guts and ghosts

Teach me unhobbled heavens how to spend these unleashed evenings. Tell me all knowers how to fill my emptied cup. The nightmares can’t find my dreams so they share my bed, staring at the ceiling, asking “whatcha thinking?” Every swallow seems full of smoke and holes. I miss the ashtray, I smudge my glasses, I spit and fume and profane any name that comes out my mouth. I hear the voices, I hear the plucked strings offer up chords, the prayer before there were words to burn. The pain is there in every portion, the world working itself out on the assembled organisms, the instrument all hunches and stumbles. To receive this emptied vessel, the chalice slick with consecration, the hunger left over from the table without a place. To walk this sickly skin, dissolving stride by stride. 

I haunt the halls of these bricked up obligations. I turn corner after corner clambering around this maze. The limbs bud green and the dust changes hue, these picked out pages turning dark and cruel. Like the spider’s appetite, the meat owes the need, the world all untaken sides and unkind ends. Like the arrow loosed into the sky, random is not the same as blameless. The roads diverge and dwindle. Some ends go dead sooner than later, free will another contract only held against. I work the words that keep coming back, weaving circles from a series of still waters and spent two cents. Something to nothing, old hopes and hollow wishes plunked in the bucket, the witness gets around.

Here is where the world gives way, the burdens taken down to the bitter end. Here is where only the ghosts are givens, where the old gray mare gets lost in the clockwork and the calendar, where nothing remains unscathed. Bones ache and eyes gaze unseeing, the years flying into the untouchable, the slide and sway of memory changing stories and losing track of the cast. These rooms given to ghosts and guts, the body maintaining the facade as long is it can manage, the mind fading in and out as every day takes a taste. The heart dying in these little flutters and sudden plummets, as even the love withers down to steely grip and stubborn gristle. Errands and chores until the empty takes it all. The epitaph “but only if.”

the moon in heaps

It’s not that my robes are ragged, I am clad in rags. My cup is empty, my branch burns in tatters, pulled close by the deep lean into shadow. It’s a cold moment, old bones bared to the teeth of twilight, the crows calling from the antecedents of dusk. Watching the last touch of sunlight graze the cheek of a neighbor’s house, crow wings in shadow and in sky, the house where I last saw the moon on the rise. The home of the block elder at a spry 97 was where she last bestowed her blessing, the last light a blaze painted in golds and yellows, the offering all I can convey across this gravity lensed altar. The buckling between skin sky and mind.

So the day sheds its ornaments, its ecstatic bandwidths and rampant palette, layer after layer of shadow pooling all about. This egg hued firmament the last vanity until the night is revealed, the faintest tread a revelation, this grave dance of shade and starlight as all the lights go out. The depths past the horizon spilling over as we tumble ever eastward swinging wildly at every pitch, the thickening blues and purples, the inky ever after and the ache unto the moon’s arrival. I smoke as the earth beneath me trembles. I smoke as the altar hungers and the heavens hint at miracles.

This is the gaze that is dedicated to a direction. This is the lesson of the simplest sameness, never knowing exactly what to expect. You wash up in the world, you linger in the lore, you learn your map as best as you can manage. I wait in the wash of ache, I slow into the wake of the hunger, the glowering aspect of the fine honed appetite. Only the smoke and the ember, the breath burning bright and sullen, the dawdling fire in each word shed. Only the stars to stare at as the windows light up to look within. The old song, the heart tripping up the temple, awaiting her embrace.

power lines

It’s the sound of ice cream trucks amid the birdsong and traffic. It’s the glittering of insect wings as the sun tangles with the power lines as it sets. The cigar smoke swirls and rises, dancing on the rush of wind. The cigar smolders between index and middle fingertip, the bite of fire, the persistent ember. The sun blinds in rays and regions, a radiant remainder of the day’s ruthless reach and grasp. I sit through the pitch though I won’t buy it. I watch the whole production, though I’m hep to the grift and rolling with the spoilers. The sun swings down, never losing a step. Sundown again, though I’ve seen it a thousand times. Another day fresh into the past.

The sun gets in your eyes, the smoke gets in your eyes— between you and me, I think eyes are generally pretty vulnerable to the elements. Sun, smoke, stick, stone— whatever it is, it isn’t doing the eyeball any favors getting in there. I see what I see, considering local conditions and the angle of the light. The homeward crows, the last guard of sparrows lined up on top of the fence, the way the branches sway their soft goodbyes as the sun westers away. The light in its alignment, the charge resonates into each flesh and surface, dusk not the blossom but the blooming. These ingrained rituals and grand entanglements where the mind resides.

I’ve always been out in the weeds. I’m usually wandering around in the dark. I’m here for the first squirrel, there when the rats are on the clock. The slide east, the spill west, the ringing between stone and star, the singing from root to crown. There’s always another aspect unfolding, the children of the season, the ancients bereft of even bone. The story has to have it out with you, no matter whose story it is. Laughter beyond the fences, the distant peal of sirens  as the last light leaves. The moon places its name upon me, rising unseen, a steady hand upon my shoulder. The drag of the archetype up my spine, marked in the muddle, a light left on in the careless wastes. Another prayer with nowhere left to go.

always

The dusk comes soft and slow, all hat in hands and temple manners. Always it goes, gentle with its touch, shy about the center until every exit is covered. Then it takes cover and unfurls it’s standard, the herald of the coming night, swinging from every branch clinging to every eaves. I keep my own counsel, the steady curl of smoke, the field of ash below the unblinking ember. A trail finder and a fire starter, with little fealty save to coyote and crow. Always night arrives with neither reckoning or road. Always the wings of mosquitoes and the beckoning moon.

And so it is with this aching aperture. So it goes with these rounding downs and adding ups, the lush curves gravid through the restraints of reaching limbs, the moon bright and beaming through sky and branch. I smoke what little I have swindled, I smoke what I am offered. The portions I pass around, the portion I am too keen to keep. The stars brightly fixed to the firmament, their shimmering light among the most ancient oaths, granting wishes and making maps. The moon letting loose another torrent of dreams.

Here I go, always outnumbered. Here I go, skins drawn from the storm of words that always swarm about me. There is a song at play, the music in your memory, the singer behind your eyes. I sit here as the streets start their sniffing, I sit here as another freight train thunders and wails. I feed the ashtray as the traffic coalesces and the story lets go. I keep the fire going as the night swallows everything whole, an ember flickering below the weight of the becoming moon. A waste of space, a waste of words. Above and below, and on and on. Each moment met leaving unencumbered, each word a stranger at my table.

status

Leave it for another day, let the night get away from you. Wait until you have a minute to think, look at it under natural light. The fix is in, and you can’t repair it. The fix is in, crime only answers to crime. The sky turns in its blues for grays, the fade to black there in the cut, the imagined reasons evidence awaiting the bag. Like it or not it’s always love it or leave it. The night comes, and the only reckoning is the one you bring to the arena. The night comes, and surprise, surprise— you have no one to blame but yourself.

Nothing ever fits, no one ever stays, you better warn the buyer and wake the beast. The sky takes notes from the on high, sunlight and birdsong and the vapor traces of passing planes. The earth is tramped under foot, trodden on by track and boot, sublime and unconcerned with its latest manifestations. The sea sings and sways, full of fitful fish and sunken secrets, strewn with ships and trash. Still you fill your basket with myths and glories, as if a crown is anything other than antler envy. As if a king is anything other than the size of a candy bar.

Listen, all I do is sit near the open window. Look, all I know is what the sky lets slip. The words feast on flesh and fire, the words dance like neutrinos through these leaden hearts. The rattle of the rails, the pressure of the pipes, the banging on the hull— the tongue torn out and left bloodying up the pages. The language detached from bone and blood, entombed in slashes and scribbles, our disembodied souls awaiting decanting from some enchanted surface. Our incarnations folded in spark and light, hidden in the fabrications of copper and silicon and ghost. The unexamined life shockingly explicit, the high horse beaten savagely despite its having passed on years ago, knowing the world doesn’t know what it wants. 

nope

It’s been a long while since I was worth a damn. It’s been even longer since I had a welcome to wear out. I wrote it down, as if that would cure the lonesome. I wrote it down, as if that would make it matter. None of it was worth it. None of it. I’m done with all this pretending. 

spit

Every night the words unwind, a fondling of the moonlight, kissing the hem of dusk. All my life ascendant after sundown, living in the landscape of the night sky. The moon mouthing beatitudes and vivid kisses, these eternities in the space of saying, the way you spell it out. Lascivious dreams and rapt enchantments, beats and bars and the deep and far. Old songs and whispered wishes alight on your skin and lips, the places where we still touch. The way I asked only everything. The way I made you say it.

We are the savored dollops, we are the spit out gristle. We are scalped tickets and cherished relics, monuments to selfishness and sacrifice. The magic that starts with the mark on the map.  The repartee of baffling fireworks and nervous dogs, the clambering around the house, the report and the rattling glass. Here we are or there we go, whether passage between mountains or the stairway to the stars. The navigable constellations and unfettered tresses of your deft hand, letters left enfolded in dark and ghosts. The memories and the marks.

It’s not too far from prayers to curses. The daily bread and circuses, the arrow loosed towards heaven, the shed breath and spat epithet. Do we watch as the candles flicker, do we witness the light as it dies? This is where I abandon the traces, this is where you find me if you look. The hours ever counting down, the short order poems and place holder lines. The waste I always was to the nothing I’ve become. These shrugged off invocations, a habit scratching away, fleshless and enraged as the inevitable takes hold.

spill

Maybe it’s the way the shadows keep stacking up. Maybe it’s the spill of unexpected rain, the hush and hiss of passing traffic, the tell of the back of the cat. I sit between smoke and song listening to the loot and loiter of the storm. Old bones and ancient ways, the dust that gathers, the fire unfrayed. This coffee cup purgatory, the sacrament cool enough for the tongue, the vessel too hot for the lip. This blood buffered atmosphere, this streak of blue blazes invective and bone bound invocation. Staring at the poison portrait, staring at my socks. Stripe for stripe, curse for curse, the transitory of bad to worse. 

I guess it is the rain at the moment, the steady sound of the world at work out among the things that bump and mutter. I guess it’s the beauty down to the bones. You lose and lose, the disappearing begins. Now it’s three light bulbs and the music from the speakers. Now it’s the rain and Phil Collins drums. The mortal turn and all these loose and laden words spilling from my lips. Grumbling bones and a wish for kisses. The abstraction and the entity and the mystery meat. The comedy of errors and the letters left unsent. 

The weather steps, the seasons change, the stars adjust accordingly. There is empty in everything, so much owed to the holes in the argument and a generous serving of negative space. My head is reliquary and wax museum, my heart raven stash and rat midden. All the rest is guts and ghosts, chains rattled and larders looted as I drift between catastrophes, wrong rooms and too soons and felony breaking character. Animal and alibi as clock and calendar deals me wounds and tatters. The lit room and the long night, the shape and the slow dissolve. 

surface

The light endows its luminescence on every slip and skin, cutting through the dusty constellations clinging to the beating of each breath. The fire fed and admonished by the breaking of each breath. So much scuff and tussle, the invoked hues and commanded posture, the press of hands and shine. The hour leans and the shadows loom, this brush of sense and flesh, the memory all grasp and drool and keen. Somewhere there are fireworks, the sound caught hitting walls and hopping gates, echoes playing tag in the maze of night. The candle still flares and drips, the incense long burned out. 

Somewhere there are revving engines. A helicopter makes itself a nuisance. The night is all skitter and atmosphere, things going bump out the windows, things thumping around in the walls. The wind rises, the trumpet lows. The old one two and destiny where you put your hands, the moments slowly sinking as you grope and gaze. The door half off its hinges and the other things unchanged.

Maybe you’d still see me if you saw me on the page. Maybe you’d remember if you bothered to look. There’s no there there, or here either, depending on where you are when you look. The space always taking a train, then something about a ball or a bird, maybe a clattering of emphatic chalk. A quick rush of senses, a wash across the flesh, a litany of impacts. Naked eyes and bare limbs and the autocracy of touch. Kisses glistening in the heat and hunger, every  breath clinging to the feeling, every word spoken to your skin. This murmur upon the surface, this imminent ascension in the depths. This fire on arrival.

show

It’s the hour of the wailing train, the hour of the seething night, the boys down the block drunk and singing corridos into the street. The words come despite the clock in my lap and the eye on the phone, the hours all old and alone, walking around in the yoke of habit bitching about the ritual. Books and hand me downs and talismans. The dust that sticks to the bright glass lamp, the dust that spills and ascends, legions of jellies and the cycles of sun and star. The far away now what you are, drowning at the speed of time, haunting the hallways of my hidden heart. All these open secrets no one ever bothers to know.

I take another tectonic breath, the song slips and my spine sighs, the light the glow of an uncomfortable alone. The sagging refurbished surrendered flesh wheezing away at the bellows, the bones the tall timbers as the wind fills the sails. Part art, part heart, part patter and misdirect the words come loose as I run out the clock. The songs tumble, engines sneer, the dog licks at a sore toe. Ozymandias calling from inside the ruined statue, the delusions and hyperbole baked right in, the long winded alibi and the fount of the eternal tongue. Between labyrinths and trying not to loom. 

I guess I tell it in stacks and treasures, the dusty shelves laden with relics and tomes, the toys and mementos and items of arcane power. I guess I tell it in the shambles that I share. This weight and heat the words wear within you, the meter of the reading, the tremble in your flesh. The days burned like evidence of a felony, the name turned and turned until it only makes you hurt, bleeding out in shame and pain and jags of hot regret. The nights the long halls and darkened rooms of the farther and farther along. Long ago I went to see a show, and I never made it back. The shadow and the say so waiting for the word.

amulet

Here I am again, the altar of god’s last ulcer. Here I am still smoking in the rain. The old words made of wolves and wood and the elders stirring the embers of the stars. The old words only seedlings, sewn of Babel and sea salt and the passage through the burning sands. The breath is always rushing off, the tongue always playing catch up. The imparted art and the compelled spell racing through your veins, dancing like iron shavings dragged by magnets. The aura and the appetite sealed in knots of craft and promise. The magic another sunset in the rain.

One by one the colors wander, each hue fades in shades beneath the looming blanket of the growing grays. The porch light pushing shadows into the mud, the dusk gaining a little with every breath, drawing down the night and blowing away the day. The cold seeps down into the bones, the ache from wrist to elbow, the season always telling it like it is. I work the wheel, I wear my will, the biting teeth of the gears of ancient engines. The fingers bitten through the gloves, the ringing of the reach, the play of pitch and froth in the key of being. Sealed in sets of symbols and epochs down in the depths, the ring around rosies and the word right out your mouth.

Beneath the waves of pouring rain, below the shining tide of stars, we are always out to sea. Alter the rate of exchange, peel some ions from the elements, change directions of these sparks and spins. You are the kernel of your craft. You beyond the boundaries of your art. I still and stir and seal the secret with a kiss. 70 thousand years without enough pockets, 70 thousand years always in the last place you looked. The creator’s breath awakened in the earth, the spirit instilled by this sea of blood and sky, the rain preaching in song and scent. This circuit of ashes, this clay so squeezed and scorched. Here I am, another wanderer on sabbatical. Here I am, an unwanted waste in the amber of imagination.

new moon rain

It’s not like I run the numbers. It’s not like I know the odds. There’re the habituated states of grace, the mind hitting all the marks, the senses all coloring within the lines. There’s the general presence of time on the go. The wished for seat at the piano bar, the eyes that find you from across the room, and the feeling that you finally got it right. Navigating by the senescence of remembered constellations and the fossils of lost lore, finding the path pretty much where you left it, the longing and the robe by the door. My present tense prewritten and my past in need of notes. 

Marvin Pontiac’s voice leaning in the doorway as the songs switch outfits and change scenery, that long walk back before all the days were derelict and all the dreams had drowned. Joe Strummer another ghost in the long corridor I pace each night, a little taste of self and sense, then the abrupt departures. One by one each song is done. The lights grow dim down the way. Again the open window, again the drawl of night. Here I go saying second hand sooth. Here I go sharing the signs someone said they saw. The new moon I would bet on, the rain only if I liked the spread.

Lately my mind mostly wanders. Lately my coffee mostly goes cold in the cup. It’s all this nothing heavy on my mind. It’s all your absence thick in my thoughts. The dogs go off, a thunder cutting low to the ground. Things go bump and the gates rattle and ring. The world takes ten thousand turns and I have yet to roll the dice. My life passed in a flutter wounds and sunsets, butterfly wings and kisses that never ended, plain spoken and ill explained into the final rounds. Nothing but a watcher with words for eyes. Nothing but a hunger shining like bared teeth. Waiting on the weather as the roof falls down.

lines and circles

The sky takes its time to make its case, streaks about the atmosphere, gray swathes of condensation and the all but gone slip of moon. The foundation shifts and cracks, a temporary face to slow the bardo witnessed, the transitory always traveling in waves and breaks. The thumb bluntly breaks the frame, more evidence between the landed lead and scattered brass, the placement of the markers as the moments fade. We stare out from among the words and twitter, our song dependent upon the feather. The flocked together and the decanted panache. We came late to the party, uninvited, mistaken for someone else’s friend.

There’s a little light with the sun still reaching. There’s a little rain where the sky gave way. It’s always that the words don’t add up laid upon the elder resonances, that there is no speech capacious enough to contain all the all that is. The words do a little dance, the words make a little love, but the get down never comes up. The language of elements becomes the cant of chemistry in the tricky grammar of physics. There’s a lot going on, even when the words say nothing’s up. I write this down, the sky breaks character and begins to rain like it means it. All tell and no show.

There is little left but want and lack. The animal always mostly true, the entity all over the map. It’s my shabby little rituals, the smoke and the weight and the turnings of the earth. It’s these laden repetitions, setting stones and leying lines. The oldest paths woven through, before there were words, when everything was made of oaths. As if everything wasn’t magic, as if the shell game ever stopped, these engines we express. Etched into the skin of oblivion, life builds and burns. These dots and dashes, this blink and gone. This boundless blessing, this stray thread. 

all the rage

Would that there were a route or license, someway to settle the approach. Would that there were a prayer or switch, something to shut it off. The image keeps reoccurring, sliding from flesh to flesh. The vision is always at the edge of seeing and imagination, the signal rerunning all the roads and ways. The power and the precipice, the picture on the wall. Relentless, it keeps on coming. The fire I feed and form, the earth my only oath. The waste and want of this haunt of words, this kiss you still taste on your mouth. Old poems and buried bones, the bow of your back, the reach of your hands. 

It is the hour of smoke and lost loves, the hour of long agos and urgent imperatives and the rats hard at it. The clockwork hungers and classic plots, the music resting its head against my chest, light a gentle hand on my back. Still in my struggles I listen at the window while staring at the walls. Combovers of cobwebs and the stacks the tide of pulp and dust. The steady ache nestled close to my core the pearl that transformed me into an oyster. That tantalizing apple left to beckon as I consider the counsel of the serpent. That trembling in the belly as the imminent train arrives.

I want you to say the words because they’re mostly what I work with. I want you to say the words because I like to think about your mouth. Just a pittance of spit and bare blooded incantation. Said then so, the way it goes folding it from light to meat. This unflagged pole stuck somewhere between seeing and belief, the ease of the trick, the sign the reading makes of your mind. This ritual of the wide peripheral while the flesh consents to every want and whim. The wail of the train and the rattle of the tracks as Kendrick fades to Coltrane, the open window and the shuffling songs. This declarative magic waiting between our heres and nows, the words filling in forevers and longing for your lips. 

muscle memory

Cross my heart and hope to die. Cross my fingers to spare the truth. The hours go on marching by, the years retreat into time’s horizon, now ever and always falling into ash. The long drawn shadows, the long lost artifact. The curse of garden, the break in between songs, the stars you could see if the window’d only let you. The stars you could wish on if only the walls would at last relent. It isn’t so much how it’s spelled as how you worked up the nerve to say it. It isn’t so much how it landed but how it never lasts. From god’s lips to the devil’s ears, there’s always a lot to lose. From the architecture of the latest thinking to the ocean of sparks and the dawn of life. The light always leaving, the flesh uninterrupted.

Maybe it’s the cat across your lap, maybe it’s the music in the air. The story from the point of impact, the story from the point of view, something battered something true. The arrow of time and the arc of the narrative. Our baffling hearts, our bruised and beaten bones. The fife and the drum and the more to come. Find it or let it fly, the words will get to it and feast on every scrap. The words the soil these slips of soul return to. The words strung through us another churning earth. The blinding act, and the burden of filling in the space stolen. The deadly action and the ache that bleeds wails and hollows. The hope of tomorrow oozing slowly from the the wound.

It comes down to cases, I play the angles. Things get hot, I save my skin. The gut punched heart, the echoing kiss beating out time on the insides of my sorry monkey skull, the tangles of vein and root spilling like stripped wires into the glistening real. Broken tooth and bit tongue, the riddle woven with the tale unspun, the artifice catching up fast. Laying in the egress of an unguarded window, the cold casting spells on my bones, the moment spilling over the sides. Like a bike took to again after so many years as memory, the stretch of treachery you served to survive. That reflex of repetition, the body as a body, the gods as ghosts. A whisper ravaged dandelion, the breath as it leaves your lips. The steady stricture of the say so hot against the flesh. 

voice

The bass line seems to stray a little from step to step, the moment and the great ascent, a bare bulb and that spiral of smoke. A pause for old applause, then the rhythm takes a ride, from the haunted electronic ephemera to the blood and viscera and the ship with black sails. The symphonic rumble roll spread all around the orchestra, the gamelan musculoskeletal rattle of the multitude becoming one. The tunes slide around the timeline, the styles and trends and one hit dead ends, the oracle of the songs on shuffle. The wind reaches in through the window screen. I clear my throat as if I’m about to try my voice.

The bedroom window is always open. The bathroom light is always on. The weirdness of this winter, the change from major to minor and such. This toss and tumble of the fool’s journey, this fall and stumble as the slapstick sticks to beatings, the bump and grind to bump and bruise as the clock runs out. All that want and wait, the hole in the ground, the hinge on the gait. The words work the wound, empty pockets and restless hands. Somewhere between the song that’s on and the animals that scratch and gnaw, this signal stuck on send.

I’m a simple instrument, I’m just always out of tune. I’m a typical conspiracy, just another crime without a clue. Somewhere between stray and beggar, somewhere before tomorrow, this place past yesterday. Bad sneaks and the shuffle off to buff, the moon melting to the medicine dance. The breath persists in the rough and tangle. The breathing the stitching of the same old on and on. The breathing a painting made of spark and pheromone, the body always a turning of the burn. It isn’t my throat, or even the hungry kisses yours enjoins. It isn’t my breath, or not mine in the way the meaning mostly goes. All the same, it’s my voice playing in the end.

lesser than

The medicine almost doesn’t show, between the steaming mug of k cup whispered nothing and the flower that hasn’t touched the bloom. The dirty steel and tepid water, the dreaming and the fecund flesh. Sharp shores behind the eyes as the tide takes its toll, the breath a labored bellows. Some more smoke, cobwebs and textured shadows, the sashay of the music and the somber of the song. She loves me, she loves me not, the answer so easy it spares a lot of petals. There isn’t an incident to remark upon. There isn’t a soul to pin to the wall. Small rooms, cluttered shelves, a closet full of empty selves. The windows all open and the lights left on.

Surrender your wrists to the clock on the wall, surrender your ash to the tray. The stars stir and stretch across the cracks you radiate through the firmament, the night another shape staring in. The action never waiting for the lights or the camera, bellies and boots on the ground. Fill your altar and devoutly aspirate, every votive burning the prayer to the dirt. Look to the earth, look to the sky. Feed the fire or take the flight. The call from the heart of the darkest night, your flesh and bones devoted to the last direction, the song comes on and your heart is bared to unseen witness. The ceaseless gaze and the hunger that always picks you first.

We follow the paths laid by those who passed before us, scorch marks on the ceiling, mismatched screws in the outlet covers. We run the old conduits, recover the forgotten sprinkler system through mishap and misadventure, rummage about in the rocks and bones strewn about these ruins. We retrace the map even when the map is off, nothing is ever taken back. Turning over the oldest stories in our dank basements and dusty attics, a sticker on the calendar, a table with a view. The night unfurled like the night before, a clatter of bus tubs and small talk, the train long and slow as it wails away. Through the locked gate, up the stairs that ascend into the dark. The lights are hit and miss, the lonesome is waiting by the door.

fixture

It’s already outside the reach of sundown, the twilight full of cars and sirens. It’s already dusk going hard into darkness, the night all in my eyes. Again I sit with my back to the west, watching the world swallowed whole by its shadow. Again I let the song slip away, no longer fighting the tide of sky and stars. Back at the blank page and the empty words I offer. A strange feature of this stretch of the road, the fixture on the front porch writing in the dark.

I fill the hours with doubt and habit, I know how to work a wound. I know how to lose but I still get sore. I pace the void and double down on the distraction, the nights only getting longer as the lonesome becomes the life. The ache the stake driven clean through, a tell unto the done. Still the years keep at it. There’s always something left to come undone.

The coffee is cold by the time Orion shows up. The cup always forgotten somewhere between hands and thoughts, the lighter you’re always looking for, the knife you always find. Words that follow the tapping of the signal. Words formed from a twiddling of thumbs. Face lit by the ersatz page as you drizzle as iffed ink. Marked as certain as a star, this absence always there. An oddity along the way, a light that’s alway on.

dewdrop

The single bulb, the window’s breeze, the ashtray cradling the rising smoke. Another measure of this quintessence, another port in the storm, the wind so cold the robe so warm. The wishes picked at so long they turn to wounds, consume the flesh as the mind devours the time, a midden full of wooden nickels and burned out stars. The slow tongue of shadows steeping the embers of the want, this language of darkened corridors and doors torn from their hinges, these words of everyday horrors and common touch divinity. The night creeps on through the undone house, tomorrow’s words traced into the spilling sand. This ash, this mote, this droplet as it falls.

We burn unseen in the thick of night, we blaze unnoticed in the plain of day. This imminent waste of words and wax. Postcards passed between strangers, matches lit against the weight of night, sparks struck from stones and the smolder that you pocket. Lonely rooms and sad souvenirs, coats of dust and smoke. Like the circles paced in zoo animal prisons, like the form imagined before the light saves your skin. The wild reel and the ritual of star and moon and skin. The light in the forest, the beckoning in the night. Huddled in husk and curse, the window waiting open.

It’s not like you can tell the weather by the season. It’s not as if the dew point didn’t turn to frost every day. I don’t want to wake with the sunrise. I never want to face the dawn. But the world is made mostly of who asked yous and keep steppins, whole libraries bent on bossing you around. You can hardly hit a guy with a rock and not get accused of sinning. So I play the hand I’m dealt, I play the tune of the table. I let you toss the coin and call it, my kingdom swathes of smoke and shambles, the bones that break not the bones that roll. The deep sigh of the turning earth, the voice that rides upon the wind. The work of the soil and the star stippled sky, this night simply the saying of your name. 

unmatched

The night again, and the gutters crawl with whistles wetted and the leaping of loose light. The porch again, the light pushing softly off the wall, bejeweled with shed carapace and enmeshed beneath the covetous web. The smoke again, a rasp across the tongue then the curl in slow ascent. The steel cup, from black bitter mirror to blown steam to quaffed dose, a leaning in and a lifting to the lips. To hold the bloom however fleeting until the coming thunder blisters it from your grasp. To hold the night, line by line, as it sheds its vestments to the wind. The fixture between bricks, the travelings amongst the flesh.

I am the light of the last fading embers. I am the passage in the depths. The days come crashing down, washing away the works of poorly composed notions, torn to pieces by poorly trained moods. I find some beast and navigate it back to life, vaguely holding back my murderous pack. I find some demon, wings thrashing like a trapped bird, walk it out a window or a door. I ignore the orders, I observe the proprieties. You take the heat when others can’t. You help when you’re asked. There’s the words I toss around, then there’s the fustigation of the forms. It’s a busy road, it never hurts to keep it moving along.

It’s the sprawl of lights from passing traffic. It’s the stir in the bramble from the beats of cats. The rumble of engines, the stars holding course. The hunger always sounding alarms and making maps, the passage of the atmosphere and the animal, the discourse of the intention and the dealt hand. The once I was a labyrinth with the walls blown down, the now I am somewhere between reluctant Minotaur and untethered sacrificial goat. A lot depends on the relics and the lore. A lot depends on how well you loot the ladder and the armory. The heavy flame, the hidden star. The light that finds a way.

cup and saucer

The year hardly started and it’s already getting used up. The calendar counting another month out, time parsed by cup and bowl. Coffee slowly steaming, gathered flower waiting for the burn. The weeks fly fleetingly, the flesh trembles unto dust, the treasured rituals disappear as if the never existed at all. The way you set the table, the order of the silverware, the water and the wine. The passing of the salt and butter, the napkin in your lap. The measure that used to meet you halfway seldom breaks its stride, leaving you more and more in the past tense. Chipped and scratched and nothing matches. Time talking in attrition with the rain falling down.

I was never much for being in. I was never much for keeping up. The world slips away, what’s the difference? I was only ever living at its borders. I was only ever living off the crusts. You lose track of the iteration of the incarnation, the name and the number of this particular collision, the plates of that truck that hit you. Just a few facets of the feel of the machine turning over, then onto the next blithering mystery. Just a sense of the song and the sway of the organism and the entity remembers to forget. So I move from dream to dream, living off myths and snippets. So I wake to this desperate grasping, the name and the dying. A few more stars swept, and I do it all again.

Last year was full of lessons, but mostly it made me do the math. The sting of betrayal and the shock of the context clues have long worn off, but the basics do stand out. When it comes for you, you will be alone. You carry yourself out, or you stay where you fall. I move from task to task, the hands of a clock and the footwork out of step. The days circle and spill, the here and now swiftly another there and then, the sun the moon the rain. The years dash past and everything is so beautiful as it goes. The words flock and swarm, nothing to fill the cupboards or keep me warm. The scratched out lines of poem after poem, ink and paper and the insistent presence of ghosts. Blinded well before the light gives up.

bad actor

At least you look the part. You look like they’d think you’d look, and seeing is believing. It might work if you stand just so. It might work if you stick to the script. Belief is easier when everybody does it. Remember the audience, remember the ensemble, remember where the exits are. Play it right, it’s money in the bank. Take the show on the road, you’re set for life. You can’t go wrong giving them what they want. 

It’s been a long time since I had my act together. It’s been a long time since I put on a show. The skills aren’t quite there and there are holes in my head where the old routines should be, but my hands know what to do. The entity always shorting the organism, the organism always the knowing of a multitude marched hard through long time. Creation always one up because creation keeps working on its act. The show doesn’t sit around and wait. The show goes on.

The moon might shine yet if you pray on it. The clouds might part if you ask them nice. The sky leaks out of the frame, dull deluges and empty threats. A gray from the beginnings of color, a gray ready to turn back to black, lingers in the arriving night. The stage is always set, though there’s no telling about the show. Arrivals and departures, beginnings and bad ends. It might look like justice, it might look like karma, it might look like cruelty from soup to nuts and the place isn’t winning any prizes. A lot depends on the seating.