mercy

The shadows of leaf and limb waver out of focus on the tree trunk, a blurred version projected by the walk it off sun, the verite of this cinema an aftershock of the double seeing to be done. Our eyes add the stories as the world meets us with stick and stone. We have fallen and we can’t get up. We move like the world moves, in all directions at once. Our symbols all stitched into our senses, everything sticky from the constant pawing of our monkey minds, everything laden with colored ribbons and bitter fruit. All the children dance and pray, hoping mercy shows today. The sun and tree keep the act going, at least from where I’ve been seated.

Oh, for the sippings of the whispering winds! Oh, for the swaying limbs sharing the morning moon! These maps of ancient passings, these remnants of the world before the flood. There’s just no pleasing some people. This god playing both sides and always throwing conniptions. This world ordered in every direction every which way. Everything chemistry, everything physics, everything bardo there are never words enough. The monkey always finds something to climb. The monkey always finds some shit to sling.

Alchemy and alkaloids, the tuning and the transmission, location and velocity another viscosity moving matter through the sieve of seeing. The time taken for each undoing, the thousands counted, the billions missed. I have already had my moments. I have long since missed my shot. The numbers always missing from the narrative, the broken branch knowing nothing of the thriving of the tree. It’s yes and and no and all the conjunctions and punctuation you can add to the heap. The possibilities are endless if the probabilities play out. Ask and you shall receive, but you never know quite what. God thees and thous away, I answer with a good says who and an old fashioned sell that soap down on down the road. I’d rather take my lumps than give that jerk the pleasure. 

green cathedral

The winds give in to the cool shadows, the sky still blazes blue, the season so green and reaching. The tangled grasses and the bone strewn yard, children passing in masks on bicycles, the dogs lying down by the drive. The sun is ducking out behind the house, a blaze of glory upon the fields and crown of the silent elementary school while the light takes sides between earth and firmament. The direction of the abducted smoke, the glide of the drive by, and the separation by wings all take their measures. I am left with the attended embers and the intersections of the reports. I am left to the wrong heavens and the slipping of the stars.

The sun goes slow, touching the tall cypress and the lonely palms, swaying their soft so longs with the wind. The chill strolls through bloom and skin, the great balance always adjusting to local conditions. The asphalt shedding some radiation that the fickle concrete ignored, an explosion of new leaf more translations of the reckless abundance of sunlight. A crow flies low above the treetops, cutting northwest over the green and vacant school field. Yet another story over my head, another telling behind my back. The wheel turns on without a care.

From the floodplains of my childhood to these days of drought and pavement, from the days of dreams to the lay of the land, the map is never the same twice. I wander the depths of this apostasy, the debt and the drear instead of the destiny. The mountains had called, then the forest had found me, then I was taken by the green cathedral beside the sea. It told me a secret that was only me, met in these passages between mountains, imbued in a fever before a fire beneath clear cold stars. A call caught in the atmosphere, that shade of twilight almost the sifted scatter of the ancient temples of sequoia and spruce, a sharpness of salt when the morning’s gulls bring along a breath of sea beneath their wings. The night presumes and my skin still dreams my name. 

the old robes

The stories have a way they go. Only wish on the nearest star. Only walk on troubled waters. The legends and the lore reach up through the roots of tongue and breath. We are riddled with these words and ghosts, the presence of our flesh carried upon this continuity of blood and breath, life both the raft and the sinking ship. There’s always one more drop in the ocean. There’s always more fish in the sea. I still wonder how you wear it. I still wonder what you’d say.

Here the hunger is just another sin of omission. Here the words cling to the carbon bonds. The echoes along the coursing shadows, the ringing around the ears. From urgent to inert, the shift in being from bound to break, memory sinking into the dark mythology nested in the organism. The crumpled fragments of some brief impression, a flash of flowers, a blur of feathers. Something I would tell you if we still had things to tell. Something that’d only mean more rope if things still meant.

Swaddled in some cheap polymer, some processed floss and tangled weave, I no longer grieve the undead. The passage of small time has done its prunings, though the entity still exasperates effortlessly. The lingerings of deep time coil and reach, tendrils tight around every fiber of flesh and bone, the direction implicit in the strata and the artifacts. Wrapped in entropy and hardened habit, my hands fumble in the unreliable pockets, my head hidden in the hood. I wear these rags past worn out, swarmed by the growing legions of holes and an alarum of use by dates, the only numbers the drag of the clock and the old one two. I still wear the wonder. I still hear your voice.

dandelion

The moon was almost worth it. The day was almost kind. The sunshine followed me back inside, the warmth of the day lingering by the door, sitting a spell on the front porch. The music plays, the smoke cavorts, ashes curl up in my lap. The night and the street make their reports through the screen door, the whole world awake to the spring with busy hands restrained in their pockets. Engines rev and voices raise, all the stunt work and the stotting, birds and bees and the budding trees. Though old, feeble, and rapidly falling apart I feel it too. The big bright moon and the warm dark night aren’t fooling.

I swallow a mouthful of tepid coffee, take a beat before I take a smoke. The moment is a muddle, ache and break and prophecy, the body in its habitual dismay. Squaring off with the exchange rate, counting down the clock with the gravitas of the gaze, every display case empty and covered in dust. My policy is a qualified let live. I have a wasp nest by my gas cap. I let the yard run wild. I rest my bones on a charity chair and ottoman, the moon dragging me by the heels. A childhood song, a dandelion, a wish unspoken. 

It’s 10:30 on a Saturday night. I’m 54 years old. The world around me grows frayed and tattered even as my grasp grows weaker, the blows come harder even as my strength fades. Waning hard as the moon becomes, albedo radiant down through skin and bone, a color of breathed out blood. Staring clean through ceilings and walls, encumbering every surface with this laden gaze, the still and the slow as the world boils away. It is the moment in lone blossom and lucky clover, the staggered planets and the steady constellations. The smoke always showing for the fire, the beauty all scattered to the wind. What else is this life for but the living? The turn towards the burning, every breath a wish. 

dust dispatch

The day relayed its attitude in tilt and rotation, fiery chariot across the blue, dreaming revenant aglow in the black. The dust is stirred by wind and wings, the earth turning and turned, the way so worn and wasted. I took the steps, I said the words, I filled the vessel with intent so as not to waste it. No message, no meaning. Just the flex of flesh and respiration, the shambles of the animal as it moves around. The sun so warm, the moon so lovely, the witness so what.

It comes down to walls and windows, a door with a peephole, a gate locked up tight. It comes down to the hours of books and screens, the staring at the ceiling, the wishing on the stars. The heart’s long diaspora answered by the tumult of a hard earned hell, it empties slowly of all but exhausted blood and ache. The world is big, the world is wild, but the world wants what it wants. You never know all that it wants, but given time, you know that it isn’t you. All the rest is yearbook notes and horoscopes, and the brutal race to the bottom.

Time is running out, and yet it still manages to fill my schedule. My time is up, but there’s no telling how much down there’s left to go. The motions move through me, the dancing of a marionette, the worm to the spade. The words left wanting filling in the litany of blanks. The shape of things, the shape of the saying, the pressure light takes to push a shadow out. It’s like a calendar, it’s like a clock. An impression of a passage made from light and paper. A moment folded to show where the absence was. An arrow to show the direction of the loss. 

the odds at even

The hours are running out, the hour’s getting long in the tooth, the way it always seems watching time just smile. The crowded atmosphere and the blue bias light, a cough that presumes too much, another object in motion trailing smoke and dust. The old songs play away on some gizmo, the heart another hard scrabble gadget, fuming away in some lonely room remembering when you were beautiful. Dawdling with the screen door open, aching down to the architecture, sinning through the antecedents. You smoke in the raw outrage of the moon coming on. You smoke in the style of lone men in cheap rooms. Even stillness thick with menace. 

The tv is the radio, the radio just the shuffling of the songs. The ashtray fills with offerings to Ganesha and apportionments for ghosts, the embers livid with intent. The bottle baby cat is taking up the ottoman, the pit bull coughing from the couch, the night dishes it out quick. Glued to the routine of tapping out line after line, queued up and raring by the clock. This oblique circus, the weave of memory and sensation and myth, this smudge of wonder across these bleak empiricals. This worry of waves and miracles, the story of the moon pieced together from puddles and magazines. Feet flat and slouched low, I am a marvel of met atmosphere, a star fallen trailing smoke.

Tonight, it’s all flashes of ramparts, it’s all tattered banners and rambling anthems. Flash cards and stop sign stickers, worn through fantasies and the demands of the animal. The train wails, the world rattles on with the fun all gone, the stranger shuffling along his beat. Here at the trailheads of the wanton probabilities, the easy chair full of flashing teeth and dog fight proclamations, we bear the weight of the radiance. Revelation where the grace clamps down, the meat in the moment, the skin in the game. Again, these words again. Cut outs from old magazines. The puddles left over from the last rain. Toss a coin, the story will take it from there. 

made monkeys

I thought of the moon, and there it was, stuck halfway up a tree. A blink of an eye, a half a breath, and there goes the sky. It’s as easy as the thinking, it’s learning to watch what you see. Run amok or pay attention, it tends to average out. The pointer or the pointing, the lake or Li Po’s moon. There’s only so high you can climb, no matter the forest or the mountain. There’s only so far you can see, no matter what you’ve climbed. Here comes the clouds, there goes the sun. Here the winds take up the banner of the night.

Set a spell and draw down the stars. Stay a while and ink in the night. Lines laid down in toil and tradition. Lines pulled out the hat. Just the being to keep us busy, we dabble and we gossip. We flirt and flit and plot. We rise and we show our tails, the words all laden with tricks. Time goes on and the world goes with it. Better make it like you like it. Better make it like you mean it. At least it will feel like a reason. At least it will pause there when you wonder why.

Look, the moon does just what it pleases. Look, the mountains move whether you tell them to or not. There’s the seeming and the say so. There’s witness and the world. Talk is cheap, and such big portions!  Talk is cheap, but it’s a living! Seen and done, and moving as if one, we iterate the iterations walking straight out the sea. The imagined and the incarnations, the story to each deed. We ape blind the intentions of the divine, livid incantations skittering through the skins, stacks and stacks of giants entombed in all the climbing. This bitter magic, this endless forest. 

sons and daughters

What was the world while the wind swept through it? What were the obstacles removed to seed the path? The cold toothed zephyrs nibbling on the golden sun and the blue sky and the green dreams reaching, winter waiting where the weather gives out. The gutted hungers and rush of appetite always almost arriving, almost always about to go. The change we are and the changes we are blamed for, the birds of a feather tethered to the flock, the fruit of the tree and how far it falls. The masks worn for your approval, the shiny skins that fill the bins. The kings of kinship, the ghosts of all alone.

So here we are, in the crisp blue afternoon. So here we go, all brass knuckles and smudged blood. The wind whips up the unseen legions, seed and spore and fellow travelers, the words in raucous concentrations and bitter drizzles. The smoke drawls and sprints, its split allegiances sorted by fiat, the sky all gusts and gasps. The spring unwinds along ley lines and expected engines, old gods and ancient mechanisms unfurled on field and branch. This reach in receipt, the call of stars and the strength of roots, feathers up in heaven and flowers in your crown.

I am a path that faltered, a fallen tree, a stone in the shoe of the earnest traveler. I am the embers and the ashes, the fire found extinguished but still warm. Father to abortions and miscarriages, placeholder and adept of the open stance, a home for sins and strays. The swollen ocean and the oaths of orphans, bones dressed in the tattered whispers of ghosts. Another set of embellished burnings, salt and cinders and the window wanton with the night. Words and fire and second hand empires. The sky bright and the winds wild, another sun gone down.

by the numbers

Spring blesses the bandwidth with resonant hues of greens and blues, wrangled from the sky and the hotshot sun, drawn from the earth like an expectant breath. Wings spun from shine and appetite paint the sun streaked atmosphere in feathers and flight, sparrows and finches and the innumerable invertebrates in swirls and dashes, patterns of lift and hunger left to add heft and blur to the periphery. Birdsong and calls to alarum as the day leans in. The afternoon a soft stir, gentle like a prayer, lofty like an admonition. A hush of wings, and every shoot aiming for the sun.

So I knot these braids of smoke. So I waste my breath on words. The day takes it all at once, the day takes it in chips and pieces. I sit between the acts and the impacts, full and empty with the trend of the sky, vessel of shadow vessel of sun. The day ends with this world begun, the drift of blood and the rift of witness, the west a blinding band. These scattered sentiments, the song there in the phrasing, the words left to contend. The ache in the architecture, the worn down matter and the desecrated mind. I wind my springs and spin my wheels, an oxidized machine, an ode to obsolescence. 

There’s nowhere to go, there’s none who’d have me, I’m the sharp shards where the social compact got broken off. The circus without even peanuts for pay, the tightrope and the trapeze acts without even the witness of a net, mismatched skill sets and forgotten cants. All appetite without aptitude, all moon and mountain when the bills come due. No one’s giving up even the least of hints, and I haven’t got a clue. I close my eyes and feel the sun soak in, warming my bones in the moment. I open my eyes once the night rolls around, trying not to miss a trick. Bones and ash and the stars counting backwards. A story told in dust and teeth.

fizzle

We rock around the clock to find the prohibition fresh on the lips, neither pickle nor motor sickle be. We burn and fade and are by fate waylaid, both the algorithm and the instrument, the climb to the precipice and the rhetoric of the long talk down. Our rubric and our declamations as we drain and dwindle. All the possibilities missed and the kingdoms built in their absence. The gospel of the road untaken, the miracles of these unwritten lives as memory turns to dust. The story we adhere to until the story falls apart. 

The artifacts are resolute, shirts or skins and the worlds within. The mirror another corridor, memory the needle sting and the flash of teeth. Footsteps echoing in the stairwell, the crowded sounds of lonesome places, the odd accompaniment of the assembled ensemble of the self. I move from room to room. I shift from chair to chair, propped up on an elbow or a folding of pillows upon my restless bed. The sifting of the aches and the counting of the frames, the straining and the story, the motions and the form. Slowly the assertions grow more emphatic as the facts start losing face. From spark to sizzle, to smoke and fizzle, the dwindle only grows.

Would that it was seared on the streak of the star’s fall. Would that it was carried on insistent breath and dandelion seeds, the wish astride the wind. Instead it’s the stiff joints and bent back of the daily parade. Old wounds that won’t stop singing no matter how much medicine they take. Bruises woven into the words we use to soothe ourselves. The resolution slips and strays. Falling from such proud footing, the gibbering fool resplendent in their crown. The lights all snuffed at once, a whimper after all. 

blue ox

The sun rides the blue tide of sky from one end to the other, its radiance seeding greens and scathing down in droughts and plagues, taking its tithe in lore and language. All the reachings out there towards this unknowable fury, this fever singing fire in the pitch and freeze of spacetime. We ride the same skies, name the great fires and the distant stipplings, all the stars from near to far. Weighing in on the wanderers with our ape heavy myths, the heavens there to ring with our reckoning. Existence unto this static scribble. The words so laden because they’re what we have to work with. The mythos so busy because we never learned to forget. 

It is up to the elders to share the stories. It is up to us to carry the tongue. And it is up to the language to change to meet the spoken moment. The words still there when they can’t be found. They’re just smoking around the corner waiting for their turn to come back around. They’re clinging to some idiom that’s still rattling about. They work in silence, in hands and backs and the ceaseless tread. Deeper than bones, older than the gods and the ones that brung em, they rise from the root path to the starry firmament. These words awaiting speech. 

We stray and we suffer, we plunder and we profit, we slip and stride and pad out the books. Ways wander and they idle, old paths grown over from disuse, ancient rites lost as soon as they left our hands. The prayers get caught in the briar patch, the offerings secured by squirrels and crows. The yard is wild with weeds and intemperate grasses, strewn with bones and dog toys and seed for the sparrows and such. Smoking, still, as the flesh is tended by the cooling afternoon. The limits of this vision, threaded between ways and worlds. The pittance of this witness left to the ephemera. Another age, full of heroes and odd phrasings, left to the tide of blood and breath to inspire.

back burners

It’s strange the things you find when you go looking. It’s odd what the season brings around. Spring has been beating around bud and bush, green reachings and the sun where it sticks. Now the wind blows and blows, a little chill for the windowsill, a little stirring about the stars. The limbs stretch and sway, the horned moon having its way, the hint of frost burning your very bones. The words are never there until you look, but the calendar insists. The words always unwanted, saying what they will, leaving what they may.

It depends on where you point the light. It depends on how you say you prayers. What you see, what you dare. The narrow creep down the corridor, a light peeking around the corner. The heavy hallway and the door left open, that waking in the thick of dreams to feel a watcher in the dark. A weight like a held breath and the senses spilling over, a shape in the window, a sudden rush of wings. Heart pounding, about to pull back the curtains, afraid of the gaze that looking might reveal. The mirror watching side eyed, the moon another tide.

We wait between the shapes, we stride amongst the summons. The world churns along, the clatter of stones tumbled by the crashing ocean, the restless report of the shore. We are colored in skies and sad goodbyes, comedy and tragedy the eternal scene partners stepping on their lines, plots and schemes and pipe dreams where bury every beat. I wish this was a letter, some big gesture, the best on its way at last. But it’s only dusty walls and a window left open to the night. It’s teenaged music and tomcat appetites, the trash fire at the end of the world. Last laughs and epitaphs, and smoke so you know.

hard bargain

The rain pours down and the hammer keeps beating on the anvil. The winds blows cold and the bellows continue to wheeze and puff. Smoke trickles up through the droplets, smoke drizzles out from between my lips. The cold stays on point, stealing the heat from my hands, coaxing the smoke on down the road. It’s the limits of the vehicle, it’s the motive in the mise en scene, it’s the ashes on the altar and the burning of the rope. It rains, it pours, there is little left for me to know. 

The storm strolls on as the shadows reach and the night breathes from the earth on out. Rain piddling in pairs and platoons on the aluminum sheeting covering the patio, rain dripping down the limbs of the sprawling pines. I sit and smoke, an avocation without fixed appellation. I sit and smoke, the unfurling of an unaffiliated flag. I am the crossroads at midnight, a hard bargain never driven. I am the four way intersection, blinking in the dark. All feasting sense and the mumbling of the peanut gallery, the words wander through in drags and dashes. The witness wearing out its welcome. The music climbing the strange crescendo, the sacrifice to the faith of the song.

It’s all smoke and embers. It’s all mosquitoes and accepted flesh, the currency of breath and blood, the turning of the wheel. The moon is a dreaming to the west, bathing in the depths of gray and change. I weigh out my measure, I meet the balance of my mass and the come and go, staving off the defaults of this instrument. I wait out the twilight as it turns out it was the night all along. It’s an ancient story, beaten out by tongues past countless thousands. It is the burden of the breath, the tending to the fire. The words offered, the fire found out.

roadkill

The day gives in to the graces of the gray, green from the recent rain and awaiting the coming storm. The smoke reaches up and climbs the coils of burn and wind and offered breath, the fickle sky anchored to the engine planted firmly on the earth. The smoke strives and stalls, ambivalent to altar or entity, nodding at the offering as it goes to the ghost. The sky is all unsettled water colors and wanderlust, never the same sight twice. The crows and dogs add commentary as the world below slides by. I drop my cigar in my lap, hands slapping at my clothes stippled with ashes and embers. Everything has its price.

It’s the sort of story that goes unnoticed. It’s the sort of life that ends up under the wheels. Nothing planned, nothing personal— they just didn’t see you there. Everyone’s just racing to get to where they’re going. Everyone has a prize to eye. You wander the world of spent wishes. You wear down every path that you cross. Soon it’s only ghosts and premonitions, the flutter of the curtains, the hawk out on the fence. Soon it’s the light down the driveway, the light on down the hall you know that you turned off. We shelter in our stormy skulls, set our shadows loose upon the world. We were trained well to go with the motion, learned early our yes ands and to honor the misdirect. We only know how to give our all to the show.

The wind sweeps away the dregs of the day, the budding branches all astir, silhouettes slowly swaying to the tide of dusk. The last crows say their goodnights and disappear to the north. A slumped teen on a razor scooter stops to work his phone, white t-shirt and white earbuds a hapless apparition as the last of the light taps out. I make another offering to my ashtray as the song reaches its crescendo, I drink cooling coffee as the scooter kid glides and clatters round and round, the night just silly with it. Traffic hurries past, deadly to any inconvenience. The want opens up its maw and there goes the road. The endless tarmac a need tattooed into the skin of the restless world. A stitch, an itch, and only one thing certain in the wide open world. 

after tomorrow

Name us now by how our days go wasted. Call us by our collars, know us by the bridle and the bit. Toil away in the dirt, work your clean shirt racket like a champ, get tagged as essential so you can die in the harness dumber than the dumbest mule. It doesn’t matter if you’re docile and work like the devil. It doesn’t matter if you beat the machine and break every lead. It doesn’t even matter if you get up on your hind legs and fuss and fight for what you know is right. You’re either in or out, and by now you probably know it. I’m not worth a once over, I’m not worth a glance. Best to keep your eyes to yourself unless you’re ready for the last dance.

Look on the bright side, it’s there on the ceiling. Follow the sun so you don’t have to see. Another engagement with the empty ever after, bum rushed by the usual suspects because they know where you live. Crowded by grifters and idiot relations who figure whatever you’ve given up, whatever you’ve lost, there’s always more to take. Left to my own meager devices and whatever fairy story you want to tell about your generous soul and unblemished attentions. No one listens when you need to be heard. I stopped talking long ago, save to offer reciprocal fuck offs and to spice up the old heave ho.

Someone is ill, someone is dying. You have your duty, you have your heart. It doesn’t matter if the task fits, it doesn’t matter that it has killed you dead for the rest of the world. Sometimes there isn’t anyone else no matter how many others are hep to the jazz. It’s all you, or it’s your thieving relations, then a spate of strangers and institutions that you have every reason not to trust. Nobody asked me to step up, nobody wants me around. Someone better should be here, easing suffering and playing house. Days daisy chain into quicksilver years, everything you wanted or cared for is dashed to ruins, nothing ever gets better. After tomorrow, it’s today again. And again and again and again. The words go on unwanted— why should they be special? Just another habit in need of quitting. 

precious

Every day it’s the same old thing. Every day another world ends, bang or whimper, flood or fire. Old age or sickness, accident or intended end, wrong place wrong face wrong species— the gone gets going along. One day you have a life, the next day you’re done. Life is precious in the general, much less so in the specifics. Down to last acts and brass tacks, each little life doesn’t look so cute. Whether clear cut forests or feed lot heroes or unloved people, it’s slaughterhouse rules. Drop dead, there’s a chorus singing all the reasons you deserve it.

There’s not much to me these days, there never really was. I turn the pages, I work my beat, the days fly by with no one getting better. I get my mother up each morning, I put her to bed each night. Her dementia is all that’s getting stronger. Lately basic words elude her, things she used to care for, things she always knew while her body falls apart in drips and drabs. The slow senescence of her mother seems to have been among her inheritance, taciturn and stubborn as her world contracts down to a few rooms, digital books and the radio. We’re both on our third acts. After she passes, I’m all epilogue.

The years rush through me, the days make me spell it out. Live so long and learn so little, and make a mess of every breath and blessing that ever fell my way, only earning the indignities and the humiliations heaped upon me. I move through list and labor, grudgingly attending to my obligations as I dissolve into failing organs and bad faith. Hacking out these daily epitaphs as basic words elude me and my life contracts down to a few rooms and too many unruly animals. Whatever it was I wanted now moved from the improbable to the impossible. If only all this going didn’t take so long 

like water

The tall palm sways slightly in the near distance, leaving its brush marks in the wet gray sky in witness to the labors of the rain. The gutters rush and the puddles ripple, circles within circles, the surface a skin of impact and consequence. Drop after drop, rain falling in loosed pearls and unwoven rope. Rivers down the rooftops, streams down the drive. Cold enough to feel alive, old enough to know better, I cast off coils of breath and smoke, blessings to each direction, offerings up to generosity of the storm. Like stone I am deceptive in my stillness, like fire I am all bite and appetite. The rain takes the shapes it’s given, moving through the world like water. 

I’m not much for learning lessons. I’m no fan of the ephemeral. The world works its insides out, the world plays it close to the ghost. I wake up and climb the knotted words, eyes open to the inevitable remnants of the self. The skull a bowl, the brain a sponge, filled with sops and dollops spilling out into the day. Death a threat that doesn’t even mean it. The bones another Babel tower waiting to be something else. The tide of mind, sometimes playful, sometimes deadly. Sometimes it’s just another spell to hold my gaze in place as the self sheds its skin, a rainy day, a useless husk. Smoke staining tooth and lung, another fire with pinned wings, another legion moving on.

The last of the day comes in greens and grays, spring fresh and winter grim as the sky flows and dims. The rain graces the atmosphere, stirring pots and filling dishes, whispering secrets into the flesh of the earth. A drizzle of house finches spill to the ground, filling belly and gizzard before facing the cold, damp night. I sit and smoke, I sit and dream— I might as well be sleeping. Dozing in one uncertain skin or another, filling whatever vessel opens its eyes, turning naked and fearless in the depths of the ever shifting earth. The old songs wear the new songs, our voices the echoes of the singers before, ripples on the surface or shapes made from clouds. This story not a story but the shape of the landscape it takes and changes soft and slow. This name not a name but the sound of something said long ago without a soul in sight.

wishlist

You slip along a thousand paths, head stitched heavens, and hell scathed steps. The sticking of the constellations, the scripture of the stars, words braided through the chemistry and sigils leavening the blood. Heir to the endless explanations, antecedent to a few certain dooms. It started all over, it can end that way too. If you knew now what you knew then maybe you would have a friend. If I knew then what I know now I probably wouldn’t have stuck around. 

But here I am and there I go. Aching for the exorcism, bare handed and waiting for the bell. The night consumes what the light eludes, the feast of flesh and the prim pell-mell. Weighing in with your observation, changing the world with your gaze. The point of view or the velocity, the empty intersection and the blinking red. I need a map for all the memories, a meteor for every slippery wish. I slump over the screen with the door wide open. I fall asleep with the lights still on. It all adds up when your number is too. If you do the math you only know where you aren’t.

I wander through the misspent kisses. I linger on the never known. Breathless stares and bare intentions. These winters with only the keening and the palpable absence. These years thrown out into the yard with the dogs and bones. Counting down in half-lives and doomsdays, in answered wishes and brash commands. The cold wind reaches  through the window, the songs pay their respects. The ache remains in these small rooms and this lonesome bed. The ache remains out where the fire has burned out and the night makes declamations in unseen animals and slews of stars. All that is missed and all that was squandered. All that’s entailed in the changing of the tense.

the alibi

Oh how the stars do call to us. Oh how high us monkeys climbed. We till the fields, we stack the stones, there’s not one good thing we’ll leave alone. We learn to read the room, work our spells and prayers and lies towards that prize we keep eying, never obliged to watch where we’re going. We keep at the story, we dust the crowd with dreams, the words welling up until we believe it too. Watch the way the buzz words travel. Watch the thing everyone suddenly says. Half smart, half heart, we carry on without concern for consequences. We only worry about the alibi. 

It’s all about how you dress up the violence. It’s all about how you sell them theft. Put a badge or a crown or a title on them, put an unseen entity out there somewhere that somehow has their back. Blame it on the devil, blame it on Cain, blame it on their skin or tongue or the way they fit the frame. They will preach at you, they will pronounce your sentence, they will quantify your character before they cage you and steal your life. You get born wrong, and the sticks and stones you get complimentary with the words they use to find your fault. You get born wrong, they’ll beat you dead with their Bible belts.

So we live in the stacks of the fantastic, built brick by brick for ten thousand years, language a likely story full of silly rabbit tricks. So we couch our actions in explanations after the fact, this culture of con men and hucksters, this society of blown smoke and bullet wounds. Caveat emptor while they duck out the back door. We allow ourselves to be robbed and poisoned and cast into destitution while the built in criminals tell us from their avaricious hoards to work harder and go without. We are by far the dumbest animal, full of words and shit. 

glide

The sky grows soft as the lights go out. It lets go of the brazen flesh and blunt features, gives way to the stippled starlight and the legions of unseen wings. Spun from gossamer floss and chitin or sprouted from hollow bone and feather or stretched leather and fur, they fill the skies and crowd the lights. They sweep through eaves and tree crowns, giving heaven a taste of its own medicine. They buzz around lamps and ceilings, seeking the decoy moon or the trail of breath that leads to blood. They flit and flex and ride the icy winds. They glide outside of every sense but that of imagination. Even the simplest scenario comes rife with flight, wings astride the night.

We work our rackets, we walk our beats, we rush towards our hungers or pace beside our deferred appetites. We seek shelter, bolt the doors and shutter the windows of the roofs over our heads. Some warm bed or unbothered corner. Some set of comforts and whatever luxuries are allowed. We huddle with those we love or with them that’ll have us, if we have any luck at all. Is it so much to ask to rise above the too much that is asked? Ladened with burden after burden, can’t the night just let us be? We pray to the powers or mumble to our pets, yet our higher selves still stagger in the dirt. We die unnamed, forgotten beneath the weight of merciless tomorrows and the endless now. 

I grow old, and the machine starts to fail. Limbs wither as disease and decadence sap my strength, the somersaults into senescence built into the beast. The shoulders sag as the sadness gathers, heavy in the heart, stiff about the hinges. I shift and stir in my easy chair, I toss and tumble in my bed, a tuneless dirge where a singing soul should go. The old, self indulgent dreams have long since left me. The sheafs of possibility down to single slips and tattered scraps, destiny just another set of numbers. Feared and despised, I dig my unmarked grave day by day. I feel the earth, I watch the skies: my wounds will not close. What was I ever but the words of least resistance? What am I other than another empty husk, another wish for wings? 

got a million of em

People collect all sorts of things, shoes and cars and tchotchkes galore. Some collect people and experiences, harboring little prisons and checklists in their hungry little hearts. I harbor grudges, keep vintage grievances ready to infuriate me at the least recollection. That and the dust and moss that sedentary stones and slow broken husks are prone to. The illnesses are taking more of a toll each day, but they aren’t moving fast enough. Most people would do the world a service by blowing their brains out. Me, I ought to get paid to do it.

If the last year taught me anything, it’s to not trust anyone. Not anyone in public life, not anyone to do their job correctly, not anyone who goes out of their way to seek me out. The amount of people out there living in the thick of lies meant to conceal their poor behavior and extoll their facade, even to the point of self delusion is heartbreaking. And it’s particularly exhausting, between all the self actualizing horse shit and the pointless lying that people engage in with reckless inconsistency and no accountability to listen to any discourse. It’s all shitheels and fuckheads, with a few trash fires tossed in for the atmosphere. Me, I should have been dead for decades.

Rain took the day, the cold tied it off, and depression and diabetes cut it off at the knees. I only ever dig in deeper it seems. At best I just keep distracting myself, pretty sights and shiny things. At worst I delve into hard facts, the sort of truths that don’t do a body one damn bit of good. Another birthday coming up, and all I want that I can have is to not live long enough to see it. Nothing to look forward to, just poverty and piss buckets and living with people I would just as soon never see again. The attrition is all I can count on. It’s the sort of worse that keeps going once it gets started. The laughs just keep coming once the joke is you. Me, I got a million of em. Pray we never meet.

calculate

The day has gone from greens and golds to greens and grays, the rain retorts and the get away crows abound. The dark clouds grow darker as the sunset sets in, the clasp of shadows and the grasp of artificial light. The rumors trip from room to room until they idle by the door or slip in your windows, the only words they honor the ones that will take your place. It’s the lessons that they tally, it’s the numbers that they take, your flesh and bones and beating heart sums to calculate. The storm is held is the bowl of sky, spilling down upon our intransigent dreams. The storm reaches down, spilling blessings and rattling roofs. 

Know the rain by its gatherings, know the pieces by their placement. The tracks come and go, claw marks in the dust, footpads in the mud. The gray water pooling beneath a rubble pile cairn of brick and concrete and rusty rebar, the rain water turning a wheelbarrow into a birdbath, three crows flying north in the night. The cold air slowly holding hands, finger by finger, the icy ache ringing from wrists on out. The words accumulate as the night seals like a promised kiss. Who knows what sleepers it may awaken?

I am still before the immensity of the rising night. I am bathed in wan electric light, shoving small shadows through my mass. The bright of writing on this ersatz page, the whiteness spent luminesce to absorb the illusion of ink I partner with in this perception, blinds as it reveals. Garage doors clack and rumble, trash cans bounce up curb and driveway, taillights shine and signal as travelers cease their daily travails. I abide the ritual, food for any appetite that will have me. I endure the ritual, words wasted through and through. There’s just no being me, there’s just no knowing you. Just the stirring of the sleepers, the dogs going off down the block. Just the settling of wagers and the falling of the rain.

the attendant

Meet me in the antecedents, let’s seal our fates together. Strangers save to the ancestors, I’ve seen it all go up in smoke. We hold down the conflagration, we hold hands as the bridge we built between us burns, we hold the line as the line is swallowed whole. We’re not much, but we’re all that’s left of few good turns at the tables. We’re not much, but we’re what there is to show for the last bunch of runs around the sun. Meet me in the after glow, the indulgence of harbored half-lives. Let us gutter on the altar, let us fall fast upon the ending well. 

The clock is crawling towards midnight, the air full of estranged light and uncertain flesh. The insistent entity and the afflicted meat seated at the table of tomorrow, dissolving into dust and debt. The fleeting sovereigns and the shamble of the wounded animal. Here I come, with the songs on shuffle. There I go, scraping and scuffling through all these words and dirt. The freight train rattles through right on time, the storm I rode down due to make the rounds come morning. Another moment met with furtive fervor and deft intent, the attendant legions just waiting for a reason, just working on a rhyme. 

Memory is the broken mirror I shave with in the shower. Time is just one thing after another. There is no place left here for persuasion. It is just the patter of the arriving rain as it wakes you. It is the sounds of the storm against your window in the night. I still taste your salt and smoke, kisses left clinging to the skin of my life. I still see the sunlight on your shoulders, the almost offering of your throat. There may be dreams left to dream, places to go and things to be. There may something left of the oath sealed with your lips. Maybe there will be a tomorrow— I haven’t seen one yet. 

a lot of losing left to do

The day will come even to you, oh persons of destiny. The day will come too, oh you vessels of fate. The slip, the slide, the glide of all this rubble and soul will take its toll. It turns out you only rent the flesh, the eternal was on loan, you did okay considering you’re just the aftermath of a bunch of dumb explosions. The earth and the atmosphere have dibs, plus a little sheen of dust given up to the vagaries of the vacuum, as a goes around comes around sort of gratuity. Stardust to space grime, given space and time. The wages of sin are pretty much the going rate for any trade, endeavor, or vocation. It doesn’t exactly take the sting from all the murder and destruction, but at least the destroyers and the murders all get Ozymandiased and door nail deaded too. 

It isn’t a consolation, it’s a trick like cold reading or having interests. It can’t be fixed or helped, so many more gods never weaned or whelped. This flesh is all perils and pleasures, and this wind down, sudden or slow. The grade is gradual, the drop is deft, at once the was and the never more. Either we burn as we rise or catch fire as we fall, or plummet gloriously to the inevitable impact. We play telephone, try to pass the message on down the line, whispers to the ears from future selfs. We have our lore and our endless work arounds. Incense the same silk and thick perfume whatever deity it praises or cat box it smothers. Here we hold court and covet thrones, all pomp and power until the bones molder and snap, gone like that. 

Too often the old bones thrown all in to cover some long shot. Too often the empty hand for the honor held, the cost known and hoped against. The missed medicines and the mercurial moods, the freshened fractures and the rot bound wounds, the well earned beatings and duties to strangers all abide the price of flesh. The wreck is burning down and the cold is stretched from heel to star, the evening out adding up. Each day a piece goes missing, repairs and replacements dwindle down, the halo or horns ever more thorny than crown. Whether words or wants or childhood haunts, there’s a bunch of one ways worked in towards the end. However hard it is, however unbearable it’s been, you’ve got a lot of losing left to do.

asterisk

It’s something about the smoke, the slow unshaping of each breath. It’s something about the aperture never quite adjusted right. The light softly washing over skins and surfaces, the dark paying little heed. Another shift from hip to shoulder, another balancing of bads. I burn down here in the toss and turn, sleepless and astir. Another day like any other, staring at the ceiling. Another day like any other, now that the special is long gone.

These days it’s always nothing doing. These days are all past their use by dates. Day and night and nothing in between. The stars appear, the stars depart, comporting themselves by shine and constellation. No more blood, no more breath, just the bottles tossed into the ocean without messages tendered. Wide awake in the late anthropocene, deep into the slip away.

There’s always the words left unsaid. There’s always the way you wished you’d played it. The comebacks and the repartee, the questions left unanswered. Everybody turns out strangers, the dead don’t return your calls. Every record set an asterisk as the numbers all accumulate, the lies playing on repeat. What you were, what you wanted, just scribbles on an envelope. The self another shadow spilling down the wall. 

dream land

You separate the ashes from the embers. You sweep the shadows from side to side. The little room, the tiny light, the low growl from behind the wall. Moth wings and the accumulated crane flies battering the bare porch bulb. Time is a hanging tangle, taken for the weather and the cobwebs clinging to the eaves. Time is a fraying knot, the bind and the unwinding. Sleep is here, or near enough to there abouts. Sleep is here in the boots tromping around inside your skull. The clock in your phone, the clothes on your floor.

The night is long along about now. The moon has slipped her tail, the clot and stretch of star and cloud, the imagined impromptu somehow evasive and askew. Not the tune you had taken to as the night sped past the window all those years ago, the sea between the hills tangled in the freeway, the foam and thunder as the tide cudgeled the sprawling sharpened shores. Not the song you had learned when love first burned you and the magic let you down. Instead a separate melody swings and sways here at the end of days. The wind in the pines, your heart on the ropes. The immensity spent on engines and electronics, this strange turn of sand and skin, this map of the land without. 

Sometime later, you’re awake in the dark. You don’t remember the moment before, the dozing up to this awareness, the dreams you might have slipped. You are awake in the dark, and it feels like there’s a reason. The silence rings, the little light left on or slipping in pressed against edges and dimensions, the scene filling out between each breath. The sound of your breathing, that sense of somewhere other just outside your ken, the stranger lost behind your eyes a silence in your skin. Here you are, between the day and the dreaming. Here you are, far away and cleaving close. Your eyes are open wide, letting in anything that shines.

unfurled

The day weighs down upon the body, the stretch from stone to star. The time hones the old bones, brittle blade ever sharper, waning to want and direction. The wind dives and soars, the night advances spilling from the half shell sky, brushing up against the flesh whispering intimate wishes and prophecies of your imminent death. The eyes sigh as the light gives way, shadows both bug and feature as the evening lets its flag fly loose. It unfurls, all stars and planets and maybe a moon or two. I sit and smolder, and generally try to stay out of the way.

Mostly I stick to the script. Mostly because I’m writing it as I read the lines. I’m saying we’re sailing in the same boat, close to the cursor and drifting out to sea. Eyes wide as the lights come on, the mind a figment of time bunching up around the abrupt and obdurate, the arc of feedback the fuzz around the features. The melody the blowback of this insistent diving into the present tension. The instrument and the animal take their virtuoso turns, and the entity arrives. Mostly mouth and doesn’t mind, I follow the tide I provide. 

It’s in the way the world washes through me. It’s in the way smoke wanders away. We bleed away into the vastness of the firmament, we dissolve into dirt as we turn back into the earth. Eyes open as it all goes away, spin after spin, tumbling dice and dust to dust. I’ve spun out to the edges, every day a little further from, every day a new never. I am drained, I have dwindled, the words gone from take to ache. I am all smoke and smudge, gathering wool and spinning threads. All the light burned away, only the glow of this smolder and sputter as I gutter in the naked night. Only this altar of want and falter, clinging to these words that never were.

ex marks

It comes down to the differences, the map in mind versus the map in hand, where you put your you when you aren’t here. It comes down to the numbers that comes slopping out your mouth. You say the prayers that suit you, you ring around the rosies. You spend your starlight on weighted constellations, your stories the dancing shadows tossed from the crackling fire of your life. A day misfired, the hawk at your window gazing back at the wrong sets of eyes. Your tattletale heart staying true whichever you you pull. Root to crown your glorious gown, all crocodile tears and alligator grins, your stride the shape of heaven falling down. 

We are always traveling, changing shapes and taking on skins, shoving our way from train to crowded train. We are the roads we ride, the company that jostles and elbows us about, the something in the air we keep passing around through blood and belly. The particles we shed with every step and breath, the world that passes through our teeth. I trail smoke, agitate the air around me, feed the early bird mosquitoes. I sit in conspicuous disarray, as the neighborhood takes its turn. I sit in ugly introspection as the world gets out all its screams and whispers. Here I go, leaking dull abstractions where a real live animal once happened. Here I go, marking another where with words.

Look, if I ever had a purpose, I most likely served it. If there was a use for me someone would have found it by now. It’s not that complicated. I’m largely point and shoot, mostly plug and play. The days dissolve as I try to touch them, the path crumbles with every aching step. Not even snips and snails, I am sharps and sighs and unspoken goodbyes. I am the sputter of the ancient engine, the flag twilight unfurls. The entity aimed one way, the animal trapped the other. Not an ex, but an exclamation point, saying  “you are here.”

ashes in my lap

The heart waits by the open window. The heart is an unfurnished room. Ashes on the nightstand, smoke idling towards the lonely lamp. The hands shift from foot to foot, uneasy with the devil’s work. The songs skimmed straight from the streaming, electricity busy in wires and in bulbs. Art and the unseen tiger, cosmic calendars and hand mixed metaphors, cobwebs dust and ash. Always plenty of flames and irons, though there’s seldom a candle lit. Always something getting going on with the being gone. 

I’m smoking by the gusty window, just below the black clip lamp. I’m pressed breathless between the pages of the book of days, something in the signal, something from the circuit. It’s in the charge I carry. It’s in the spark I pass. The days reckoned in fragments and fanfare, the placement of the artifacts, your picture in a frame. This place of speaking while I hold my tongue, the words curled up with the ashes in my lap. I’ve said it a thousand times, what’s another thousand more? This direction aligned with my intention, this daily indulgence kept at the back of my breath. 

There’s always some stranger in need of aid. There’s always some neighbor in distress. The dogs raising hell at some sufferer in the dark, the raging at the gate, wading in to break the ruckus and see what can be done. The lost, the maimed, the stragglers from some curbside campaigns all come looking for relief. You keep doing what you can even though you can never do enough. I’m all spilled words and timeworn routines, shtick and deep magic, circus skills and glib mystery. Smoking as the light leaks out, working at the language, always in some losing battle to hold the line. 

the answer

The sun burns on despite the gathered clouds and the angle of the incline. We orbit and we spin and act like we did something. We hurl these words like joke shop smoke bombs for cover as we flee. Our hurts and hungers flung wildly around us, trade in blame by the say so, as we fall frame by frame. Here to move the matter around, we still have to mouth off about it. Here to seed the future, we cling to ancient alibis and fables long gone to dust. We fall east and see the sun disappearing into the west. Things are even upside down in our eyes. Who would even ask us, knowing what we’re like? 

I miss most everything. I likely wouldn’t even look unless it was a ruckus being raised. If I read it, I’m probably sorry I did. I watch what I watch, the focus also a filter. The small worlds dying all around us. The mistaking of words for work. The moments lost to smoke, the moments granted by it. Breathing is burning, being is burning, alive and your fuse lit. It’s happening all at once, and you’ll never keep a clue you catch. Tires squeal, engines rumble, the calico queen of the night jumps from a pine bough to the roof. The crows call assembly, sharp tongued echoes across the dimming sky. The rise of sudden sparrows. The silence clinging to their wake.

The path you took becomes dead ended. The story arc well past the denouement, the ensemble either fair welled or planted in the ground, shadows falling like ripe fruit all around. I don’t know where it hurts, but I hope something kisses it better. I don’t know what wounds stayed open, but you find whatever’s good for what ails you. More and more it is to ease the endings. More and more it is hold the line. The hard times are fast upon us. It’s the open stance and the offered hand, help however it goes. More smoke and symbols for the deepening night.

lookout

It’s the sort of sunset that gets the bones to mumbling. It’s the sort of twilight that unhinges the jaws of the heart. Who knows who’s listening, who knows what’ll finally be enough to choke on? The day goes from show to tell, the uncanny and the ne’er do well slowly assemble their infernal internals, they take their trade in specie and in flesh. The body sings its same old song, missing meals and kisses, counting stars by the way they fall. The hunger takes it by the hinges, the heart all sweep and swallow. The horizon glows at the sovereigns passing, waiting for the night to take the helm. 

It’s built into the machinery, it’s written into the routine. I ante up even if I’m not playing the hand. I’m the best there is at what I do, but what I do isn’t much. I’m the best there is at what I do, but I’m even better at what I don’t. I sit as still as the local physics allow. I sit lookout through the changing of the guard. I keep the fire burning in my blood, I keep the ashtrays full. The work to the wheel to go with the motion. The work to the words to slip the reins. The world squandering light as the gloaming leaves its last.

The words turn over, soil to the spade. It’s not a lot of work, but it’s always shovel ready. Mostly it’s where I put my empty. It’s a place to go when the lonesome takes hold hard. All these years and roads lost in this senescent husk, nothing but the mumbling of old bones, grit and grease and little release. So you feel your way through fit and fever, shorn of blood and skin, all wings and will and sin. These caperings and incantations, all whispers awaiting flesh. The world turns terminal, these voices in the speechless dark waiting for someone to breathe.