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.