.

ball of wax

It’s not so much that the sun is setting, it’s that it’s leaning hard towards the west. It’s not so much the world is turning, it’s that the dice keep tumbling on. I go numb past certain notions, abstractions of peace and wise living, I lose touch with the loss of touch. I know the cruel of the moment by my bones and peculiars, I know the blessings by the hull of the tide washed wreck. The dogs on patrol, the sun in my eyes, my cold fingers and the nothing much to touch. Words from wherever the words were left on. The blind bright in my left eye, black wings writing down the particulars, the call sharp and direct. 

The cold speaks through my bones, it plays them like some artless instrument, like a poor bow to a saw blade. The untuned breath a particular caught fire, the way some consequences release, in skips and spasms and momentary revelations. The sparrow chatter and low road hungers, the repetition and the rhyme. These moments of rough wing warming, these saga of hitch and hew, the sky a drift a color a loss. The days mob up, passing with the speed of sky, passing cup to cup.

The words are there when I wake in the morning. The words are there as I drag through each day. The clock beset with the chase of the same old numbers, the page is made of myth and math, this ache and the dreams of blood. Nothing but the breath and burn and bodies unburied. The stones and the stacks and the no going back. Hands filled with fifth business and busywork, the lighter, the phone, the pen. Hands empty but for the reaching. The days just the dragging from place to place.

attribution

It settles in like smoke in the locked room mystery, the inkling through the keyhole, the spillage from the barrel. It fills in like paint in a tumbler, the water diffuse to the hues. Clues of clouds and stubborn occlusions, the cowl of circulation caught about the dispensations of flesh, rimshots from every chamber of the diaspora of breath. I shift in my seat, I ache at my joints, I turn the words to works. I murmur dull abjurations and wicked blasphemies, the rictus of the elder postures, the slow drawing down of storms. Limping through the rituals, loosing the aspect and the iteration. A bitter taste speaking for my mouth.

Comes a sputter, comes a spark, comes the fireworks owed to the fuse. The night works out its payment plan. Say it out loud, offer flesh for consequence, put yourself before the plow of the prayer. Pick the chords and sing along. The crack of breath, the tomb of bone. The sunken the song the stone. The heat of the ichor, the depth of the cup. The flutter of wings bright with gossip. The weight bending the blossom down once it went the way it was heard. 

They’ll catch it with the quotes around it. They’ll get it in a cartoon bubble. The sayer and the say it so. Words to whet your want against, words to feed your whims. The whether there’s a there, the sincerity of the hook, the time you table and the time it took. We give the ghost the most we can manage, we give our heart to our host, the deadbolt and the door hinge. The crown, the thorns, the whole throne deal. The bend about the breath unburdened, the steady rake of worship, the cast of snake and stone. Speak it as the words incur. Say it as you must. 

due

They come along when it costs a lot. They come along like clockwork on the calendar, like the maze of days and dropped dimes, the glistening web and the hard once over. It’s the beat of the feet kicking rocks, it is the tamped dirt of the scheduled stomp, the spade called out at the worm’s cruel turn. Call crow, call clouds, call thunder, the earth beneath so much body cost and shout out. The bout comes down to you and whatever trouble’s around, the aspect you’re afforded and the angle of attack, the naked limbs and the crown of snips and silk. They show up too late for much more than tactics, greasy fingers all prise and please, the will already imbued with flesh enough. Arrive with the sky in tow, arrive with the guns ablaze. This day is all but done, only time left due to do. 

It’s enough that the day showed up like it was day. It’s enough that we remember what wasn’t enough. The sad tumult of horns, the break around the rhythm, this unscored melody this uninked turn. Where we weren’t, again and again. Where the lights lingered, where the map went unminded. The words on out, the silence back in. The only circuit that’s ever connected, the switch that gets left on. Monkey see, monkey shun. Monkey knows what monkey’s done. The sky so cold and open. The music running down.

The gravity adds up it you just give it a minute or two. The mass is always on the move, this joint is always jumping, it shakes out with maracas if you want. The sky guns grim as the sun melts away west, cold and gray and full of rumors. The cup is emptied, the hands go numb. The words shuffle around in stacks and skins, stretched thin and stitched tight, the good lucks and good nights. You breathe deep enough to catch up to the script and loose a little spirit. You breathe deep and send steam to heaven, warm flesh and gray plume. You stretch out and it all comes due. 

the unkempt

The gray shakes out from sky to skin, the reach to the rapture, the rattle to the brass. Soft from space to shape, life climbs each step as steam stripped from the atmosphere, as the boundless ladder of blood and breath. The stir of wings, the scratch of an itch, flea bit flesh fresh with open constellations. Each layer another name, every name some spill of syllables, certainty always loafing around the words. Sparrows to fill in the margins, wings to steal the sky. The crow sharpens its throat against the long gray, calling out first wounds and the gossip of dirt and rocks.

The ephemeral fills in the blanks, large drawn sighs and eyes determinedly set upon the ceiling. The drag of existence scuffing up the paint job, the world split into pass and traction, gaps and actions all over the scenery. Spit bitter words and hazy exposition, let the spirit dampen your beard and grease your chin, this voice all but useless in this rushed cacophony. Erased at every juncture, burned like an everyday bridge, there is neither please nor placement left. The wasted witness, the blinded aperture. The bell made of bones and biochemical terror.

It is the place of lost songs and dying engines, the rattle and the wreck, the hole where the direction used to be. The shuffle of things and names, glass singing out from the floor and basin, the invisible animal suffering its sounds. The same old beat of lack and alone, cold hands empty in the fray, smoke and signifiers in the space where the entity used to be. It’s a shake of the box, just to see what noises are left. It’s the claim of a sustain, the held note, the unkempt exposition. So small that the sky can’t find you, so lost there’s no there there.

the middle givens

Some days don’t so much fade as fold, all at once curled up on its side head tucked towards tomorrow. The horizon bright on its side, like the gaze of a thrilled child ready to dream on to day, like the beaming mischief caught in the last glint or twinkle. The dusk of old fashioned clatter and the havoc of loose mutts. The done day settling down all around, the darkness reaching out, the train wails once then rattles on forever. You can read that how you want. You can call it like you like. 

Me? I’m used to the wrong end of it. The leaned on laughed at aspect, the beating on repeat. The fear or the other, the blank place in the mirror. Words written as if in remedy, words choked down like alibi. I light a tree, I blend a breath. The wide open night closes in. There’s so little left to me it’s hard to tell quite where I am. A link in a chain, type in the stack, the strata after strata. The ashes twice, and then the fall. You can repatriate the punctuation. You can count the pops. 

Shuffle for the numbers, cut for iteration. You wear it fresh in the wide eyed moment, you miss it as if hidden by a spell. Hands clasped empty, wrists crossed below the heart, if the heart yet is honest. Cold in song, cold in skin, the wandering past the winds. It sings out in rumble and in scurry, the motions that wave at us, the earth drawing down. It calls out at crossroads and gas stations, intersections under alien light, all left but to signify. The bygone ways that are gone once we let them go. Wisdom only what we can carry when we have to leave.  

gravid and graven

It isn’t in how the walls are painted, or the dust and cobwebs as the light gives out and the color fades. It isn’t in the colors resonating from the shelves or the secrets buried in the stacks. The bright palette pressed into the eyes by the hard put insistence of these reckless apps, busy always a synonym for interesting, the tired crowd they won’t let stop dancing. Name after name, face after face. All scribbled on and colored in, scored so you know it’s holy, attributed so you know it’s scripture. The moon is out, though I’m inside, it calls me by my matter. The moon looms large in the ash heap of my mind.

It is the salt spilled from the cellar, the countertop constellations and the nirvana of your touch, the least swift gesture a cosmos erased. It is the constellations as they occur in ink, to spark and signify the bookends of the blood. It is the high window upon the tallest tiny tower you reign down from. The dusk heavy on your tongue, the song a wise knife and a tragedy of glass, the clock always glancing back. Green sprouts and black vines of mold pass into transience with the lashings of gray and rain. The earth works the tricks and the time. The foundation sways below staggered steps, the soil speaking softly as the strata reel and rollick. Knowing breath to breath.

The difference in how the name was hanged. The imminent eminence, the weight in how you say it. The difference in how the moon was cast, though always bearer of the most ancient claim, the goddess aglow and gleaming. The clouds all gather, the rain sets aim. It’s all there for the asking, it’s all there to put your hands to, this moment filled with crossed out words and the emptying of all intent. The moments misplaced that I would put you through, dead bang present as the words brush your lips, this triumph of blood by the legion. Written to your skin and hinges, this robe of unseen albedo and the riotous insistence of the text. Written to your silk and hunger, the moment held in a fist. 

the grays

Winter yet, the day held gray, a savored breath unbound. Winter still, the husk fogging up the mirror and the lenses. Proof by the plate, proof by the probability, proof by the fire kept alive. The cold day a slow drip, the icy earth steeping new meanings in every released breath, the lungs staggering the atmosphere. Unfurled smoke, the proud flag of the transitory trailing sign towards the sky. Plumes of smoke all the offerings this wreck attends. The flame abides between the tides of blood and breath. The flame always first in line.

Hold onto loose leashes and empty collars, the story still untellable wherever you go. Cling to the old photos and the offered ash, keep the facts at arms length for a while. Let the teeth savor all they bite, however empty the calories, however hard to swallow. To the bleed, to the bone, to the ruined temple left to burn and rot. The words gather, honey to the hive. The words gather, sting to the wound. Nerve to skin, wit to panic, the where is always now. This moment by your measure, this voice speaking. 

Out in the chill when the dusk comes, I smoke and hold my tongue. Out in the grays when the day gives way, I give the wind and cinders a spin. The reason of the rhythmic moon, the gulf between the burn and the being, these feeble words and this liquid drift. The hollowed out rituals of a spent entity, the whimpers of the dreamer, the wailing of the animal. I sit here while the sky gives way. I smoke out here while all the warmth burns out. Amid the flickering of blues and blacks, the dead eyed gathering of the grays.

the incidentals

At the dull, dwindling end of the day with the glow of a light bulb, black robes and speckled flesh. At the shrugged shoulders and crossed arms of the day, the portion given to the mark of mind and myth, the portents of the ones to come. Strewn across the subtle shifts of stars, the ashes abandoned while the fire held out, the words once you leave the words behind. The cold hands offering up their warmth, the place where you wake within the song. Bones waiting for the stillness, the mystery all astir. 

It’s the moment where the smoke turns over. It’s the moment that’s taken by the wind. The glass of cool water, the bluster of the bathroom fan. The light that comes from right around the corner. The light that creeps in from the back yard. The signal keeps sending, the signal keeps showing up. The echoes dancing between the rooms, the shadows dashing between lights. Sore to a breath, sore to the stitch, the drift among the consonants once the name is spoken. The magic by the mouthful.

It’s okay, but these are not your neighbors. It’s just fine, but this place isn’t mine. The long arc, the slow burn out of sync with the local physics. Something to strain the credulity of the naked eye. The days are strained, the nights all but surrendered to the bumps and beasts. Comes the telling, comes a train. Gone from the writing to the rain, the reach before the words arrive. Gone from the record, gone to where the earth meets the dreaming.

the fallen

From the moon haloed in the early morning sky to the moods of loosed smoke and dead men’s songs, the numb skulled day has dragged along. A life lived in effigy, billowing sails and trembling scaffolding, ritual stance and signal smoke. The seething soil, the spill of color, the bitter flavor of the held tongue spells and the lined up invocations. Angels once, then the inevitable betrayal. Cast out for the sin of change.

The outcasts and the unapologetic, the apoplectic and the Donnybrooks, the devotees of the forest or the books or the old ones yet unnamed. The purity of the drawn and the drained. Habits so heavy handed they wear a window between the worlds, repetition halfway to ritual. Coffee and cigar in the strange siren soaked first of many. Weed and steam at another era’s end. 

I sit and smoke in cool blues and wistful grays, in dog fracas and sparrow song. I sit and smoke with fresh dead on my hands and changes on the ground. The cagy scrub jay flits by in a lucid fit of bright and blue, getting a quick scan of the scene. A squirrel slowly slides down the pine, deciding whether the risk is worth it. The smoke unfurls, climbing the cold up the sky. I sit and I smoke and I say nothing. I sit and I smoke, saying my goodbyes.