align

The day leaves without saying, the sky astir, the earth in ruins. The day is gone without a single glance, the signal of at least glancing back never received or sent. Just foundlings in the fundaments, the same old feelings dashed into the ground, a change in the air as the skin finds out. Something dead and something dear, a reach through the blue and past the sway, roots and crowns and right of ways. Scratching at some surface of the world that didn’t show, the imagination burning bright, perception goes another way. Now the time and the insistence of the husk, slowly this dance from want to quintessence, pared down by the path.

This dusk and the ways left wanting, the cool hue of shade upon the pavement, the constant proffer of used smoke. Adrift in the drawling traffic, a fixture of inconsequential transience, the proffer and the appetite. Knowing the streets by the corner and curbs, signs parked at the intersection, sigils in paint and glass. The winds lean wild and the empty opens up, a car or two then graven pavement. Cool and futile flesh pressed against the sharp end of the moment, a direction to heel to and lament. 

Mostly it is in the scraps of sky and haunts of moon, the weight of the proposition, the drag of the thought. The waiting it out while the once was or the wished for tries to have its say, the hot in the atmosphere, the slow throat of incense trickling into heaven. Clay and ache and relic bones, the words that never leave you alone, remembering the deception revealed before the final slight. The duration this seething heap of woe and sorrow, the sharpness leading each feel, the here and now only so much thanks but no thanks. This shelter, this animal, this switched on circuit. Another compass joining the pointing at the earth. 

zero

It lines up along the impulses, ought or naught unto eternity, the utility of the dance of opposites. It is the tongue of flesh and the tongue of fire, these analogs of hunger, these waves of want and wish. The twinkling of machine inklings pitching woo with the entanglement of language, thoughts like stars dancing upon the midnight tides. Perception directed with intimacy and audacity as the wheel turns and turns. This life a fuse offered up to one blazing now, the missed moment always seen by the spark of its immediate extinction. The pride of punctuation, phrase taking and homespun idolatries. The wisdom leaning witless into the halted existence, wantonly pawing at null sets and snuffed singularities.

It is there in the cold in my fingers, the dwindling there in my grasp, the blood slowly gives up the fight. The tattered ends of the tapestry, our resplendent escapes into the sea of genes cut short for the organism, those missed connections and social deficits adding up to a map of eternity. Life lives to fight another day, those fated to end up smashed upon the grill not missed one but. I smoke these heavy metaphors, full of despair and attrition as my number comes up.

Another strange rain, the climate changing spots as it goes. A crow explores a plastic bag abandoned on the curb. Traffic passes shushing home on slickened streets. My hands burn to their aching bones, the animal frailty of my day to day ferocious and unyielding. Under whatever sky suffices, beneath any looming brunt, the countdown never relents. The beauty of black wings and street side appetites, the toil of mind and time, the magic of never knowing and never being enough. The mystery means to keep you missing, rapt and ecstatic staring holes through the waxing moon. The number of the loosed breath, the number of the journey’s end, wedded with hungry belly and empty hands to a symbol you can only not know.

circle jerk

Another wasted year, another circle around the circuit. Another wished for ending that never came near enough. Fifty six years, thirty of them well after I should have been planted in the past tense. This sick turn around the mulberry bush, waiting on the weasel to go pop. Years of bedtime wishes never to awake, as the body atrophies and the mind fragments, words and images and conversations sealed in this dull and fragile skull. Damned if you do, damned if you’re done, this life is wasted on me. You wake up, old and alone, aching for the end.

A lifetime of life unworthy of the word, nothing but a reliquary for hatred and mockery, a pariah plumed with expletives and contempt. Holding tight to what little seemed reciprocal, cleaving to the way the winds seemed to blow, ending up with the receipts of the imagination. The won love, the returned affections, all the stories you keep hoping come true. But I don’t know how to be a person that is worth it. I don’t know how to hold onto any value where all that I cherish is worthless. The liars and hustlers and thieves thrive, in this, the shittiest of all possible worlds.

I had hoped not to make it to this birthday the way I had hoped to perish before my last. Of course, it looks like I’ll have to handle this on my own. I am trash awaiting disposal, and hopefully I will achieve my end before the year is through. It isn’t just me that needs to be done, but if you think you have a reason to hang around, that’s reason enough. As for me, I can’t keep being miserable just so I can lighten someone else’s load. I am through with dissemblers and deceivers, and take no comfort in your long standing lies. I’ve only ever been a fool, useless and ugly and nothing worth the effort it takes to circle the drain. 

obstacle

Sometimes an instrument, sometimes an obstacle, I take shape late and give up easy. The sun has too much gumption; I let the typo have its way: I hit my bumps and potholes at speed. I blow a tire, I break an axle, I drag these chains throwing sparks. It’s the show that goes on, the proof of life gone to seed, the spectacle after the look away. It’s there— right there! But I can’t reach it. It’s there, and at most I am a ghost. The remainder of so much meat and miserable. The enduring afterthought.

The days pass fast, but the ghost goes slow. The carcass littered with curses and flashing lights, all manner of foreboding warnings and prophecies rotting within. I mix my carcinogens, I read my fortune in bones and gutters, the world pulling away with its lights off kicking gravel. I worked out my worth in words, and it wasn’t a figure I wanted to find. The flesh is weak, but the spirit goes first, the soul another joke on me. I smoke the latest charity, my body keening for redemption. Another flight I’m not fancy enough for.

There’s a point past bounce back, the energy finally insufficient to overcome the inertia. The local ache of bone and being clear in their testament, while the devastation of abstraction and expired intimacy dither in their poignant protests, their common complaint that green eyed devil me. Outsider and obstruction, incomplete in astonishing detail, an affliction to exile and shun. This long lonesome in decrepitude and constant grumbling, the earth alone to hold. A want for words on repeat as decades turn to dust.

short form

There was never a want for words, filling in the margins, making up for time. The far side of this elicited ache, the heavy haul of flesh grasping at the atmosphere, a glut of abstractions meant to justify all this breath and blood. Conversations caught mid cadence, my voice aloud elaborating my bias, sorting ghosts and ephemera. Would that I did, would that it were, these beasts of want and dream. Nothing but the wait for the space to say, the will to choose a way. The medium and the tools at hand having their way with the supply and demand.

There’s the light despite the fading sky, the blue as it is beset with gray, the sun still having its say. There is the throat of smoke and the wisps of the wind. The song as it moves along, music taking to the gutter, the singing clinging to the trees. It has come a long way to know the dull attentions of this much alone, where my limits slough into fragments, sound and sight and this kiss goodnight. You stroll across my mind, but do not settle. The gone suits you now that you’re gone for good.

Not that it amounts to much, once loosed into the language. Not that there’s much of a market for what I do, mouth the sacred shapes of fetishes, paw at gaudy baubles and greasy mementos muttering hyperbole and sacrilege into the night. The wait and the want, the all fall down. Down to the ache, down to the burn, hard bit by the never learn I trace these few scant words. Here at the high point as tomorrow comes barging in, the lowdown ever lower, just wished after kisses grabbing after the dusk. Just the words and the once were, and the never will again.