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.”