inert

The flame separates the stick of incense from its soul, smoke curling upwards for a few laps before departing on the ferocious winds. The dull intention and the empty heavens torn silk before the exhausted earth and boundless sky turns again to extra words and clumsy embellishments. The feel of the fool’s nipped heel the whole of my identity, a tattered spectacle, hapless and chained to this decay. The mind exuded from the meat, thinking it is the exception rather than the rule. Like the tree cursing the sun and the soil for the limitations of its roots and limbs. Haughty stardust bleating and bleeding and shitting itself to death.

Once you slip loose from the story, the gravity of your interactions lose their abstractions and alibis. You keep mouthing off and counting cards, knowing each choice is futile, but you got to have something to do. Gone are all the old compañeros, ascended or descending or dead. Gone are all the equivocations now that the invitations ran dry. Like smoke, like shadows, like footprints beneath the rising tide. The world is not the earth, the wants are not the needs, the paths all dead ends or stations of the wheel. This recursive urge to say it out loud endures, to speak the same phrases again and again, like there will be a sudden outbreak of listening. 

The sun just keeps rambling on, westering on its way, throwing shade into the street. The shadows roil and shift, as if awaiting their transformation into their final form. Hints of jinn and angels, the host coiled just on the other side of veil, waiting to seize the loose parts of the mind and manifest. It suggests the unknown terrors that would visit me from the darkness of my opened closet as a child, with demons fashioned from old fashioned movie monsters and the enemies rallied against Scooby-Doo. Waking to my name whispered, body frozen in fear, choking on my attempts to call for help. I never knew that I would unbecome, a shapeless shiftless shambles, seizing hearts and embraced as the object of the torch and pitchfork set. I never knew that I would lose my place in the world, volatile but ultimately ephemeral. Furiously spinning my wheels as the earth consumed me. Smoke rising because there’s nothing to hold it  down.

humdrum

The tide of dust slowly swallows the static and the forgotten. Music seeping through the rat clambered walls, the separate faiths of song haunt the house while the ubiquitous bass thumping down the street. The low keeps diving and the ghosts keep driving nails through my skull, the last contrivance of reason long since hacked to pieces in the basement of my brain. Mercurial turns from sob to seethe dance me around the madhouse days, beating my head against the wall, my heart and head bricked into the masonry. Madness around every corner, help a curiosity from a quainter era. The gates all locked and the gardens a shambles even the serpent shirks. The fruit all fallen and not a tree in sight. 

The house is still, but there is no peace. Too many crimes committed inside its crumbling walls, too many sins have taken up residence beneath its eaves. Hell doesn’t happen all at once, people decide to inflict it upon themselves and others, dull and dumb and breaking out all over.  No one listening turns to no one to listen turns to the grunts and mutters of an obvious nutter. A reflexive cruelty built into society, law largely the need to kick them when they’re down, religion always punching in that direction. The flag of the abattoir waving proudly over every nation, the fires of perdition turning over the motor of each automobile, gifting the atmosphere with a little less breathing. The glow of screens and a single gaudy lamp reveal the latest abomination.

My old man bones hurt so I let old man moans slip, cursing under and over my breath. The old furies have returned to my blood, and with nothing to drug or distract there’s little to my act. I tire of the contempt and the mockery. I tire of the fear and the fleeing. A lonely and beset child grown into a lonely and feared beast, I have become a bouquet of quirks and afflictions, unpleasant and unlovable and irredeemable. It will only get worse as the private and professional fustigations and drubbings of the last couple of decades take their toll. The humdrum hell of each and every day worse than the next blaring away the most persistent lesson of my life. The sooner it’s over, the better.

bygones

Break out the boxes and blow the dust off the ledger. Open up every seal. Dig deep beneath each surface, pry loose the floorboards, slice through the trembling flesh. Slow cancers and ancient grievances, love letters and other curses, all that is buried rising with the least graze of the eye. Intention loosed and memory jostled, we wake in cold sweats and anecdotal frenzies, the forgotten clawing at our thinking. Nothing is ever over, things become other things, a wheel of infinite begats and bygones alive in our blood and breath.

What else is there but these scrawlings and mementos, this flicker of lucidity beneath the dreaming? The slow drip of heaven in the accumulated cuts and bruises, the occurrence of the lost thought as hope momentarily arises in the heart. The rituals and replications, the wreckage and the reenactments, we stand still as time passes through us. The lives we would live, the people we would be, the chances and the cheats we carry with us though they are the flimsiest of fantasies. Woulda coulda shoulda in an infinite loop, if only if only if only it had been.

I crawl in bed early, an old man shivering in the spring. The blood goes bad, the veins give way, the body grows cold as the years take hold. The trees are green, the blackberries are in bloom, children laugh and play in the street. The first ladybug of the season freeing its wings on the bird of paradise flower, catching a breeze in a bright swath of sunshine. Life goes on, with or without. Warming my bones, the litany of those that were lost and those that left settling in with me, I am buried beneath the consequences. They don’t even bother with goodbyes, they go bye bye and begin the next campaign. Old bones and a husk of a heart full of alarming absences, I hold on to the long gone. 

nobody’s home

Most of all I’m sick of the make believe. The small talks and glad handings, the alibis and misdirections. All the people I nod to who I’d just as soon not see again. The chitter chatter while the sickness metastasized and death kept heaping it on. Pretending that I do anything but cause pain and delay the inevitable. Pretending that the words were anything other than desperation and neediness. The lie that I was ever here at all.

The lights are out and the movie’s gotten awkward. The couple was a couple and now they’re two people with an angry kitchen and a lot of words and tears. Clumsy words and then roll credits and the television is just another light, talking to itself as the shadows stir and stretch. Lying here, just part and pieces. Looking for a story to keep my insides out. Looking, always looking, for an off switch.

I turn on a light, I put earbuds in and turn the music on, all the songs on shuffle in my skull. I tap away at a touchscreen keyboard, the broken record I keep writing getting longer and more meaningless as I throw more words away. A little after midnight and I’m adding to the empty, Saturday staring right through me. Books and boxes and an unsurprising epilogue. The lights are on but nobody’s home. Locks and doors and a sheet in the window. All oh wells and fresh hells and grim ghosts dragging flesh around. 

askew

It’s something that falls between the boundless blue and the insistent sun, the atmosphere laden with heat and restlessness, a wound between worlds forever bleeding out. Neither hunger or appetite but the tint and timbre of every sense felt as the heart keeps circling its favorite aches, the body in painful decline, a knot before every breath. The knowing gnawing away at the aspects and the affect, sick and weary and assured only of poor returns, the husk all ash and embers beneath the vagaries of the wind. Breathe in, breathe out. The wounds will only accumulate. The heart can only break. 

So it is smoke and wind and the sun’s long so long. So it is crows to the roost and the earth rubbed atmosphere. The wasted day another one for the collection, yesterday and yesterday and yesterday, the same sound and insignificance. We are only what we can witness, the taste and the teeth and the funeral wreath. We are only the uncovered tracks, the beaten path, the reach of want and wander. Navigating the landscape by map and Bible, passing through the names and the architecture, these bespoke ruins of our latest conceits. Never yet another flavor of forever.

It is written, but I won’t read it. It is said, but so are a lot of things. These days flow like locusts, they glide like monarchs dappling the sky, they freeze like mantises waiting to strike. Your meanings are meaningless in the world I inhabit, your meanings are trifles in the words I infect. Bodies bearing ghosts and trivia, dragged from scene to scene, hyping recycled myths for tulpa and constructs. Beings bearing only their impulses and appetites stalking through these abstractions, shades slipping in and out of skins to add to any available confusion. Games wished into existence by sports and slicks and irredeemable cheats sounding out above the din of the real that parcel out our time and resources despite the obvious grift. First the forms, then the engines, then the irreducible blue of a truth forever bruised.

the rudiments

The life that you live goes by in inch and hairbreadths, jostling you along the walkway, throwing elbows while breathing down your neck. The life that is claimed moves in years and miles, a road winding through the mountains with barely a mention of the scenery. It has a flag and a bible and a tradition to defend. Honored ancestors and stubborn antecedents to turn the stream this and that away, stones to slow and add suspense, dams to pool the cool waters before they come tumbling down the peak. The stories that churn and roil within this skin while the world wails away upon the impending self. 

It’s the keeping of the time, it’s the drubbings of the heart, this red x this perceptive pinpoint. The exes in exponentials, the plodding apostasies, and the mind always livid in the fitting rooms. The drizzled reasons manifest out of thin air, the then and therefores of this storied evermore, the strata of observations and rudiments in aid of navigation. The Hail Marys and the blessed bes, this tangle of stumble and jungle, the mingling of crude gaffe and honed truths depending on the skill of the hand. The worn on down to the persistent bones, tattered rags and withered tissues, slack of skin and devoted to the dust. A question writhing through each moment craving the context of engagement.

The days get longer as the world turns and burns. You are measured, you are marked. Bound by breath and flesh and brackets, the words that mean so little still can bite me stick. A trick of the symbols, the hard bitten human parts that lock us like headlighted deer, the steer and stir of would and were hardwired in animal and entity. Two brains all a tumble and the gods that campaign in your guts talking all at once, the howling as the sirens sound, the drool at the ringing of the bell. Entangled in the interminable earth and the drift of myth and the soundings of the furthest stars, we run in rivers and we settle in skies. At the roots of everything with eyes fixed to the horizon.

the muddle

The spring winds spill like cast off angels, tumbling terribly on down, the day so adept at taking its turn.  Long, bright sun slick days painted in ominous golds and greens, blue as any impending doom. The low end of the harmony the blackened foundation of the glory of the firmament. Mother Mary wailing at the feet of salvation, the gift of a death unfit for a savior. So we move from clutter to clearing, from dim resolve to cruel ubiquity within the space of a breath. We are the word moving over the waters, the dust and the conflagration of vague conviction and interminable consequence. The belly tight around the empty, the blood between you and the sky. 

And here I sit, riding the ribbon of smoke and breath. Here I sit, embedded with the rituals, ashtrays and tobacco flecked words and the lensing of the cannabis. Thinking in churchills and minutes exposed to the undue elements of cast and cult. The lonely black dog and the yard in disarray, the swaying of winter wheat and dandelion caught in the long light of springtime with the sun in her hair. This hi light of low living, feasting on the fruit, spitting seed and stone. Here at the foothills of this desiccation, sticks and bones holding the place of stars and stones, the fortune told with the serpent’s tongue.

You think the thoughts you have are yours. You think the words come a running. It’s hard to fault, these particulars of perception. Location repeated three times, a simple spell bespoke on the sly side of the tongue. The lazy river running through us, the moon on the water, the sun in our sight. The curse of self and the contraction of the invocation, ripples between the worlds sharing a single skin, the intertwined roots of soil and sea in the muddle of this restless blood. A moment turned into empty words, a prayer starved of its very breath, the ceaseless preachings of the wind.

highway hypotheses

By the time I get around to saying it, everything is suspect. By the time it’s written, it’ll never be read again. I don’t see all the colors, I miss a lot of shapes. The form I see is the one on the wheel, the first flash still pressing through. I never know what it might look like lately. The road opens at the least provocation, it closes at every opening and curve. The knot tied and untied, the way the wheel seems to favor, these languages to spit and savor. The words working through the blacks and blues, the words thieving flesh and ghost. 

It’s not that it happens more out on the road, it’s just the focus grows narrow enough to notice. It’s not that it stands out so much as burns into the ubiquity, this set of signals, talon and feather and the tear of flesh and bone. The errant metal in the very air, as the changes set and the blood goes black. The land as it opens sky, the wings visible in thought and deed, grim totems fixed upon the power lines. It is the light on fire, the rider of winds and appetites, the turn always up ahead where the head and heart align. The being and not only the story, but the story just the same. 

I don’t know what this will be once the words return. The blasted days and relentless nights will go as they go, wave after wave until again I blunder, the stumble of the dissembled soul into contempt and statistic. Gone a little at a time, until the gone is all that is. Just the words as the road runs by. A river through the letters, the estranged covenants of blood and deed a gleaming along the skins. Life striving through earth and myth, a forest told in ring counts, fossilized ephemera scattered across the reach of oblivion. I want and wander and set the dice to dancing. I move so slowly my thinking crystallizes, shapes and shadows as the words crowd around.

there you go again

It takes a moment—

maybe two— mouthed one thousands as

day catches up to the night,

the patched up tongue and

hangdog eaves riddled with

webs and smoke, the incense 

without an altar, shoeless

gods and hungry ghosts

eying the lip of the cup.

Dribbling over the rim, beading 

down the seeming skins, dribs and 

drabs missed by the darting

licks of language, evidence of

the sin of indifference before

the blessings of plenty, that 

animal attention, blood and appetite 

your restless focus pretending 

at kisses, regifting oblivion.

grindstone

The words are left to set a spell, heavy in the ephemera, gnawing at the grace. The heart keeps time in wishful thinking, beating back the tide. These glad rags and quick hands only slap boxing the half of it, the rest continuity sacrificed to the mystery. Eyes closed, eyes closed— somehow this has become the road, the figuring on the wrong side of the seams. The drag out knocked down to the physics, the depth of weary flesh and stubborn bone, ghosts and guts and everything touched by the flow of blood. The turn around into another round, this grating orbit again through walls of stick and stone. The words all that’s left of the hurt of the turn.

Back to the creases on the map, the blanked out names along the seams, the streets that got lost in the folds. Back to the landscape, back to the land, the earth and her fits and stirs. The convoy of drawling traffic Sunday driving on a Saturday afternoon, a lazy dragon haphazardly getting the lay of the board. Old bones crossed at broken passes beneath worn out wards, the history of the fall of a beast, the weather and the whip. Another cursed number on the cursor. Another year through this narrow loop.

So it goes with each round sung louder. So the dance as the reel runs wild. The habitual turned to ritual turn to the engine that drives the wheel. All this talk around the terminal, all the writing on the walls. Nothing to do with the empty cup when the cup runneth over with empty. Nothing to do with the hunger trapped in the walls clawed down all around. These uncontended bones, this polished obsolescence. Only the smoke that drawls along behind the burning. The grinding away of what was left of the day when all the days are over. The routine is all that’s left on.