shapes and spells

Starting out I didn’t know

saying what I meant 

meant that you wouldn’t understand,

I weighed my words, left them

hanging off of line breaks

falling and fading before

they let a sentence form. I wrote 

all the parts, where you

touched me, what I took.

I never had anything to say;

I still don’t— litany and lament 

and punctuation jokes,

apostrophe and poesy, the tumble 

between bone and inkling and

creation, the gaffed dharma of

I’ll get you when you’re dead

played out in this press of dread,

crumbling books and diaspora flesh,

this wandering between incarnations,

another inhabitant of the dust

cast about in the brushstrokes and

dark wards of this incessant sweeping,

the sand gathered, shapes and spells

painting the mandala, these words

assembling stacks and selves—

crumpled letters, crowded shelves,

your picture in a frame

the moment ever after as

the bardo holds its breath.

threshold

There go the words I would have put here,

there goes the sky I would have said

if only I looked better in its light.

Look flight is like this—

a pointless exclamation, a panic in

heaven’s direction, speed and

strength and the miracle of lift—

wings working hard despite 

the words hammering down,

envy the salt of all human endeavor 

so I brine away and

bray and bray, all worked up

to nothing left to say, down to counting

breaths and throwing bones. Without you

there’s a lot left over.

It burns a hole in my pocket,

all the way to the wide horizon 

it doesn’t change. Each day

the long haul gets short changed.

The crows call and barely give it

a second glance. More and more

I am a failed state overtaken by 

ants and earth, I am

the forest missed for the fire.

Fewer words and letters 

no longer written or insisted as 

we wither down to dust.

somewhere playing softly

The shadow leans to the left a little, bald head sharp nose cheater specs horns, the light to the right just a smidge in my peripheral vision— shine and sight in that order. The street whispers and roars, donuts smoked in cul-de-sacs echoing in their screeching idiocy while the strays and packs prowl and make passes. Trial run feints to shake out the fight or flight. Eyes watching from behind blinders unwittingly exposing their minds to this still, lit figure. I smoke and hold my post, train wail and fireworks sounding all around. Something to offer up and onwards, something to send back. Applause at the end of an old recording. A reminder to all the wolves how dogs wound up like that,  the threshold between meat and leash.

I speak to you like the words that you’ve heard. I speak to you like I didn’t know the difference. I start talking to the air and the empty. I start talking to the windows and the mirrors. All these ghosts and forgotten old acquaintances. There’s my voice and it’s saying something. There’s my voice like it had a say speaking to you like you were more than leftover words, once was and never weres. The door in the dark down the stairs.

It’s Saturday and somebody’s revel. It’s Saturday and somebody has to make sure it shows. Close up it’s crickets, but around every corner it’s some different kind of show. There’s always all those other conversations and good times that get along just fine without you. There’s always all those true blue sweethearts doing better now that you’ve gone. Now it’s just you and the night and the ragged edge. You worked the words until they were working you. The comfort all but worn clean away, clutched like the bones holding themselves into abstraction. The raincheck left, a missing tooth, our day will come somewhere playing softly. You sing along, your whole heart for a story you know is not for you. That’s what people do, so they say.

leitmotif

A cluttered room, a lonely light. Fingerprints form a lattice on the tablet screen. The words don’t want any part of it, they’d rather follow the dogs around the yard or the cats through the trees. They’d rather do anything but this dusty old number. The pity party of a sick sad old man playing to the cheap seats, the vaudeville act of a busted up slugger swinging futilely for the fence. Who could blame them? You can have too much of anything, especially not enough.

There is an arc to the ember dangling between fingers, an inkling slowly leaving the ash. Drawled sparks in the smoke drenched blue bias, shadows sweeping and the winds busy wolving the door. The flat affect, the patient flicker, the landing of the apt track across the moment of my disarray. A confession dragged out of the brass, the bass line and the banging on the bars. So it goes, the show is over, the spotlight swept up with a push broom. And yet the number plays.

I’m not the sort that gets many return engagements. Most of my encores are more a pelting with rocks and garbage than a listing of my greatest hits. The going has gone from bad to worse, the circuit never much for forgiving. The clown flounders about the boards, clutching at the curtains, pulling up his trousers. There will be no quarter given, no indignity spared. The laugh track between the themes, this melody falling down.

heritable

You get to where you were always

headed, the outcome of every

fortune from the cut of

the deck to the folds of your fists,

scar flecked hands that hold 

all your futility, this rhythm

beaten into your sorry heart,

this note clutched long after

its shelf life expired. Maybe

we are meant for smaller worlds

full of prison art detail and

the bardo at the border of

these endless metaphors and

the sticks and stones that ring

our bells and reorder our

illusions the scale of change

and the rate of perception 

work the throttle leaning

hard into the turn,

the unknown wandering 

every road as we unwind 

into words and corners. Trees and

birds and language set loose,

rock piles and scratches, lines

dragged through the mud.

Wasp nest fine and crisp as

a voice in the pitch still night.

All these wings in flight

the sky a sudden shift

in the dialogue, a lapse 

only found in language and

the space between the stars.

It is this singing, slowed

up the same old grade,

this hill heavy with the flow of

love and bone,

a crumpled letter squeezed dry.