decrescendo

Finally, I sit down, and the sun gets up to leave. I try not to take it personally, it’s a busy star and besides they say the world’s to blame. Sometimes tossing, ever turning, I am still upon this restless earth as the lights go down. Maybe I’m waiting for something I’ll never see; maybe I’m waiting for someone to leave. The heart goes tight at the height of the inhalation, then I feel it fall and gush. The embers are bright, the smoke is flush with the shadows, Jupiter shines above the shapes cut from the purpling sky. A roof, a tree, little sympathy for the one that is found in fault. 

Night arrives, and even the stars are hidden. Porch light moths and busy spiders go through their routines, spilled smoke and smudged lenses dulling inept eyes. The day takes and takes until you are burned down to a nub. The day smokes you to the filter, the night arrives and offers you a light. Cars creep the curbs, the roof is given over to rats and the Queen of the Night. I am a wreck, I am in ruins, sleep is the mystery of an uncharted shore. Sleep is the best reward the undeserving can expect. The course is clear, the path obscured by mood and meat.

I am crowned in cobwebs, I am obscured by the light that lands at my feet. Fate eludes me like any passing thought. Items on the list remain unchecked, doors to check and dishes yet to do. I bear the curse without a clue, what happened to me, what happened with you. Sing it to the unseen stars, pray to gods of words and tears, tear the seal to find the beast as absent as if you rolled back the stone on that emptied tomb. The earth allows for what is, the earth remits no easy answers. The calendar turns, the heart beats it’s sad tattoos, we escape the orbit of our allotted portions. The fall only this open book, flight and the forever wish for wings. The fall all I am owed of this hollow bounty.

extant

It does no good to fret and fuss, it does no good to fight and strive. The table is set, drabs and drabs on mismatched dishes, some helping themselves to heaps and heaps while others are told to wait their turn. If you play along maybe you’ll get to some promised heaven, though it sounds like a scam to me. Colorblind, I see past the plumage. Empty handed, I know where to put the knife.

The smart play would be to get up and go. The smart play would be to bury them beneath a flurry of fists and furies, a bullet in the belly and the house on fire. They won’t be satisfied until your in chains. They won’t be satisfied until they murder the last life on earth, they won’t be satisfied until they swallow the suns. No distinction between their gods and monsters. No room to breathe or bloom. 

The room is always empty. The light is always on. There’s no one left to take your part, just honey lipped strangers and the words you long to hear. Just scavengers to pick your brains and gnaw your bones. Just strangers to squander your blood and your trust. You are here, just as alive as anyone. It’s as much yours as anybody else’s, the kingdom and the glory another damn fairy story missing the glimmer of truth. Leaves spilling from the gutters as the forest is punished tree by tree. This is how you think of me. This is how you think of me.

tantalus

It is the rigor of the triggers,

the cunning of the trap,

green leaf yellow leaf brown leaf—

seasons on repeat. The eyes go to

where the mouth will water,

the pretty of the picture, 

the crisp of the whisper and 

the certain in the crunch,

all this keening clipped from

magazines and gibbering screens,

home where they know to

lock you out, burnt photos and

salt-rimmed spells. The curve

her hips threw your hands 

as the cure of her kiss again

eludes, half flavor half feel

almost savored upon the sudden 

sight of her, ripe fruit and 

cool water. You reach for

the moon stuck up a tree,

the last star fallen

struck down with a wish.

no there there

What are we to do with the stardust in our eyes when the day comes too soon? Who are we beneath this skipped beat sky with the sun sneaking in? The past both irretrievable and omnipresent, the future a bedtime story meant to keep the monsters away, it is always this hopeless plodding on. Winnowed away as the world comes in heaps, dreams drained of all but dread, wishes left hanging from the absent star that looms in the halo of its destruction. Just the misgiven and the lost beat, and the trembling transmission of this wad of nerve, gristle, and gloom. 

The room closes in, hiding from the broadcast sky and the telegraphed reactions. The indecisive autumn, and the sinking ship of soul. Fragments full of hyperbole and fragrant turns of phrase. The dimwit numberings, and the digging of the grave. Weeping through the seasons and praying for sweet mercy, carrying cruelty in this dead eyed heart and dismal daily sins on these lips. The habitual rhetoric and spit. The story that goes nowhere, this sticking with the sinking ship.

No one calls, no one writes, nothing eases the endless nights or puts the ceaseless days to rest. I am the roaches in the ashtray, I am the spider in the shower. It goes on and on, and all but the most dismal pieces of me have long since gone to dust. There is no case to be made but want and lack, the empty overcoat hanging on the broken rack. The abandoned altar waiting with nothing left to offer, the strange pains rising from the dying flesh dragged through this pointless pantomime. Music hall, and vaudeville, and all the shows that have all but closed. The shine of salt streaked cheeks and the Seven Cities of Cibola shimmering somewhere beyond the horizon. Drunk on compasses and words I’ll never hear, starving on all these just desserts.

continuity

It’s the comfort of wasps in the wind chimes, it’s the comfort of children screaming in the street. It’s wedding bells and bacchanals and words you never heard. It’s the Diesel engine idling across the street, waiting for their plug. These longings that no longer pay out, these tenders that don’t tend towards you. Teenage romance and pop stars and celebrities you never heard of. You ride it til the wheels come off, you ride it into glue, there’s always more miles to go. Whether you’re game or gone, there’s always more road to run. 

Maybe it turns out you’re a goner, maybe losing is all that’s left. Maybe your day is done. There’s still someone waiting on the sun. There’s still someone yet to shine. It’s not enough to live on, it won’t keep the devil from the seat by your bed. The pain keeps coming and the fear only gets braver as the years boil away. The beatings won’t be belayed, and the worse doesn’t lose any sleep over your breaks and bruises. The time of the long lonely nights has found you. Alone is all you have left. But the odds will still find their favorites even as you bleed out in the street. Someone’s star still burns bright as the night crowds on in.

There’s not much left to it. A few words, remembered flowers, kisses lingering from some long dead dream. Comedies of manners and bitter dregs. Wish and want, shout and taunt, the bullets don’t bother with names. Dusk has come, and it’s getting darker. There’s nothing left to do but be buried by the night. It doesn’t matter what I meant, it doesn’t matter what my heart once held. There is life in all this dust, the show goes on as we know it must. 

apparatus

This is the broken record. This is the busted clock, right twice and preaching to the time. The floor is strewn with the remains of the altercation, the unwound fob in slow release, the spring talking down the tension. Light and dust pay shiftless witness, prophecy and process holding hands at the intersection. All this time taken winding down.

Throw the bones, read the leaves, toss your fortune to the stars. Live garbage day to garbage day. You are the reason set to rhyme, you are the rattling of the cans, the timepiece automaton set to sort and strew. The shadow whirls around the needle, the scrying of the fire, the tongue of smoke and breath. The machine every piece that turns out a part.

Offer up and get a clue about tomorrow. Wait it out and the puzzle’s about the same. It is this persistence towards the perpetuity, the pendulum of the palindrome. The shell brims with irrelevance, nameless and unneeded. These reachings in the dark, the heartbeat, the endless ticking. Crows start a ruckus in the fallen leaves. The pail fills, blood and broken crowns. The skull brims over and the words spill out. One thing leads to another, then another and so on until it all comes to nothing, and something like it starts again.

epitome

Step away from the story. Back away from the day. Close your eyes without another thought about it. Rest your head as if you ever slept or dreamed. The word still moving over the water. All this smoke to show the fire. All this grief in leaps and bounds. The cross you carry is the one they stick you with. A hammer is a hammer, but it still means every nail.

I’m a broken record and a busted clock. The full moon slips in the window like it’s in a song. The house is slow and open to the night, the skipping of the needle, the weighing of the words. Gravity the only given. The heaviness comes bearing down, heaven cracks and grinds. The dog sighs deep, trash cans drag and bang. The street says something to itself and doesn’t meet my gaze.

There’s no quibbling with the numbers. There’s no accounting for taste. The heart wants its wants and carries all it can. The beauty a burden on every breath, the slipping singing out. Wishes made of grease and gristle, wishes the shade of moon on bone. Ten thousand lives all lived alone. Reaching like the sky towards stars, the peak broke horizon. The rising of the firmament, the furthering of the fall.

sore to form

The light is less explicit, the wattage whispers and stammers, the brilliance of the filament and the dancing of the dust. The resonant bandwidth of warm skin and rejected flesh, the story of rawboned ghosts and worn ligaments. The form pooling shadows, moving through the stations. The ache from the frame, the pretty to the picture. Rising with the burned down breath, the burden born in clumsy motion, every thought an exasperation. 

So goes the burning of the ember, so goes the carrying of the torch. The illicit thrills of tongue tip wishes, the light and heat implicit in this grip. The heap moves from shambles to shibboleths, the aptitude to self delude the staple of this faith. The crane shot and the slow dissolve, the turn into the silhouette. At the height of the well honed hunger, every feeling left a fall.

The gifts still gather in my squalor, my love still lingers where the squander runs free. The smoke that curls towards blue biased heaven, the words I would have said or have you say, the room entombed by the night. It should be oaths and lips and letters. It should be the tangle of collided want and time. I follow the phrases, I follow the sentence. I wake to the fading of what could be. Shoulders slumped, feet rotting on the floor. 

mythos

This field has fallen

to the bottom of the gray

escarpment, day climbing to

dusk, footwork and the feels

stitched to the stage,

this old show, this ancient 

gaze fixed upon a missing star—

the choir and the clockwork 

elevate each urgency 

seared into the flesh by

wheel work and wet work 

laws and longings,

crowns and blasphemes

the story standing in the wind.

This is the night upon us, 

this is the bumptious dark,

the flame hidden by 

the hand, cupped palm

giving the fire life. 

little red book

There in the last days of hard copy, there at the holdovers of pulp and ink, the bound spines and boxed volumes gathered to fall into dust and margins. Sagging shelves and closeted crates holding the aggregate passings, unsorted strangers and lovers, art and ephemera and could have beens. Notebooks smudged with lipstick and coffee, the inscrutable scrawl of my hand becoming more cryptic and crabbed as the shadow of my style fills out. Diaries of daydream and delusion, the brick by brick and bird by bird leaning into the unbecoming. I am a glimmer cast by the drudge of this past, forgotten idols and dead tech romantics, words blurred in the margins. Names and numbers now come to nothing.

I kept the addresses of every phone booth I ever used, I kept the numbers of businesses I only used once. I was grown in foot notes and index cards, in the gospels of the facts and the stacks. I was raised by television and paperbacks, wits and wise guys and the same old story. The cartoonish arcana that became the cannon, the cult of the brilliant janitor and the gorgeous beast, all the testimony and the repetitions where the borders blur and the corners fill. The chorus of that Bacharach song, lit by dashboard altars and idle gauges, staring at your stairs and gates. The way some lives end and some just plod along. 

We are the silent volumes, the chapbooks of napkins and puzzles, the treasures buried deep in the stacks. Set aside in the tide of the news of the day, sunken in the scrolling and the restlessness that passes for freedom, we are the inevitable ephemeral sinking into uniqueness. The paced out cages and the counted on checks forever in the mail, these drowned accounts and brain spattered pages. Small, hot rooms with the walls closing in. There on paper, there in the ether, gone from the discernible world. Names you never say, numbers that you couldn’t reach if you tried. 

tin can

I want to be here for the bones, so someone will remember where they’re buried. I want to be here for the blood that still strives and thrives. There’s no other argument here to linger other than that the limits of the other options. Better something than nothing, both brain and gut agree. But the entity is something that the wind blows through. The entity is something painted on a cave wall. The entity knows the off switch. Sometimes the can you kick on down the gutter is a bucket. 

The day is rapt with screaming children. The day rings out with the sound of many engines. The sun thinks it’s summer, the wind says it’s fall. The sugar gushes and the salt just drips, leaf shush and leaf crunch at once as the steps are dragged out into the open dusk. Palms up, fingers stretched around blue blazes, the seeing shifts. The blown top bottle remits its exuberance, retreats from the physics by the backroads of time, and sits stoppered and sealed around that frenzied intention. You put away your pretty things and bargain reckless for the souls of children dying in their sleep.

There goes another used to be epitome. Some lesson learned from every wreck heaped beside the road. There goes the very reason no one else knows. We labor through the days we don’t laze away, we linger hard in the faithless night. We swear our outrages and our spells, tiny hooks and fish bone cantrips, the staggered steps tripping up our breath and the seething hexes hiding behind our hearts. The candle flickers and you feel it behind you, heavy and pitiless gazing through the backs of your eyes. Caught in a fist, strung on a line, a tin can full of ashes left on the shelf.

impossible thoughts

And so the dog crippled the skunk, leaving it to drag and dread around the backyard. Even I know where it happened. Even I know when a crime is a crime. Tomorrow the skull of this sacrifice will be the oracle of the next order, the tales told of tomorrow once we get the drift of the smoke and the opining of the stars. Somewhere between tobacco tar and sunsets the scent takes its tithe. A violation of the sacred, the incantation of rent soul and the toothsome incarnate, this blind horizon. The laws of transmission and the tireless cogs of consequence. Even this savage, selfish appetite knows sin by the aroma alone. 

Unkept yards and unkempt minds, flies on my skin and the sun in my eyes, my frame slouches and sighs as time keeps coming due. The coda and the corpus, the chorus minus the girls, the stone hums along as the sky sings and sings. The seasons show up earlier every year, my countenance given to the glib and the grave. Last calls and least evils, mike drops made of glisten and glum, wholehearted devotions and lost cause crowns. Root to star and all the sway and swing between, the horizon fallen prey, swallowed by this greedy imminence.

It is these monuments of self delusion, these blonde bygones and literary coquettes, oath voiders and heartbreak precedents. It is these sad sack bodhisattva and diner window derelicts, the poised notebook and pensive pen, the collateral of this skinwalker cool. We plead and ply these ancient prayers, we bleed plots and old spells, every breath a precipice. The altar and the abattoir indistinguishable amid all this sacrilegious burning, seized by design and caprice, the flesh pressed to this wanton bent. The hunger paces in slow circles, the dusk fills with night. 

apparition

From thick within the shadows beneath the scrubby pines you see the moon nearing mystery. Folded between materials and atmospheres, you leave your witness in the dark. Outside your own lit windows you feel a strange voyeurism, the hushed and hidden expectation to see a stranger or yourself, fiddling around in the kitchen or staring back from your room. That dread sense that you will turn a corner walking in the night and never find your way back to life. The sound of your breath quickened, the sound of detritus crunching under your steps. You return to the house, an intermittent ghost, stepping back into the heart of the haunting.

This lighter to light the candle and burn the incense, these feet to stir the cinders and the dust. The heat clings to the air and binds the flesh, perspiring glittering constellations and busy rivulets down whatever is bared. A figure to go through the motions. A figure to still in the dark and return a gaze. The music is silty whispers and minor chords, headlights stretched across the wall. There’s something you sing to yourself that isn’t a song at all. 

Find me here where the leaves are dying. Find me here with all the lights turned off. There is a stirring in the air, something shuffling in the shadows. There is the sound of constant gnawing, the rats always scrambling in the walls. I move more slowly than the seasons. I fade more swiftly than than the feel. Once I would scratch around the periphery, dragging shadows and seeding songs. Now the ashes roost and gather, and the hours turn their faces away. Attachments dragged from room to room, the picture that you painted, the window where the sun touched your face. The house leaning into the earth, the yard spilling over with weeds.

epitaph

After all these long years

your bones gone to ashes,

this strong drag of dusk

across the garden of your faith

swaying, a pall still

your long absence 

addressed in this wasteland 

still reeling from loss,

incense aimed toward the gloaming

rising from the column where

the flag was flown 

so long ago when you

walked the world

without a want for words.

transubstantiate

I swallow a tincture of the ghost, I founder in the smoke, ash from the altar tracked across the floor. There is the hole of wanting, the aspect always wanting more. There is a coiling shadow crawling towards the curtains, the sun set to burn and blind. The crawling through the affects as the self starts to glow, the rosy play of rhyme across the synapses, the dance tripping off the tongue. I swelter on the record, I smolder in the act. The skin shed left, simply sweat and fact. 

Comes the same old heat, comes the same old cosmic disassembly. The matter only stepping stones into the cold unknown, the spirit seeping through the clock and the carcass, the mind largely conjecture and superstition. The spin from words and brake lights, the boardwalk bare in the sunlight revealing all the spectacle and the flesh. Walk upon the pier, stumble with the waves. An old story told first by the etiquette. A love there spilling at your feet.

It’s been awhile since the faith was abandoned. It’s been a long time between Judas goats and candles lit. The old bones punching in with the season, the old blood slowly burning out. With the  grace of a phrase you consecrate, with the man-handled metaphor you leave your witness wanting more. How needy the animal, how slow the rope. This long pause before the knots begin to preach. This slow smoke crowning this drowning faith.

entropic

It’s the weighing of the evidence, it’s the going at it word by word. A crow, a vulture, a few fellows loosed in the blue. It comes down to the looking for. It comes down to what you are trying to do. Cold takeout parked in the lot. The meat down to the bone.

It’s there in the smoke you spill, it’s there in the cinders that you say. Here but for the grace of burned tomorrows. Here but for the want of way. There in the panic as each moment is abandoned. There in the song you want to say. It’s not so much the seeing that goes missing. It’s more the sorrow of the saying that is never to be.

There’s glory as the ruins smolder, there’s grace even as the fire takes. To winter every season burning want and wonder. To succumb though you feel free and fit. The music lapping over in thick layers, nearer the singer than the song. Oh how the earth rejoices as the flesh is turned upon the spit! Oh how the stars sing beyond our every oblivion, these breathless prayers, these gasping pleasures!

grind prophet

 

swelter

The weather does its share of diva turns, tantruming down the thoroughfare, trashing all the tchotchkes. Bones dipped in tallow, every hour illuminated from the fire inside, dry lightning fingering the ceiling as the rain passes through. The soil speaking to this effigy of grease and kindling, ache and inferno and the actor’s mask, oh but for the burning of this breath. Heat and headache and broken hearts, the tumult a clatter of teeth lost in a dream, a memory of looking at your hands. A consistency of change in between get away plans. A topic to turn to where the words are supposed to go.

It all comes down to swerves and swears. It all comes down to what you do with your hands. I scratch at scabs, the itching around the crack in my skull where the soul seeps out. The fragment of some ancient impact, the shadow patched with stitched in kiss and curse, the plume of the unyielding flame atop this crown making sleep a stranger. I fold the pillow, I soak the sheets, the heat doesn’t ask permission. Days and nights heavy with bleak and blight, stars fed from the well of dreams falling from the firmament, conversations spilled from a cup full of cards and keys. 

The thunder rumbles, the thunder rolls. The night keeps changing genres. These cherished small circles, these venerable primal plots, the calendar and the call sheet. Salt and beast and time have steeped in this busted bed, the habitual and the sacristy, the venal and the victuals. Fathers and Mother floating upon our exhausted incantations, the stone drained dry by these exhortations to bleed and flow, the tumbling dice ever beckoning a new shooter. Here where the flesh remains charmed and berated, the story running away with itself, the matter aggregated and spilling light and heat. Watch me we say. Watch me as the wishes melt away. 

have one on me

It’s no secret that I follow the smoke. It’s no secret that I love a singalong, from the geese at dawn to the twilight crows. I’m happy to go around again, I like to grade to the curve. This seeking, this swelter, these longed for bones to shelter whim wish and hunger. The production running over budget and the way you let the scene run out. Artifact or instrument, the sprinklers hushing down the dust, the neighborhood another round of effigies to fluff and flatter as the day runs aground. Oh to sing so sweetly along with the gone home crows. Oh to sing so sweetly, seeing the stars all fall. How I want for yesterday’s plunder yet to come.

There are the slow hours and the persistent aches, the eyes’ dragging along their beat, ceiling wall portrait wall screen screen screen screen screen, sigh and repeat. The prayers and the patterns using every part of the self, ego only the anima burning through the blood. Dancing the romance around in fresh heaps of negation, always some fuse counted out, always some fire burning through. The face there in refraction and in effigy, the places always people too, every favorite shared a rabbit hole in waiting. The sight of you and the wish to see you. As sure to come as the setting of the sun.

The day starts it’s last stretches before the dash into the dark as I trail smoke and Nick Cave starts to spin a tall one in some dusty immediacy. I turn over and over in these fresh hells and shallow graves, passion always the precipice I only see as I’m falling, the certainty of gravity my steady sutra as I crumble beneath the consequences. Those almost moments, the cathedrals of rust and inertia we leave strewn across the might have been, histories of collisions for conclusions and the voices muttering just outside the room. This sin of missing, the embers of the offering smoldering on the stone. This still witness, this slow burn. 

testament

There are these fevers

I cannot speak through

these fires I can’t contain—

livid beneath the thickness of

the tongue, these dashed and

scattered whims dancing

calamities around this conundrum,

the cross carried up these rates of change,

gravity conveyed in trudged hills

and bruise-boned shoulders, 

matter always meaning it more

no matter who wants it most.

The days don’t look, they cross

the street without breaking 

sweat or stride, all sugar and smoke

as the dust dictates the etiquette and

the hat gets passed around.

I keep preaching while the pulpit 

blazes and the steeple is seized by flames,

full throated and choking

on the secret I could never say,

all ashes falling down

the empty altar

the litany unspoken.

skin deep

It is a matter of depth, of resonance, remembering the color of your eyes. Not the hue they heel  to in still pictures, but the brushwork of your sight shining on me in that brief and bygone time when you were near and I was seen. The attitude of your architecture, the wellspring of so many trembles and sighs. The ease of your amplitude when the signal’s still strong and sharp. The reverence of your flesh when posed in prayer, the teeth that showed whether or not you smiled. I forget everything, trailing dusk and fugue. 

That’s not to say that memory is a refuge— I remember enough to wish I remembered less. The look of disgust as the words walked the line, the roll of the eyes at the very thought of me, the standard exasperation and the assurance of the opposite. Contempt on your breath and the weighted phrase, the lie repeated once the lie was revealed. Little more than a filler for a plot point, nothing much but a number and some stage directions. A pallid, aging pantomime. All the accessories out of style and the lapels too thick or too narrow, a comic caricature to emphasize some personal low.

It doesn’t matter that this is not your story. It doesn’t matter if this isn’t who you are. Millions of lives end every day in the pot or in the jaws, never squeezing out that last not me. The numbers buzz on past, and each day we are each of us winnowed away. The heartbreak in the everyday, the humdrum of our answered prayers. The fire offered, the altar calling to your bones. These kingdoms of once and future kisses, old lovers just over the horizon, your blood clutching at its breath. 

hot foot hearts

The night always has us harder put, the night always over the rubicon. The day does its part, the ill lit precipices and the brutality of eye candy. It calls us by our mirrors and shades, knowing the sausage to make lemonade. Lanky and bright and callow, the day pushes buttons and dots and dashes, lays it in deep with the lashes. But the night starts with loose curses, the names and numbers scribbled in the margins of its grimoire, the hammered grammar of every regretted sin thick upon your tongue. The art imbued through sleepless writhing and taking stock, the weight this lonesome makes of the missing moon. 

I am backlit with cobwebs and moths cutting silhouettes. Draped in tattered vestments, my beard crisped by smoke, my fingers always smelling of fire. I abandon old altars to fresh gods, let the mud and the masonry call out to vagabond devils and limber spirits, let the wasps take the hen house and the swifts glut the dusk. Let the bricks crumble as my flesh dissolves, let the ending pay off just once. All the sick and whispers running listless through the dark, all the dreams gathered for black medicine cantrips, all the sacred carved up for souvenirs. The machine coughs and grinds, clouted with ghosts and oxidation.

There’s always someone creeping beneath the windows. There’s always someone checking all the doors. There’s a legion waiting to fulfill every sneaking suspicion, a gang to wear the colors of your every foolish fear. We are witness to the war of attrition of our existence, heads full of bullets abandoned to madness dancing to our hot foot hearts. Spent spells and spat out incantations loop through life and limb, one breath racing through us like Santa around the globe, dusty libraries and brooding mausoleums spilling from our wounds. Stuck in the words, forever rounding the corner, always left in the empty tense. I linger in the cruel invective and wicked epithets that serve as my amens and seal the moment unspoken. The angel holding in the secret with a finger to your lips, the clearing in the forest lit by stars and the beckoning flame. 

as the days go

It gets me smack in the vernacular, the rings straight through those grinning idioms, the genre depending upon the part I play and the particulars of the blocking. Nothing more deadly tragic than a person in a farce, complications heaped upon them as they clamber with over corrections, slapstick always about the way they land the blow. Forever running for a life that’s all punchline as the sands slip away underfoot. The pause before I work in my act, cycle through a few routines before a short show stopper and a return to the choir. I pause to wake to the dreamed routine, tumbling through the days.

I fill the margins of unwritten texts, clocking in the commentary, scratching in the itch. We plant Atlantis in mouthed off about and claimed by unoffered maps, the wingings of the ancients recorded like their laws, the mistake of the persona for the act. I am buffeted by the dopplered thump of passing bass lines, the compressed air and the tag backs dragging its roil and rattle along. I am forgotten as I am forgetting the way the plot works out. From chance to word to bye bye bird sampled and skinned and taken as word. Foundering in the calendar as I’m kicked on down the curb.

Where is it that we linger when we lay out in the passages, waiting in these corridors where want and word collide? What is it that we wait for when we wait to want? These long desperate stretches, these sentences always seeming life. Something to wash up in the wake of this wonder. Something to bloom now that the dream has gone to seed. Whole tomorrows lost to the pause in the passion, the loss of the reason as the words are coveted, the story ever so it goes. A service paid to solace, a practice of the prayer. 

me too, Horatio

Here I go again, so fervent among the figments. Here I go again, pressing pictures against the glass. The chagrin factored into to every action, these alternate universes of spilled milk and cursed to the touch, weary of the play by play but bound to it by oath and altar. I sift through the dust and the literature while everyone wants to throw me their ghosts, muddying the water with the flapping of their lips, soaked as we are to the bone in the rime of the mind. By each station we are beyonded. By each angle occulted to some sight. Forever feeling around unseeing, always a few steps away from lost.

So we are adequately refracted, pupils contracted and aperture pronounced. We fill the mirrors as we part the waters and bullets fly astray. The galloping heart still trotting along, forgetting every path. Every sense imbued with a whim or two, tinging the light of this dream stitched and lust licked world, trailing twists of plot and turns of phrase behind. Some prayer, some song, the punch landed line or the ride along. Where else to linger than at the intersection of the little details and the big picture as the self accumulates? The moment, where it’s going, and where you’d have it go. I pace the foundation and witness the grim regent, spirit or revenant. Other than to say what seems and say what’s so, what is there that won’t give way, what is there that won’t let go?

There is nothing left of poetry, philosophy another of faith’s long cons. There is nothing to hang a hat upon, no shoulders left to cloak. The plodding observations, the worn gears of the machine stuck on repeat. The impulse first and foremost, bowling over book, spook and beast. This is how the sausage gets made, this is where the magic happens. The ache of resignation, the appetite so resigned. We say it is so, we say it aloud, rent garments and raw knees. Eyes closed tight around unseen horizons, glory coming if it knows what’s good for it.

turnover

The day comes down to the color of the shadow of an unseen wing, some lovely lilt of speed and virtuosity, dried flowers foundering in the dust. A lounging in the liturgy at the easing into sin. The achy breaky breath and the bitter to the bones. The long haul all hosannas and are we there yets, the take away something about how every stranger looks the same. The clerk resigned to their midnight counter, the driver across the gas station isle that pays at the pump and never looks your way. So down the dark hall or swinging from the family tree we go, saying names and taking notes. The smoke seeping through the firmament, the gone there trembling still reaching from back when. 

There’s the joke and there’s the way you land it. There’s the crash footage as the narrative marches on. Some flame in the wilderness, some saying about the way things go. The cast that are killed off, the cast that are written out, the parts other players replace, the roles abandoned after the irreplaceable got lost. I am slow to learn new roles, and insist on first refusal. All my craft is absent or outdated, and I am resistant to giving up my shtick. Sometimes the punchline gets you square in the chops.

Heaven help the meek and mild. Heaven help us grumblers crushed beneath the heel. A chill in the wind sends a shiver through the shins, a scarecrow propped up on brittle pins, the vulnerable right on top of it. Slumped shouldered and earthward eyed, I tumble clumsily from step to step. Spilling down the shoulders of the the moment as it arrives, falling into so much untangled dust. The waver of the bandwidth, the uncertain purchase of the words. Come the lonesome, come the hunger. Come lust, come slumber as the meter turns over. Wander away with the world.