lift high the light

The day grows old and the gray sets in, the chains of rain and the overcast ocean. I grow old in dull, unwanted moments and phases of the moon. All roads lead to the gallows, all gods are devils in the end. Alibis and excuses to free the beast locked in your heart. Sophistry grinning from your idiot smile, teeth bared in confession of your many ugly sins. You can settle who with a bullet, you can settle up with a blade. Paint the walls with your brains, let your blood pool around your corpse. I will not pass your way again.

This is the life leavened with lies and ergot, the mad ramblings of the chapel, the base deceptions of the church. Cops and kings and creepy little priests gather their legions to hunt and hang the truth. They bleat and bray and pray away, coveting the sun and cowering in the night. They preach and claim while the wind and the rain wash away their clumps of verbiage with the rest of the shit in the gutters, insulted and afraid because you tell them no. If a book or a flag or mad mythic devourer gives them license, revoke their right with a clout or some further fustigation. The only laws their are are those that are inviolable. All the rest is etiquette.

I’m mostly glad to play along if it doesn’t cost me anything. I’m mostly glad to stay my hand unless the evil is unabashed. I can’t be true if I follow dissemblers and deceivers. I can’t be free through the oppression of others. Don’t heap your idiot oil wars upon my shoulders, don’t kill children and tell me it’s for my good. I know death and I know fear, dragged through the world by the four horsemen, broken and tattered and unrepentant still. I’ve nailed them to trees in the depths of the forest, loosed their mounts and burned their tack upon lost altars beneath the scattered stars. A heart full of love and murder, and a juggler’s hands in the midst of the slaughter. All blessings and blood warm.  A lonesome animal only beholden to the moon.

wanted

Again the winds grow cold, again night falls fast. The window open, the lights left off, the day does like it’s going to do. There’s no one loved, there’s no one true. The proselytizing and the platitudes play on, the kingdom of heaven and all these Candide knock offs. You can’t throw a stone without hitting some idiot who knows the secrets of the cosmos. It’s a word problem, language another sort of plumage, tail feathers shaken to impress or misdirect. We can’t help but lie. We set out to spread deceit so long ago, everything is destiny now. Ask no questions, the lying won’t even miss a step.

I keep it up, though no one asked me too. I keep it up even though I can’t get it up anymore. Empty words for every empty page. Empty actions from an empty husk, biding time until counted out. Holding down this fort of dementia and despair where every offer of assistance is yet another bag of wind. All the reasons not to are for everyone else’s benefit. I’m living all the reasons I should be dead and gone.

There’s a first time for everything. There’s bound to be a last, even if it seems like it’s taking forever. Fragile nazis run the streets with impunity, murdering children and getting medals. Rich fuckers make the earth their shithole while sucking Mammon’s cock. People have confused costumes with character, ever sold a bill of goods wrapped in flags and founders and other grist for the grifters. I know I’m worthless because I’m still here emptying piss buckets when I ought to be emptying magazines. I know I’m a coward because I’m still around to write this shit. 54 years on this earth as me are about 55 too many. 

low

Eyes closed, you listen closely to the music ricochets and rebounds off the dim lit walls. Eyes closed, you hear the notes and the ringing of the lights. It’s this narrow walkway, it’s this lifetime of electricity and earth. The places where the spiders gather, the windowsill littered with drowsy flies. The creeping flesh, the assembling dust, the weary years singing out through the joinery and the joists. The clinking of chain and gate and flagpole hoist. The cool wind turning old bones cold. This skin a succession of whim and wound, wrapped around this sickness, swaddled in indifference. The dull ache dug in below the heart, lamp lit and radiating pall and pain.

Strange to be where the day has gone. Strange to bear the brunt of nightfall and all those generations of sin. The song dies down and the rats gnaw and skitter. You shift your stance to the crack of back and bone. Useless to the past and helpless before tomorrow, this sorrow sounds out, a midnight chime of another time. Feeble flesh and second hand words, the burning bush and a handful of bird. The heavy door bolted despite the crack down the center. The wood distressed by some uninvited ingress, the huff and puff perhaps at last enough. Would that there was a wolf waiting. Would that the words could stay.

Maybe this night will be enough. Maybe the meter will finally turn over. It feels like sorrow, it feels like sinking, it feels like the surrender is finally setting in. Staring at a screen, staring at the ceiling, staring at some memory that all but tears me in half. A remainder of a remainder, the dredges and the dregs. As worthless as any treasure buried, as worthless as gold laden galleons sunken to the bottom of the sea. This soul the color of pavement, this soul as nimble as a brick. A small bird dead at the foothills of heaven. Broken wings and pierced breast the foundation of this sorry faith, every temple at its best when it’s burned to the ground.

earth tones

All at once it was raining, slow and steady like it was racing a rabbit. Just like that, though the forecast had said Sunday. There’s no accounting for the future— it’s never where you put it and by the time it gets there, it’s gone. You can watch the horizon. You can hold the high ground. Maybe then you’ll see it coming. Maybe then you’ll finally get it right.

From Terpsichore to petrichor, from the mysteries at the borderline to the hollow at the core, we move from motion to sense to nevermore. The music and the misdirect, the pleasant presentation and the ever present past, we fumble through the repetitions. We mumble under the chorus, grim or giddy beneath the irredeemable themes. This one, that one, and the dumb recitations of what god knows best. We dance in precious reverence, rewarded only by chance and guile. Tomorrow never knows because it isn’t ever there.

I am adrift amid the skin of all things, all this matter that doesn’t matter to anyone but me. These stray cats and hidden stars, the vacant heart beneath the scooped out moon. Hoisted by my own petard though I didn’t even know what one was or that I had one, done in by dribs and drabs. That old voodoo that you do taken in heaps though a little dab’ll do. There are fields out past the fields, mountains behind the mountains beside the sea. Counting down the exits by the number, the headlights only showing where you go. The rain that falls, the rain that’s missed. The sky the only soul I know. The falling rain the last likely kiss.

drafting

The day is bright and wild with bluster, a turkey vulture ascends a gust in that Christ on the cross affect, wings in a wide open embrace as it rises. The vulture slips and turns, surfing upon the rush towards balance, the rollick and the effortless glide. The sky is always an act of faith, the sky is a science sliding by. Something to look at once the sights grow sparse, somewhere to set the eyes that isn’t here. Life lingers and life leaves, our stories eventually turning for the worse. The least we can do is have something to see when we look away.

So go the tousled clouds and the goodbye blues, the stir and rush of the atmosphere as the sky keeps singing, the spatter of shadows and the long last drag of the sun. The winter wheat gone to seed swaying in the unkempt yard, the steady roll of a pedestrian across the windswept street, transfixed by his screen and his stride. The green tide of treetops and leaf hungry for sunshine constantly wave and whisper, the ever present shush of their susurrations a feral tongue of restless elements and the spirit before the word. The ever present evidence of our irrelevance testifying to our every sense. 

It is the tenure of this senescence, the return unto dust. The mind makes alibis weighing in on the indignities while the body knows the lowdown. The cheap talk comes too dear for the heart, the witness settled uneasy in the husk. What of the wind while the bones warn of the impending end, what of the night while the flesh frays and flecks, these assertions of agency and alarm that hold no charms against the inevitable tide. Moving through and moved through, the one shared breath at the pinnacle of the precipice, the self both steam and sediment. All at once, a hummingbird appears, hovering within arm’s reach. Centered for seconds within a tumbling roil of gnats, it feeds. The no one home in the head or the heart rides the sight, drafting behind the tiny blur of wings and will as it bullets off into the rising night. 

woe

The speed of light, the thick of dust, and heaven always on the run. This day, the next, the taste of blood and cinders. The folly of the words, the swindle of the soul, belly sick and heart broke and the on and on and on. The blank page drizzled with pigment and sickness, the thought experiment painting the walls. Touch fades, sight blurs, everything louder and louder and getting harder to hear. Hard to here, hard to there, the dismal automaton sputters and drones. The same ignored prayer every day with no end in sight.

A lopsided skull, a mouthful of mismatched teeth, body broken and riddled with disfunction. Knots in the lungs and the breathing is missing pieces. The sharp and dull sharing passage in a rundown brain, thinking in bullets and nooses and the mass of a train in motion. This flea bit carcass, this rotten husk, and the lashings of mockery and contempt in every last frame. Words sloshing around in buckets, words staining the floor, spilling endless lies. The nothing to see here more and more. 

There’s no one to talk to. There’s nothing to say. Another entry in the litany of dissolution, the dissembling of the everyday, the distortions of the extraordinary. The washed out stars and the muttering, murdered earth. The moonlit ocean dotted with the ascension of jellies and the glittering of message bottles bobbing aimlessly away. Garbage people building a trash heap world as our time runs out. Awful writers tapping away at more ugly, useless words. It is written, it is written.

tangible

It’s there in the clutter, dust and thoughts and unsettled books, memento and fetish and the foolish all but forgotten. The surface tension of this fixed focus, the tangle of mind and meaning, this restless sieve of ash and ember. Maybe it’s somewhere in a notebook from twenty years ago, maybe it’s in the marginalia where there used to be receipts. The same books and boxes dragged down the decades, the slow circle and the latest last tango. Like going downstairs into my grandparents’ basement, the narrow decent into darkness, something waiting for me leaving with a flick of a switch. Not the root beer waiting in cold brown bottles, not the sense of something rushing in the skin of the shadows, but knowing now I was watching me from that darkness. The tear in all the time between us, the same stirring as the notion unfolds.

Absently I lick my lips, back in the dry wind and old bones. The travel more a stitch in something than a sojourn, a hole closed between breath and being, a circuit at last set. The ragged clothes, the tattered flesh, this knot of consequence and conceit. The song I get to singing the song I always hear depending on the vacancies. It’s a one way road but you live in all directions. Ripped along the resonance and humming from the hollow, the husk always the sound of the wind and ocean, a chorus of animals between the sky and the shore. Aching to the bone, hungry for anything but what’s on my plate, the vivid green tousled by the ceaseless breeze. The taste of smoke and salt, a sea of senses in every descent.

I count the dead in funerals I never attended, I count the dead in the graves I’ve never seen. A few surprises and bolts from the blue, but mostly the stumble into the word that gets around or the startle of planning a visit. The neglected friendships that passed their expiration dates and the loves gone like the letters they burned, the people in the past tense and the ones that put me there. Old and broke and sick as you’d expect, holding onto the architecture and the archetype, belly both ache and pain. I do nothing but dissolve into earth and atmosphere, and I do it every day. Words that drizzle through the wounds in the world we make into our own. A trail of smoke left on the shelf, a direction sealed in traveling light.

bug out

We should have agreed on a signal, a safe word phrase or a tug of an ear. We should have hid a key somewhere under a rock, had a meet up plan and an exit strategy. Instead we wandered the world as idle words and ugly appetites, breaking paths like kindling sticks, burning bridges like it was fire season. Our skies were alway stuck in some walleyed light, our hearts the box the empty came in. Parking lots strewn with tumbleweeds of loose refuse, paper cups and plastic bags, the cracks and potholes of our clumsy discourse. Lunch abutting the cul de sac, the debris of the deadbeat and the alacrity of the day tripper. Nothing about when the lights go out and the world is burning. No words, no map, no anxious bag by the door. 

The wind comes along just to move the plot along, taken up the cause, cleaning off the stage. The puffed cheeks of a cartoon cloud heavy lidded and deadly behind your eyes. The scratched out sigil and the improvised prayer, the sway of leaf laden limbs, greens going gold in the leaving light. The default on the flesh gone to cold, slow and sorry beneath the ruins of another graceless day. The sun drags on, going on gone, the tipped hat horizon and the slippery halo. Stilled as all is leaving, only the heart sticks to stepping. 

I wait outside as the light fades out. I sit and smoke, watching passing traffic and precious time. The earth tumbles and the heavens buck, atmosphere and scenery stitched into every sense. The wind on bare skin, the stone beneath the tongue. This distance swept with black wing and smudged skulls, the threadbare incantations still caught in the air, the intentions showing bone. The pages gone the moment the seal is broken, blood and breath spent for the hungers of shades. The light climbs higher as the land lays low. The winds are on the rise, the customs are in flux. The trees all sway and shine now that the age of words is over.

fixed pin

The day is just like that, the crush of dawn, the bird revival. The day is just that way, nothing to gain, nothing to swear. Morning comes to everyone that’s still around to lump it. The day just wastes the time away, the stretch of the sky, the ache of the earth. One dizzy rush to the next, ecstasy and perdition and all the bandwidths in between and out beyond. The foundation to the firmament plus all the fixings and untold munitions. The ache unto, the ache undone, the habit of the aperture. The fixed pin and the dance of shadows.

There’s little comfort down here in the flesh and bone. There’s no way to sate the shades, entangled in the never never. The ghosts stick to your ribs, the ghosts rattle around in your head. The ruin of every realm at once, the rudder of the belly, the rumbling of the guts. Sweets and meats and pretty frippery, all the hell you can hold. The words can go either way. They can rush to the rescue, or they can leave you at the moment you need them the most. They are the wings as the follow the wind. Just ask the sky, see how long the answer lasts.

I’m a prison of my own design, built of goldbricks and thermodynamics, the consequences of all this undue ordinance. I’m a one-off that would’ve been better as a one less. Every death littered hill, every sticking point held until it bled out, every coin toss called wrong. I learned from the wrong parts, the gallows punchlines, the forgotten technologies found sleeping in the soil. Left with the seepage of the civilization, the words and the debris, always somehow wandering a wilderness. The day that comes no matter how hard the night tries. The blood and the breathing, the blind spot that is always in my skin. 

potential

You say goodbye to the messianic sky, the bygone blues, the gray and laden clouds. You say goodbye to the books and baubles of the shelf. Rifle through the boxes, turn every pocket inside out, put aside the labors you owe to ghosts as you wander these avenues of the labyrinth. No one answer will ever do. Every traveler down the same shared path has a journey all their own. You lean against a pillar. You sit upon the bricks. There goes the scrub jay, there goes the crow, all these inseparable alones. The green anointing every crown, the roiling at the roots. 

Heaven in the grip of blue, sunlight slathering the opportunistic greens, grim and ebullient in the same smoking skin. Two or three beasts to feed in the deep belly, tricky wishes and fiddle fights, skull stuck schemes become breath and bone in the knucklehead domains. Some fief lord or haughty daimyo, some weird claimant to one realm or another, the monkey always ready to show its ass. Reading the crowd sourced world with the gaffed hierarchy of us angst ridden apes. Everything happening all at once, somehow always ending up about us.

The words strung around the tree, the palpable anticipation of that forever imminent eminence, the allied appetites and that tragically eager urge towards the precipice of yes, ands. We pass the sacred phrases back and forth, sewing the saying into the say so, at once sacred offerings and melodramatic grifts. So we sing and serve the thick of matter, the dreaming we drift through, the passing of the visible spectra on a soap bubble’s surface. I smoke and grumble, the bardo between the ruins and the dust. Another fuse lit to spark and fizzle. The trees as green as I can see, the earth speaking in everything.

subtle

This is the history of the entity. This is the story of the smoke. Aglow in the ambient and the albedo, from the shine to the surface, from the ember the ash. Time is another thread of the essence, all double stitched through our dimensions, the resonant vibrations of our shaky seeming selfs. I speak aloud in idle hands and dirty work, in the rattle of trash bins and the sound of glass that’s had it, in these scintillations of ephemera that brush against your skin. Half bled out half exasperation this press of held tongue and sealed lips, the assembly of sticks and dashes into the affinity of a kiss. The flame and the carried torch.

It’s in the way the night encroaches, the porch light orange and the screen door silhouettes, the sway of shadows and the business of the dark. The street sounding out and the gutters cluttered with sticks and stones, the jet engines overheard and the lowdown of the all alone. I ache and sway, and stumble over my own too certain stride, I gleam and glide and always find the right crossroads to collide. The sound of darkened steps and lights left burning, a tale of windows lit and unlit. The stare and the implication, the chair and the television, parked cars and proximity lights. The body global, the ghost local, the mystery a lot of crossed wires and mixed signals.

Here we are with the music playing. Here we are with the lights down low. This moment and it’s reception. The translation from room to room and flesh to flesh, the combo racing up the scales teasing out the melody while calling out the beast. This flicker of tongue and lip, a dry breath, the sound of an engine idling. Silky smoke and weathered flesh, the skull and sinus toned voice as I sing along, the fit and the features and the endless fusillade. These are the words I strung and strummed, animal and entity, lonesome and lust thick and ringing into the ether. This is the reaching beyond the touch, the intimacy of transmission, the propriety of the switch. The things I say when you read me. 

shuffle

The day is slowly sinking into the strata, the bashful blue sky soaking up the sun, spring tumbling head over heels from root to shoot. Something for the shine, something for the smolder, something for the memory of the match. From scorched fingers from playing with fire to the cold bones dragged through the depths of the atmosphere, this form rings with songs and ghosts. From scrub jay pretending in the pine to the tobacco drawl drowsing beneath the smoke on my tongue, the day sparks and strays. Old earbuds plugged into my phone, I give in to the sophistries of the mechanism and let the daemon stack the deck. Song after song going through the motions. The illusion of movement by changing up the tempo. The mood leaning hard on the gaffed stack and gleaned blood.

The music sets off reveries and memories and strange montages, rented momentum to call through the core, breaks and bends in the signal sent straight through the flesh. The tune occludes the moment, raising revenants and herding ghosts, picking notes and pressing chords here in the meat and bone. The song a hoarded moment and a renaissance, old and new and probably something blue, the world taking some strange shapes where the spirit bunches up. This sieve of blood and happenstance and the husk of the tongue. The trick within the algorithm, the busy architecture giving form to the slipping, the bouquet of selves gathered by the old song and dance. 

Days turn into decades, the search becomes the story, motive just another slab holding down your grave. Our small doings, our faded names, these gardens of memory and stone. The seasons blur and the fires fade, a memento trailing flesh and words, the one and done or the slow dissolve from agent to object. The flourish and the riffle, the palm and the pass. The choosing is always a force or a gaffe. You do a little shimmy, you throw a slide in, maybe show some leg with that shake. Here deep in the dwindle all we do is dance. Parts and pieces, the hollows of the passage through form and feel, the light left on so we don’t miss a trick. It all goes wrong. Caught in the tempo of the tide, we flicker as we fade. Someone else comes along until every turn is taken. 

glimmer

Two in the morning it’s all train wails and tv light, the movie moon so full and spooky, the simple spell of black and white. The room a dance of shadows, the only sound the recitations of the dead. All the time and what it takes right there with you in the wide awake. A turning of the pillow, a shifting of the bones. The ceiling always swimming, the window given to gossip. Night after night, the switch and the light.

You drift around the details, you float around the plot. The things you said to the ones you love, worn razor thin in the replay, unmitigatedly cruel and serpent’s tooth sharp awake in the dark parts of your heart. The things you always hear, the things you’ve always known, pacing the floor across the ceiling. The dialogue drifts in and out, something in the story too close for comfort, a line left hanging. The words alone, and the word alone, and somehow everything is said. 

It isn’t always train wails, it isn’t only two. The clock doesn’t care what time it is. The clock doesn’t care about the looming alarm. I wake from dreams full of friends and strangers, walking around nonexistent streets, traveling with the dead. I wake from dreams so fragile that they escape recollection. Only some mote almost coming into focus. Only the glimmer of something that was almost, the ache unto the isn’t. Waking in the dead dark quiet or to the riotous reports of the dogs. I wake as the same disappointment, the same emptied vessel in the nation of dreams denied.

grin

I’m not by nature a smiler. I generally haven’t got any teeth in the game. I take a bite of every line, take my taste of every declamation and utterance, right out of the horse’s mouth. These days it’s all declarative toothaches and the gaps where teeth used to be. Force is an honest player, it knows all its lines, it knows its motive from cause to consequence. As in the vagaries of bone, teeth always have a story to tell. Time and collisions and where the blunt force shows. The gaunt affect and the skull sharp grin. The show gone on from where the world got in. 

Time goes by and it’s counted in seasons, time goes by counted in reaching greens. It passes in life and limb, it passes in ashes drifting toward the dirt. But injury and infirmity are the architects that we build our history around. Fistfights and split lip tooth spit smiles and the stubborn insistence of tooth and bone. One thing then another, then you can’t whistle or spit right. Damage done and grim gutter medicine. The old black magic takes its cut, down to the glisten and the splinters. Down to the gristle and the grease. 

We remain as testimony. We remain as evidence. The curve of the cursor, the inevitability of yet another line, the vessel is cracked and it overflows. I speak as if my story isn’t only the sound of my symptoms, the wheeze and unintended sibilance, the stagger implicit in my stance. I speak as if the words were work, as if the saying makes it so. The earth slips east as the sun makes its excuses, crow for crow and star for star. A long ago played horn sounds out above the traffic and the caws. Breathing down the sky into this small cacophony, lit bloom and stolid bone. The flesh blessed and sublime, curling along the reason and the reach. A word spoken close, showing teeth.

reconnoiter

There’s the angle and the aperture, and all the lofty rhetoric. There’s the stone angels giving you the signal. The miracle has come and gone, with only the stories ever staying. Now there’s chords and notes, scapegoats and golden throats, the landscape of the revelation. Coils of smoke and sawed through rope and the cobwebs in the corners. The window always open, the atmosphere always getting in. 

The waking keeps claiming me, some signaled stress, some set alarm. A dog down the block, the cat on the roof. The wings loosed at once, driven like eyes to seek the sky. The day after day exasperation of the expected, counting by calendar and constellation, the empty receptacle and the sliver of the morning moon. The dreams that need me interrupted by the world that doesn’t. 

The sun comes out and sets the scene. The winds repeat their hastened chastenings. The animal is stricken with some sickness, an uneasy quease about the seams. The entity takes it personally and accounts for the curses, patterns always there for the picking once the seeing gets stuck. Look around, the angels say, somebody moved the rock. Look around, the angels go, the ghost is on the lam. Here I go, the skin of the witness as the angels say come see.

rubes across the rubicon

We arrive between cataclysms, at the gracious side of great devourings, and just like that we become the dreaming. Beneath another too soon blue and the fresh breathing green, the restless belly and the road of life. We run our mouths and our learned routes until we have to rest our heads, something to serve as shelter, the respite of dreams and some pleasure if we’re lucky. Strewn about, concussed and useless in the service of ghosts, a few shovel ready from intent to entity. We’re told it all adds up to something, god knows think nothing of it.

The sun speak to the skin, the cold whispers to the bone. We are lost and found, pursued and followed and left alone, dashed and ragged and a sight to see. Golden amid the worlds great fortunes, stubborn beneath the debris fields and the collateral madness. The map and the moment, the ache of our trajectory, the mass of these fleeting impacts. Biographies and betting slips and every giddy conceit and horrible onslaught ever. Every day evens out. Each night adds more. 

It is close to 7pm on an April afternoon. I sit, a tangle of aches and appetites, feeling the sharp of the smoke and the chill in the air. Cigar sitting to the front of the senses, eyes poised tight towards the periphery, longing in alignment with the lay of the land. This idle here in the teeter of blood and breath, this sediment of collision and sentiment, this season of being the uncoiling of the burn. We gather our forces of one side or the other, follow the tides of flags and famine across the rubicon. Every day it’s the same old thing. 

or bust

Deep in the black dog bandwidth, smoke and wind and the way they placed the gravity heavily laden upon my frame and grace. I hang my head, watching the flight plans of porch flies adjust their geometries, some shared frequency there in the calculations. Lawn mowers sound out above the rush of the air and all the shared genres of song, bass line thump and weed whacker whine sandwiching the stray octaves. Nowhere to go and I long to be gone. Welcome nowhere now that there’s nothing I can be but me.

Impatient amid the scintillations, I still until I stray from the cooling winds and swaying tree limbs, the mind always ready to buck the harness and head for the fences. The bones report their same complaints, the sky comes falling down, but memory and the moment never stop tussling away. It’s the same old boards, the same backdrops, the seaside docks and cityscapes in calm suspension up the fly gallery. The same old hack hamming it up on script and off, the terminal condition of this spent discourse. Selling the same sad fruit and trampled flowers, the sign at the intersection held by some ragged figure asking too much. 

I don’t often know what I know, but I typically do what I do. I tack something stable once I figure out its axis, I like to know when to stir up the dust or to shuffle off to Buffalo. I am down to spare parts and dark arts, spending tomorrows and spinning gears to move the carcass from collapse to collapse. I fill the cups, I break the chains, I wake up to the same boulder waiting at the bottom the same hill. We top off the clockwork and spend the rest on frippery and magic spells, and prayers to faithless gods. Going nowhere except back to the B-side. Tomorrow or bust. 

duende

It’s still a little ways from sundown. It’s still the wind and the dashing smoke. Houses papered with pressed leaf shadows, the sun still kissing the swaying trees, the green reaches of the dreaming earth holding down the ground. There is a chill beneath these eaves, there is a cold grown of the lonesomeness between blood and bone, the haunted feeling of a fire burning low. The direction of the gaze away, always seeing while trying not to look. The light always rising as it goes.

It doesn’t matter, but I keep saying it. Like a line from a play that was all but forgotten, like a spell drawn out so long it lands like a nursery rhyme, the sort of skip rope incantation that knows how it goes. Like the words of a song unheard so long, your own voice startles as you sing them. Not so much a name as a call to arms, the stretch of letters, a sudden spark in the air. Not so much a name as the antecedent of all that remains. The streak burnt into vision, the seeing that got stuck inside my eyes, the stumble and the fall. The days go on, the lights go out, I only smoke and speak.

I never learned to shut my mouth. I have yet to reach an age that I know how to act. I still take it to the pavement, I never remember to tap out. Cool winds and cold fingers, eyes as exed out as a cartoon corpse, the world seeps right through me. Fleshless skeleton or aquarium diver, I am the shedding of the vessel and the wailing of the form. This relentless lament as that fixed star blazes through my brain. I sing out from root to crown, I sing from stone to star. The only heart I have ever had, the only poetry I know.

little pitchers

This one starts with the needle on empty. This one ends in bottles and brass. The long odd Sunday, the stricken god back again, eggs and rabbits and other time honored habits strewn about. All the roads weary from the wandering, all the bones speaking in the past tense, the blood always circling back to the prophecies. The soundness of the defeat, the crack clean through the being, the firmament crashing down to the foundation. Gravity a gavel and law gossip, curses on the wing and little pitchers everywhere.

The pavement and the asphalt and the folly that is flesh. The light that clings long, the light that hangs low. Something in the script, something at an intersection, the oblivion as we read our dooms aloud. They come at you with their crowd sourced magics, they come swinging with hired guns and singular assassins, they come calling with bright eyed beauties and slick talk and bricks of cash. Unless you begin from broken, they’ll stop you in your tracks. Unless you stay indistinguishable and insignificant, they will give you your name.

There are days I remember remembering. I remember the stories and the faces I made. Sometimes I add introduction and preamble, sometimes I wave my hand as if revealing the epilogue. A wistfulness about the eye, a furrowing of the brow. Music playing in the room, voices coming through the walls. Shapes moving outside the window, shadows stirring on the ceiling. Every word frighteningly alive, every target moving, we are skin and scar always just arriving. The weight of the ache carried down the days, living the only way to know you lost. Broken glass and spent shells, another record book number. 

cornered

The night right here in self selected fragments and ritual forms, smoke and the vagaries of sleeping screens. A light on the ceiling, shadows refusing shape dancing around the room, music swelling because it always means so much. A swallow of cool water, the cleansing of the palate. The inked in instances and the cornered ghosts, painting in wrong names and guessed at numbers, instruments all hands up high reaching for the decrescendo. The sky still has to be torn down by hand. The night cools to the curation, as constant as any guiding star.

The scales tilt, the spin goes askew, the night takes its time and takes it personal. The magic rides the rolla bolla, it likes to add a hiccup or two, skips rope in rolling bones and turning tides. The room is read in blue bias light and knotted smoke, drummed blood and the vacancy held tight. It’s a card trick, but the sort you have to deal yourself. Shuffle up and deal your favored spread. With you like the words are with you, through you like the world as it moves. I tap away and the rest occurs. The night is always occupied.

It doesn’t take much to fill these shoes, a little grease and gristle, a little bone to pin down the heels. It doesn’t take much to end it all once the physics is figured in. This drag of breath, this staggered heart, the sorries and so it goes. The whims and wants of the inevitable desolation, this playing the board to the tooth and nail, the stir of the antecedents counting all the way down. Empty arms and wolf sized eyes, come to cases there you are, flesh and blood on either side of the appetite. We were always way past words. 

out of line

The spell of the sparrow hawk is written in bend and break against the skin of the wind. The workings of the elder craft upon the manifest, all soft for sharpness, all speed for strength. The deft misdirect of the evasion, the brief survey of the scene as the next crime is calculated, the stitching of the seams and the singing of the world. The raptor’s unyielding gaze meeting my mind in my eyes, the old inklings, scripture and the central shtick. It reads my thoughts as I get a couple of snaps off, born three steps ahead of my ilk. Feeding stray gods and spirits like feeding strays and squirrels and birds. The opening of the offering, the parable of the sower meets the plow as the worm, a reminder that most hungers are not limited to the belly. The feast always exceeds the table, consequence moves in ripples rather than lines. The dive a miss and a lesson, life itself an appetite.

Thus the tangle of intentions, the spinning wheel and the turning earth. Thus the stricken out line and the sky flush with crows. The songbird medley and the stir of dogs, dust kicked up and teeth flashed, gnashing at the vacated space. Something lifted from the notation of hawk wing and wind, the shifting sigils of buoyancy and lift, something sharpened in the striking of the spark from stone. Late to the game, we edit out the ghosts, we make up stories to miss the point. This is where we take flight, upon the reaped whirlwind of these abstractions, all blessings bent to fill our bellies. All that is sacred turned to bread and wine.

I can’t say what the mystery might be up to. I don’t know what parts I have left to play. The cops parley a couple houses over, old women confer in the garage across the street. The cops pull out and round the corner as a mourning dove registers its complaint, the dog in the yard shifting her location, her eyes another lament. It’s one thing after another, consequences bunch up and spread their seed, the afternoon sun and the weight of white clouds piling in the sky. The reach of green, the whispered spell, my eyes heavy with intent. I speak in smoke and the dozen hungers, heaven thick with altars, the earth teeming with gods. The words seep and stray out of line as the spirits descend. 

a stretch

You awake inside your latest indiscretion, fumbling around with the script. Outside the songbirds continue with their lists on loop, the window in the kitchen framing a falcon who isn’t fooling around. The days are said grace, the days are all ring a rosie. The circles that we travel in, around and around and around, up until the ashes and the all fall down. The secret paths and the tiny consecrations, the hands dirtied from your work, your words smoke to cover the scent. Stray gods and found altars. The profound and the performative arrive at the ritual separately, but they leave together. Off to find forever somewhere in the haunting of familiar hills.

I still put one foot in front of the other, just not so many in a row. I still walk in and out the door. There’s not enough singing to my liking. There’s too much stunt work and endless soliloquies. The plot is smooth and featureless, the ripples on the surface of a pond, the mirror furious at the dark. I’ll step right through the fourth wall just to warn the other three. I adjust the aperture and break the frame. I use my inside fighting and get stuck with the leftover art. The night finds me and really dishes it out.

It takes some time to shed a name. To unhitch the machinery, to untie all the threads. It takes some time to be something, even if that something isn’t anything at all. All the efforts offered up whether made or merely thought of, all the claims placed and taken, with both sides nothing of the sort. This is the puzzle, the etiquette of the entity, the entanglement of the animal. Repetition and these empty visions, the phrasing there remembering the shape of your mouth. There you go, dizzy from the dreaming. There you are, scraping up the paint of my mind.

if I could walk that way

Fooled again, it’s so lovely to look at. The way in the way again, it’s so touching if it’s true. Spring heeled and moon honed, we move between cases. Sun kissed and world wept, we rise from our sleep of the just. The sword cleaved from the stone, the wasp that hitched a ride, it’s the glistening of the armaments and the ice cream truck orchestral. The gloom remains unmoved, the old man growls, the fustigated heart laments. These green and fervid days growing all through the stolid debris another false flag here in the world of the dead.

The hills and fields go green and yellow and bell blue, this brief flourish before the long burning summers and falls. There’s no accounting for all the asphalt and concrete, the slabs and box tombs that glare out in open fury as they too slowly turn into the earth. There’s no accounting for all the flocks and packs and cliques that squander everything they touch. It is the age of the fool in the year of the ox on April fool’s. There ought to either be a discount or a multiplier. 

I’m the sort of fool that’s always beat up and bug bit. I’m the sort of fool always in the company of wolves. The periphery teems with bird and beast, while boys on motors live out their chosen musical genre, throw away wheelies and fear set deep in their baby eyes. I sit and smoke while neighbors mix their lawns and wash their cars. Most of us mostly what we aren’t, excluded categorically from the far branches and the better fortune tellers. Fads and filler while the named and the thrillers catch every necessary bouquet. Stunt work and one offs while all our stories are stolen. Punch lines and walk offs, life and death a joke when they’re yours.