hallowed

Maybe I will light a candle. Maybe I will cast a spell. Clinging to the tangled smoke, kicking every tire. See it before it slips away, say it for the blood in your breath. We walk the high path above the precipice, we linger on the details, house of stars and luck of number. We watch our step and count out blessings, the sediment of sentiment, the mantle of the ancestors. I speak your name when I at last surrender, for there is nothing so true and treacherous as the heart. Though you wear sky and moon upon your brow, I name you among my missing. I visit you among the dead as the night rises.

How the old bones travel. How the light persists, the flicker of a candle, the downhill slide of every shine. As still as stone each ghost in motion, the caress of the shadows adrift in obliging brightness as it canters and trots. We open these well worn trails in the strobe of remembered sun, and the treasured touch of warm hands long after the power and the heat got turned off. Time strides through us as we send our whims rippling in all directions, intent and instance slipping off shoes and swapping skins. The holes long torn through yesterday and tomorrow. Open mouthed kisses between the living and the lost.

It isn’t that your charms elude me. It isn’t that your enchantments have gone soft. I am seized with the immediacy of my intentions, your light in my mind wild kisses and tangled limbs. I follow the carnal hungers through realms bereft of heft and flesh, burning each attachment into me like a brand. A face at the window chasing a train as it pulls away, your face fixed upon your destination, never even giving this keening a glance. We move on as our dead are settling, our courses continue on against the angle of our loss. Tomorrow ahead of the itinerary, eyes set firmly on the opening road. And so all velocities are holy. And so all love is ghosts.

machined

Gray for gray, silky shadow and sunken sun, the season has its say. Dawn slows and dusk lingers, the stars strut and stroll, occult through cloud and moon. The animal laments the cage bar by bar, singing its wounded song. The entity is mystified as its words turn to dust, suffering the incarnation and the many errors of this iteration. And so I arrive, a steady keening into the empty, a lonely smoking in the dark. I suffer at the culmination of the consequences, dead to the world but still plodding on. Worn out and obsolete I rattle on through the depths of the night. Only able to hone these hungers, fit only to resonate this one fixed want. This is how the pieces work. This is where they left the parts.

This is the B side of the life of the mind. This is the spill of shadow, this is the press of light. Stack the bricks and watch the clock, the world is never still, shifting gears and walking between skins. The earth a tumult of furious iron, seething to the sky while every mote and molecule makes its move. The soil breathes us in and out, every tribe and legion abiding by all the law that is, stardust still dust just the same. The sky we burn that first breath, the spirit loosed, humble clay and brambles crown. Each of us an effigy fed to a different flame.

So I’m smoking on the front porch, as lights incant and shadows bow, a fixture in the evenings and a fool on display. I fulfill routines designed around factors that no longer exist, clunk and clatter and sputter and fume. Simple facts become conundrums, the world you were built for never having come to pass, you serve out a sentence delivered by your head and a universe that doesn’t particularly give a fuck. I ache my ache, I imbue further static into the abstraction. Conversations curved around the gravity wells left by dreams collapsing, letters to once were lovers and past tense friends to encode and magnify. More and more, it’s just me talking. A skip around the maypole, a soft shoe on the grave. The depth of night steals this last quintessence, the candle resigned to the futility of its flicker.

red [aloud]

Looking, you lean

outside the window,

gaze reaching past the glass,

sprouting grass after

longed for rain turned

the dust and detritus into

earth again, red shoots

the due of this broken 

instrument, perception pared 

before you first opened

your eyes. Green is near

the border where the bandwidth

confuses, blues and reds instead.

The spectra that you separate

cling quiet to their frequency 

while words parse that

past what you can know.

So when I speak of the greens 

in blade or leaf I lose

the truth in translation,

my every thought approximation,

each expression an imitation of

the things people see and say,

so happy to greet each other,

so warm and freely they speak,

every color alive allowed.

read [allowed]

There is a crackle of cognition,

neural rivers run wild with light,

open eyes at once identify 

here amid the wheres ready for

the drowning all around. You

the story from root to crown,

the amble on from stone to star.

Pretty like a witness 

smiling to slow the time,

knowing only the past tense

once the notion mounts the gate.

Maybe the words burst

all the senses in one dash—

starlings in the crosswinds,

sparrow stippled heavens—

every wing at once. Maybe

they slow as you approach 

fear or fascination the thusness 

you hustle with your cards held close.

The savored pronunciation,

the hinted allusion chosen

the heart of your arsenal 

the murder of your every darling

lingering in each I love you

these letters read aloud. 

take this waltz

It’s a little past the golden hour, here at the moment of long toothed sun and tree clutched sky. The crows call out their signs and affiliations, setting to assembly. The usual suspects take their stations, traffic darting in dots and dashes, time and destination no doubt part of some grand code. All I get is belted by the sounds of indignant engines and waves of drive by bass. The heavens are painted straight down the bandwidth. Rumors all that I have to go on, and even the rumors won’t reach me here.

You can read it in the settling of ashes. You can see it in the gossiping stars. Any beat the feet will follow. Any wings sent to sweep you away. The great ball reels whether lover or dancer, the dance takes no prisoners. The show ever and always going on. Only I never had a dance card like Leonard’s, a wallflower from three walls over. I stumbled through the chorus line, here and there a solo or maybe giving some diva a lift. Mad for the theatrics but wrong for the role, I stuck to warm up work, and busking well away from the venue. My notices are poor, and few.

Inured to the outside, I’ve turned for the worse. I can’t seem to keep a heart, or work the words well enough to get a clue. Haunting these passages through the shadows, watching the numbers as they wane, steeped in the oblivion of the conversations had. I thump along without a partner, I spin along with the tireless skies and the fickle seasons, love the only reason and it shines so now that all reason has gone. The years fly away while the days plod on, the ringing of the rhythm through the empty of the room. All that I want there is no waiting for, all that I have this waltz hanging from my neck.

template

They barrel through here like it’s damnation alley, they drive like they were whistling through the graveyard in a panic. Driven by the ghosts of never good enough, driven by the tremor of the forever too tiny to face the night, cradled in the headlights as the end comes hastened in the rear view mirror. I hold my breath at the dash of a cat caught in the shine of the oncoming, its live still scraping by at nine. I commiserate with my traffic cursing ancestors, though I never shout slow down. Between the gravy and the gravitas, I am careful of commands. You can never know what the world might do if you tell it to.

I smoke like dusty incense upon a desolate altar, I smoke like a volcano indignant at faint praise. I sanctify moth and spider, the holy always heaping it on. I bless this mess with the tangle in the streets and trees, with the avarice of every mouth slavering for a circle of salt. Every taste and tongue is holy, the sacred is using every part of the ghost, the sizzle of each sacrifice the poem of every prayer. Every rope and binding a tether on the tension, one move and the lash becomes a leash.

Don’t mistake me, I’m smitten by the intermittence. I crave these kisses from the depths of a life long drought. My intellect is threadbare and my pockets full of knives and holes. I lean hard into the momentum and leave intuition to rule my footing and my hips. Like a story run down to  the cliche of just the facts, the myth appears as if a vision the moment I step into the quest. The words all up in arms as I chomp down upon this burning branch, this happenstance gathered as we are turned into this kiss. I am only the oldest ache dragging this flavor through field and star, that touch of tongue, salt and flesh. The magic that we lead with as the world slips away.

pilgrim on the road to nowhere

It’s not every day the rain hangs around, it’s not every day you get to feel the sun. It’s a story that was old before its first telling, it’s as fresh as the song on your lips. An old man laments and longs, wanting a world where it worked out once. The broken record skips and repeats the ancient prayer. Love me like you mean it, love is all you need, love waking you in the morning, love trickling down your skin. The years where we romanced the radio, where we planted flags on the dream of the moon. We long along ley lines and immortal hungers, we dance our ecstatics down to the devotions of our bones. Well below the shoulders of giants we bear the astonishing weight of the world. Kisses and incantations, copulations and the transit of our blood, this fever first in the ministry of the soul.

I am only fire bearing stories, I am only dull passions and the procession of the breath. I want how I want and I wish like I wish, though my steps are staggered and my welcomes all worn out. The world remitting untold pleasure, someone to hang around and watch the stars all fall. Simple, greedy, and unimaginative; a hunger fed by animal fear and moral lack. The knowledge that I am always arriving to the knowing, unable to follow along to these unsung songs, reading in forest and speaking in tree. Smoking lonesome in the night long after the fire’s gone died out.

Unknown by the words I claim or for the water I carry, I am still below the dusk. I write in clumsy groupings of letters, trying to favor Charlie Parker over the truck’s backing chimes, leaning over screen and cigar. I mouth out words and flecks, spittle in my whiskers and a knife in my back. Artless and unloved, creepy and unplacated, astir in the dross and filth of admission. The words follow my lead and take a hint, going nowhere with little purpose and meaning even less. A crow dropped a feather once and I caught it as it fell. I went to the crossroads in a George Herriman comic, blessed askew by the Pilgrim on the Road to Nowhere, phrase left like milk on the windowsill for the fey. Serving the great unseen with beans and a bindle, the foolscap all that fits.

interlude

I’m supposed to take a load off, but here I am with gravity in my lap. I’m supposed to rest up, but instead I work my wounds. No sleep for the wicked, no respite for the good, I try to idle below this tide of mind. Thinking up one side and down its corollary, the ball thrown at the wall comes back after its counterpart. The boundless attachments that tether and tear the claw and tooth of the continuity, to abandon the tree as the leaf leaves the limb only a virtue to the overtures, the unseen the shape of every self. Tossed upon the abstract and painted in the distinctions that they learned me, I ricochet around the affects while holding to the form. A years of hard taught pariah has left me fluent in adversary. It takes a lot of work for me not to take it wrong.

It was only yesterday this got started; I’ve been doing this for a thousand years. We work over the moment with wants and words, forever on this precipice, falling harder with every step. My heart flies south and I switch towards the rhapsodic, serifs prettying up the penmanship, the heights all rapturous about the statuary. It’s a low that stays hard put, no matter how you shuffle the say so, a story we all know about waking naked in the night. The urge to gather around flag or fire, the commiseration of weeped in beers, the company of bellies against the bar. Instead the devil takes a pasting for trying to have a word, the abyss gets an earful. All this age old sorrow, weary from the war. 

We go by the roads we travel, we go by the names we know. We grow towards what light we are allowed, shaped by hill and stream, laden by the mountains and the sea. The breadcrumbs are eaten by unseen birds as the bull mounts the moon. We arrive in this land of familiar strangers, hewn by work and tools we will never know, as if told in a story. As if sailing by the consent of the stars and with the wind on a lead. There is a heated argument between plunder and dissolution we show up in the middle of where we are urged towards teams and gods and flags. There’s not much to it unless you never learned how to play along. When you don’t get it, you make it up on your own. You can turn out to be anyone like that, even no one at all.

emeritus

Used to be we’d leaf through the obituaries, surprised and assured by who went when, counting down from the markers we hold when left behind. Used to be we’d split the paper, reading passages aloud. There’s a gravity to a habit halfway to how to be. There’s a something that awaits the work. The eight to the bar or the old one two, we echo out of range. Taught nothing like that’d learn you, wondering when all the accolades went home on their own. The moment traded in an instant for another round of what might have been. 

Now the words come rushing at you as wait with all your yesterdays, graybeard in the bug light, smoking like a tree struck by lightning. You see the stories as their odometers turn over, the mileage that going nowhere gets. You see the spiders work their beats despite the season’s trend. Stillness sews stillness, the once and future lost. The mark missed and the measure forever. The clerk at the liquor store calls you Chief. Indignant you know exactly how you earned it. Waiting like there was something coming, tending embers in the night.

It’s not as if I shed attachments, it’s not as if I picked my peace. The color of duty and the long walk in the dark. The crowd around helps to heap on the all alone. The work in blurbs and least devils. The barking dog at the heels of folly gathers around the carcass past the fall. The open hands, the emptied appetites, the rituals there to hold high the roof as nature takes the lead. I weigh in to the atmosphere on all manner of confident incompetencies, resting on my laurels of pratfall wounds and scattered ashes. I smoke alone as the hour grows ragged, wondering where I went.

method

Lately the words don’t like me. They arrive without a flicker, they set in without the feel. I rack them up again and again, despite being no better for the break. I no longer know who I’m writing to now that I no longer write to you. The same old dire mood, the same old used up man, insight all dried up and inspiration left in the middle of the night. It’s a fecund moon above this rain, and it drags me through the motions on my way down the drain. I sit and smoke as the lights go out, and I play my little tune.

The day fades and beauty visits in its bounty. The tree tops slowly turning into silhouettes, the varietal grays hanging off the clouds all brush strokes and puzzle pieces as the shadows become the street. The lights on down the street shining one lonesome window at a time, traffic in swerves and dashes shushing traction from the tarmac, the great reach of rain a deep breath behind the atmosphere. I scrape the scenery out of my eyes, stippling ersatz scribbles on the screen. There may be art, but there is always madness, the hard scrabble past the reflex into the burbling of the verbiage. This is how I greet the night.

I remember how the days stretched spread between our hands. I remember how the tongue tasted spent between breaths and kisses, the scattered phrases, the nearness of flesh. Somewhere some impulse to stot and soar beneath the umbrage of another cease and desist erupting from the soul diminished as the revelations swelled. Somewhere the machinery slipped a belt or gear, and the engine ain’t run right since. Another ending with the sun still gone. Another chapter on the cheap, the not nearly good enough transcribed word for word. The scene rife with lifted shtick and cartoon gizmos, the words run out as the night grows long. Smoke for the sky, rain for the staging.

traces

Each day I wake to ridiculous images, with the obstinance of ash tugging at the far end of the incense, the memory holding down the ghost. The story that it never was, the way I shape my lack and want. A mistaken meteor for the star of opportunity, a whim that has you by the scruff. Polarized between the shoulders, spin’s two cents against the probability fizzle, less and less to love. Each day the storm drags at my bones, this ghost of lick and spittle, every prayer I ever put you through. Nothing so solid as an absence, nothing so ringing as the rain. A smile that has forgotten where memory is everything, a magnet dragging a trail of sparks.

That’s not the bouquet you’re spitting, the branches shedding blossoms down your throat. All those years and only bruised bones and spilled salt, the passion of the sand, the kiss of the sea. The stacks of schemes and dishes, the grease glistening on your chin, these seances of steam and dusk. The mirror fixes its eyes upon you, and you pin its gaze at the wings. The press of now, the pull of yes, the light before the knowing. Always where the ghost goes, never by the book. Oh the words, but also where you look. 

This is the problem with a trainwreck, it’s coiled through the collateral. This is the trouble with a shipwreck, you’re forever what you were. Fires given and fruit offered, the afterglow of the more you know, the burning bite of wisdom always a slither in out in the weeds. You wait and wait for you want, you move capricious through the life you’re given. Sticking to the myths of the constellations, stirring the embers of the all that’s left, I drag the ghosts by their chains. The spell threaded through the blood, the forests and mountains blinded by sun and snow, eyes robbed of every gem a thousand graves ago. These dreams ripped out by the root, your beauty a lack that grounds me, fixed to the ash heap of an afterglow.

she comes

She comes riding on a raven.

She comes calling like a crow.

The vision in the dishes

soaking in a sink. Steaming

water running out the faucet,

the window half mirror

like dawn or dusk. Her face

bright in the basin of this

unhitched mind, habit taking

off the harness grazing 

through the hills of hazy

memory and half forgotten dream,

eyes too bright and sharp

to leave a sight uncut, 

this new moon whisper

as the moon fills fecund. 

She comes on wings occluded,

she comes on words

spat across the shadows, 

there and gone between the breaths.

dry click

Comes the day past due

flame tongued and kindling boned

passing skins and sparks,

whetted on wild grays and

the too soon blues, settling 

between mirror and razor,

thriving in the bindings of

speech and want, the volume of

the vessel, the swaying of the bridge.

Pine needle brushwork painting

certainty out of silhouettes 

as the word come down goes around

again, the answer inscribed on

mortal punctuation, no more

name, no more traveler, 

no more leaning between 

the reachings of light.

This lost day, this absent bullet,

all out of bangs and bucks.

I pause a moment and 

again it begins to go.

a map of the wind

So all at once the sky goes wild, it drops down through tree and gutter, commanding each swaying limb and reeling leaf. The blue gives way to the laden gray, rain waiting high up in the fly galley, waiting for something to work the ropes. It’s the moment where we nudge the wheel, the moment we put hands on our chains, puppets knowing how to make music from taut strings. The earth grumbling the belly, rain waiting like a held breath, like a deep inhalation before a bout of speech. The last blues vibrating below the firmament now, the resonant bandwidth all bias, the spirit fulminating in every hesitant expression. It’d be a good time to call down the storm, timing and where you stand the better portion of readiness. 

I stumble out a few sloppy circles, I trail smoke and song, I offer up and work the remainders. Soon the sidewalk is dappled and the streets run slick. The rain sweeps gentle down the scenery, just like the ritual and the weather app said. Primate grade guile and gall, taking in the signs, and all that jazz. Now the scent of petrichor from the dry and thirsty earth, some dose of precipitation to measure as it colors in the pavement and darkens all the dirt. The calligraphy known by the brushwork, the way the dice recognize us. The words return jumbled about the geography in the stillness of each breath.

There an element of tail chasing, a bit of chasing after a gust seized hat, the story cleaving close to the form. The wind works the body and fills the lungs, the wind lays waste to the best laid plans. Thieving from the gutters and kicking around the crowns, claimed by demon king and lawless djinn and the boundless emptying of books, each breeze and bluster keeps its own counsel. It inks and erases with one brush, deft and expert in its art. We pace its parameters, we hunker down as best we can to bear its wrath. So we learn to look both ways. So we learn to read the room. We pass around the magic like we’re offering a light. The shapes left between the lines, the stories every morning tells. Each of us a wishing well, every soul and bone a map of the wind.

resound

We arrive in bright collision, we arrive awake and nameless, the stone rolled away and the world open wide. We come in shroud and shift, abruptly under judgement, the dice besides the bet. Here at last this moment under notice. Here at last the brink of long prophesied tomorrow, a catalog of skies and flowers, burning daylight in these dreams of favored flesh. Stitched in pitched algorithms, pooling into every abandoned step, this wash of want and way. We echo in the presence of these rituals we witness, gazing over the shoulder to catch the just missed moment, trailing words that circle back. We skate figure eights across the frozen lake, stack stones upon the beach only visible eagle eyed and mountain tall, speaking to our lost hearts like first gods. 

So we are revealed, revered in the rear view, known by the paths we travel. So we wear out names, these spells of blood and ghost, the listing of the ancestors by name and bone. Our tongues fold and linger, the stories go and go. A turtle or a pomegranate, a rabbit humoring death, the word worn shapes we make of the dark. The muddle of roads left shining stubborn in the tidal pool, every wave a still life spread around the space. The hungered after ripples that are only going away, the iteration hard clockwork and settled elements, prayers and spells and the ringing of bells. Comes the continuity through crack in the gutter, we abide the way of the weed.

From the blooming of the hills to the fallow in the fields, come flowers casting loves spells fairies fucking every forest, every ditch dirt and desert strewn with spirits giving this romance their all. These wheaten golds and honey clusters living in our blood and breath. This feast upon the bones of fallow titans, each appetite leading the world by its belly and its lust, rings of bronze and steel. The words give way as we walk the woods and haunt the forests,  breadcrumbs sprinkled from before the wandering, before we claimed victory being the only animal always lost. Oh, antecedent! Oh, thunder! Let us sound out across broad winter and through the riddle deep sea. Let the moon reflect our glory, humble in the hubris that we reap. 

sock it to ‘em

I never know what will make them happy. I don’t get what people like. I admire the art as impact and intention, the action and the work. The breath before they belt it out, the brushwork’s grab and grind, the canvas playing catch with the palette. Art for art’s sake and so goes the serpent swallowing its tail, the ocean in the waves. Like the patchwork patterns cut from sunlight and leaf shadow, I am stamped out from inference and negative space, the notes they didn’t play keeping you up all night. The light buffeted by the wind another set of lensings, the washing of the numbers, the gravitas of the stars. A lot leans into the lap of the observer, meaning not the least of it. The words make their journey, you are the river they ride.

I sit and stare, my position my partition, another aperture built from the limits of the materials available. A vision threaded through the filters of my limits, biased by the revery of being, this not that here not there among the ten thousand acts and laws. Every sense and de facto sentience shuffled through stacks of schema, shapes and the luckless incarnationed and a dance of tongue and rhyme. To be here is to miss the most of it. There is nothing to it, the everything that matters. The statistics will bear me out, here in the innumerable once offs.

This is the strike across the sky, the indulgence of subtle color, the weight of the atmosphere at the changing of the guard. This is the heart pleading, blood lapping up the breath, this bead woven into the restless ribbon of the spirit. Doses of dirt and sun, dregs of dark partings and blasphemous elixirs, the agreement all fine print below this ever imminent exclamation point. Stuck between the being and the mystery, strung along the daisy chained words, crowning the imminent whim I encompass I sit and stare. The becoming moon lit and laden in the shift of sky between tree and eaves, I trail smoke and moments into the forever of a sullen dusk.

sweet tooth

Mostly it’s the ghosts that go 

unnoticed through the moonlit garden

barefoot over gravel and bramble,

running intangible fingertips through 

these pools of light and shape, rippling 

memory and make believe.

It’s never what or whom so much as

where I can put my paws on it,

how to hold it close enough to sink

my teeth in. I hold no claims,

I am without excuse. I indulge

appetite after appetite seeking 

what will please. The mockery in

your eyes and that Mona Lisa

smirk, the stories you do not share

as the words implore and exult, 

your life and limb a tossed off

archetype, prayer and priestess,

altar and goddess the way I tell it, 

me it seems every boy called to the yard.

Lab rat, born pigeon, or lucky bum

flushed or fleeced I am that

unruly beast, hungry ghost

amid the legions and the hosts,

famished and matchless at the feast.

Greasy grinned from the glistening

bones cracked for the marrow,

I hunger past the trappings of the clock,

attached reckless to the instant of impact 

this sweet tooth for all you are and aren’t.

lachrymostly

Maybe I’m waiting on the moon in the window. Maybe I’m waiting on the dinner bell to ring. It’s going to be the same old drag because I’m the same old load.  Pruned down the branched synapses just to the bruised and bitter, firing up the same old neurons to keep the litany on repeat. A chair in a room, sound and light and the worn down body with the wound tight nerves. A saxophone from sixty years ago sounds out. I can see the moon if I turn my head a little. Maybe I will take a look.

So the moon’s on its mission, reeling with its grasp entangled with the clutches of the earth. We’re all along for the hurtle. I’m working the old sore spot, hammering on my stories. Patching up the holes riddled through me with aimless words, stitching together the shreds, adding to the pattern from the palette of shavings and static. Add a few more sentences, tamp down the hopeless with dead eyed star gazing, let the tears zig and flow. So we live in the gods’ dreaming, flickering away on the surface of these endless depths. This slow dissolve from blood to ghost is the ache that’s always on.

The words don’t matter, what counts is the collateral damage they leave. Shards of thoughts too sharp to leave, fragments of fragile tenders lodged forever in the center of your being. A chair in a room, music and a lamp. These ample repetitions through phrase and fragment cruising ‘round the turnaround, small angry engines screaming through the lanes and courts. The moon low in a corner near the sill, the going on still going, the gone still gone. The words not on speaking terms, the tears always showing up empty handed.

burnt

There are those of us disposed as smoke, those of us dispatched by an open window, those of us who come and go and remain unknown. They work the words around us, they pile on anthem, pledge, and prayer. They pass out names and epithets, brutal truths and empty threats. We bleed and suffer, we atone and we lament. We pitch in when the hat is passed, we carry their meanings and their suffer their points as we break and burn. All to be another unmarked grave, another empty overcoat, a digit among the numbers while our names remain unlearned.

It doesn’t matter when my eyes went out. I couldn’t tell you when the fire died. You think you’re the spark, you think you’re the flame, you think there’s something special about the fuel that’s you. It’s hard to keep the focus, it’s hard to hold the form. I’ve moved from gutter to ash heap. My tenses refuse to agree, and I let ‘em fight it out amongst themselves. There’s nothing left of me but a little smolder and a couple lights left on. We are ghosts walking through the partitions, carrying the unspoken parts of the conversation. The moon’s magic tossed upon the waves.

Our lives pass by unseen. Our voices ring out unheard. There’s a lot to see, there’s a lot to say. Dreams painted in avarice and lucre woven into gospel while humble wishes for simple needs are held as blasphemy, the common good disappeared in a turn of the cups. Bearing one inheritance, the capricious greedy few destroy most of it while using the hard parts to beat on the rest. They do not hear the chorus that carries on from before there were voices, they deny all that was written before words. We are the direction of the energy, the incidental disbursements of force and matter in opposition. The spark to the fuse, the burn to the bomb. A little heat and a little light into this vast expanse.

outside the sun

Each dusk it passes the baton of dueling burdens, the bright glare of daylight to the weight of the whole sky at once. The wind going wild, whipping every tree into a frenzy, stampeding all the bags and leaves. Ghost town suburbs running out the clock. All the hopes of the day dashed into shards like the frail vessel that carried them, all the wishes of the dusk already all but dust. The local sun gives way to a host of farther stars, heaven only the speed of disbelief suspended, the universe always including you. The chimes sound, an exalted eminence soon to arrive. Gusts and the kaze of callow kami blow down limbs and shingles. Night falls hard.

Indoors the cacophonies disambiguate, they break down to the building blocks of our inattention, so many bells and whistles and feathers to follow. Nightfall now, and I take to the screens, music from the television and the words on this tablet. I never quite rise to face the day, at night at best I’m treading water. The cosmic rough and tumble to the carnal bump and grind, the trial of watching it all come true. A lifetime of intermittence, these windshield wipers set to “SURPRISE!” On a little, then a whole lot of off. Outside the sun, it’s Oop-Pop-A-Da and vampire etiquette. Nobody’s handing out invitations.

Now it’s old man bones and the night off the leash, chimes pealing out as the wind won’t relent. It’s the death of dreams and clear eyed facts, and the litany of epithets and disasters attached to the frame. Biding time until the curtain comes down, waiting around until these last lingerers pass, thinking in bullets and nooses. No click bait, no breaking news, I’m halfway through my sixth decade of the blues. I’ve reached the stage where most of the friends I’ve had will next think about me when stumbling across the obituary. I’ve reached the stage where I mostly talk to animals. Maybe there’s an object lesson. Maybe there’s a moral to pin this story on. These words will never tell! I’m only getting any better at getting worse. 

afterlife

It might pay to remember 

you are shaking the hand of 

someone whose afterlife 

imagines you on fire

through their fleshed out forevers.

You may be wise to consider 

who you hand your fate,

this pittance, this long haul.

Hungry as the horse is held, 

your life the ashes in

the garden, the dead cold crunch

beneath their boots. You carry

them from round to round, 

propping them up in the clench. 

The ones who only see your smile

in numbers of dead teeth.

repertoire

Before I rise I tease my feet, testing for the latest pain, rehearsing this stunt of standing up. Typically I get it on my first take. I’ve been at it for a while. I step and stumble, unhinged choreography to unheard music, the herky-jerky heel toe gone wrong a preview of spills to come. I am a bundle of coaxial cable, I am a bouquet of shames and haplessness. Here at the twilight of my usefulness, here on the long way down.

The tree is all a whisper with the shimmer and sway weaving through it, the day headed west and smoke loitering in the eaves. It doesn’t take much navigation to get from day to day. The earth does most of the work, your part is largely not falling off. It gets trickier as your pins go from stalwart oaks to rickety splints, but that’s the great thing about the earth, there’s no shortage of things to hold onto. A feather here, a wing there, something to witness as we dissolve and despair. The attachments outlast their bonds, reaching for the next breath.

So another day is done. So the night is on the rise, a tower staring down. Things are passing, lives are changing, younger folk walking different dogs staring at their phones. I wind down slow, watching my pieces go missing, watching the endless changing of the guard. Here and gone, was now not, the impoverished spirits of an imprudent soul dwindling into silence. Tricks and treats and folded ephemera, words gathering like dust. She loves me, she loves me not. How I do go on. 

eyes open

Sometimes the day trails off and you’re left there staring. Sometimes the hours go witnessed with little worth, the moment sitting there, waiting to see you what you say. Scratching at skins and thoughts within, watching the words run down the clock. Looking up to see a number, thinking the number you see. Little ways to abide the listless infinities passing unattended between the hours, lack and want the tide of your ocean, crowded rooms and crashing waves and the vast expanses stretching sleep to sleep. Uncouth operators and the sound of the drier tumbling bedding in the dark. Grease and gristle, and the razor always waiting to cut in.

Some still wait for answers, some want you to draw them a map. It’s the ceiling, it’s the spider, it’s the singing on a tv show. It’s waiting to pass out candy, it’s waiting on the time to change. You watch it as it washes over you. You watch it while it passes you by. Out of love, no glory, just a reliquary full of wounds and a couple pieces of brief love stories. I leave out a lot because most of it I miss, living on memories and words spoken only once. I leave out a lot, because a lot goes into a lifelong lonesome. 

How we should have sung with the windows open, salt in the air and eyes on the road. How we should have kissed in those long cold moments mistaken. It’s all soapbox and spellbinders, preposterous sagas in the wake of someone growing bored, at last over the nonsense and already out the door. The ubiquity of the blind spot when soothed with claims and kisses, the role you seem fated to play. Spilled milk and done deals, used to Minotaur and labyrinth and haunting with intent, the litany in perpetuity. Dark streets and lit windows, the shave and the shower. Eyes open, seeing nothing near, as regrets and memories mercilessly “yes and” me. Eyes open, and the night’s just getting started.

bookmark

The light leans in late in the day, a cathedral of clouds and bandwidth, the sky within a glimpse of your eyes. This is the instant that engages, this is a mouth fumbling between answers and a kiss, the heavy handed fates or the slow roll ritual mitigation. We of treadmills and turnstiles, we of bit and tack, doing the works of heaven and earth. The smoke coils out enough rope, stitched together by vestigial wants and threadbare repetitions, anchored to the dance of ashes. Worn smooth and small by this insistent beauty, worn down by ancient fustigations and worldly curses. The plying of the grays and greens, the crows at last headed home.

Why bother to proclaim, why bother to believe. The will finds a way. Words to tow a ruthless truth like a vice to take a tooth. Words to stir the grease and gristle, words to sop the well licked plate. Over and over they fold under the rigors of your tongue, the flame as it flatters the ash. Traveling through the tangle of lung and blood, passed through taste and touch. We are the weave, both web and tapestry, both swaddling and the sack. The words are always working their way into the world. Let them fill in the colors, let them bear the beating of these black wings and hungry flashing dragonflies, the thought trailed unformed into ellipsis….

The sun says adios and the appetites all take aim. The hungers keen a little in the gathering dusk. Leaves dance reels and tarantellas, the wind alway ready to whet some waiting ghost, a shape of things taken and violence left speaking. We step slow, we keep our eyes soft, the changes unchastened by our wit and gravitas. Gone and gone, on and on we go, trailing sparks and steam. Our embouchure fitted clever to our engines and instruments, we turn the time and light into song and symbol. This turn of the earth, this stack of stones. The words that will replace our blood and bones.

the juggler

Here is the soft burn of daylight. Here are the brass bleatings of the night. Twilight always in some dull sense, some half reflex half demand, separating the schema with the usual swapping shells. What is left to significate but the order of occurrence, what is left to incarnate but the ease of the sap and the grain of green wood? Inquisite as the magician or frolic as the fool, what is left to arcane but the course of these collisions, or to shape them with empty hands and physical intention. Find a pattern for the pieces, line them up like days or ducks, the turning wheel or the cascade of instances. There’s something to good footwork, there’s a bonus to knowing what to do with your hands.

It goes without saying that the deck is stacked. The puzzle is begotten by the jig, the building begins at the brick. The order of suite and arcana, the naming and the sigil, the symbols in our clay. The spirit will not hold still, it’s stitching has no end. The agent and the entity move through the mindset, they keep the vahana at a cantor, they call cadence and embody all the kata at hand. The weave is awake with the dreaming never sleeping. The juggler gets a handle on the happenstance, they go with the flow that fits.

We live with the weight of all this falling, gravity and inertia always taking their cut. Still the world is full of flight. Wings and whims and meteor wishes. The candles on the altar, the candles on the cake. We work the wheel and burn and feel, devouring time and life. The direction of the reading depending on the sojourn of the hand. The fickle moment, hanging upon the feathers of the swallow. This magic, this faith, this sustainable creation. The breath and blood of the open stance, we build trust out of thin air and the objects available. The only freedom, acknowledging every force and form as one, the revealed path another slight of hand.

bemused

For a while there I thought you found me, the shambles in the brambles, the shadow casting words into the fire. For a while there I touched the world you left trembling in your wake. There were sharings, there were stories, there were parking lots dappled in rain and grays. Whole days lost to love and water, sticking to the spine of your medicine shine. You put a glorious crown on pity and mild curiosity, shared some salt and smoke, offered up a bite. It’s the return to the remainders I begrudge the most, but there’s not much left to me but regrets. It is in the dusty sun, with some gibbered notion that I can not share, I feel your absence most.

So goes the slipping of the seasons, so goes the burning of the years. Deadfall accumulates, wounds accrue. Waves of mutilation and sets of nested curses, the dissolution of the heart and the backyard body count. The documentation of dour days rife with squander and oblivion. The bewildering ways that life moves on and the transience of intimacy. Fingers stiffen as the world slips through them, attending to the service, surrendering to the burn. 

I wake with a start past sunset, the room around me lit by television. The days blur, the days stagger, the stillness and the static grow. Notebooks spill over, unfinished poems and letters never sent. Fragments of addresses, phone numbers flaunting their cryptic digits, phrases laden with mystery where the meaning was once. Something that I meant to say when the words were working, something that I could have said when the words worked both ways. That ghost of a laugh there behind your eyes, seeing the joke as it played out. That Mona Lisa smile, the promise thick with irony, your heart almost off the clock. The blank of a page proving something.

the habitual

I could go the way of smoke, tobacco for the broad strokes, cannabis when I want to swing it from the rafters. I could billow and plume depending on the direction of the breath, rising as I disappeared into sky and wind. Any little something to pin on the season, any little ritual to help shape the day. There is the dread of time, and the dread of self. That lamp that won’t be extinguished, that fire that will not be doused. Someplace to hang the numbers from, somewhere to put the needle.

The mind ties its knots with coiled proteins and the revealed bandwidths, making strata and cutting puzzles from the sky. The muse sticks their fortuned fingers in and stirs the pot. The animal scents it out while the entity licks the spoon. So what if I am all wish and swoon? Better beings than me have left lesser fragments hanging, embraced by gravity and the shameless pawings of the wind. Better angels than mine have trudged on for less. 

Again I write as the light runs down. Again I smoke with the flow of the east, the face first fall into starlight. Nothing much but a notch on the long toothed post. Nothing but a box of ink blocked off on a calendar, all the subtle incantations forgotten, all the supple tongues folding in languid obscurity. Dogs bark and children play, traffic at its turn, the twilight doubles its portion. The same old words make another walk on, spilling towards the gray horizon, my heart another habit gone to ground. 

surface tension

It’s poetry to pay attention.

It’s poetry to dig a hole—

don’t take it from me—

ask any poet you know.

For me it’s crows in the morning,

motorcycles passing with dreams

blowing smoke in my eyes,

so says the day, so goes

the dreaming spilling over—

a cigarette, a cup of coffee,

a face you’ve never seen.

Of course you follow premonitions.

Of course you practice some

small auguries, tea leaves and 

glistening guts, feathers plucked 

from some station of the sky.

It’s poetry to stay off topic

while belaboring the point,

sticking to the skins of things

when gravity runs aground.

open

 The crows break formation, their flight stretched across the sky, silhouettes flickering through the web of tree in player piano notation. Reading is a steady gig, remembering what it looks like when it means a thing, knowing what to look for in the scrawl. I like to think my book is open. I like to think I look like the little I seem. So I smoke beside the door. So I sleep with the window always open. This passing through and through.

You know it like there’s no one coming. You know it like the wound wet and fresh. The glistening beneath the fading sky. The weight of all this failing light. You know the way these words are going. You know enough to get the gist. It’s a letter between unlikelies. It’s the folly before the fall.

I can’t see I really see the season. The clock and the twilight, the cars with their headlights on. It’s not that I don’t believe them. It’s not that I resist. It is another artifact of culture, another set of etiquettes. The assumption that someone’s watching both hubris and acknowledging unseen eyes. I pass along these vague translations, a schoolboy mimicking the grammar of the spells. It relies on illumination and scant bandwidth, a story carried within your skin, the unwitnessed and yet known. It is the wings tilted towards the updraft, the time between the fire and the smoke.