dwell

It is here that I sink beneath the horizon. It is here that, like the sun and moon, I dwell below the sea. Lovely pea green across the ocean blue, the journey of the eldest practitioners that we still elaborate, the song in the heart along the lilting waves. Lovers with their paths now parted, the dirt at the notional fork. Ritual a machine language, molecular engines to catch the eyes of existence. A sorting of the so and sos towards this lush ever presence, a few licks of the nursery rhyme, a hammering of the pulse. That sense of sinking, this unpleasant effervescence, the weight of limb and the press of breath. A brief halo of bubbles escape as you sink, flesh among the flood of myths. 

The symbols settle like sediment, sealing off paths and rivers, muddying up the tongue. These skills that pile up as the culture condenses, these certainties set in our own stone. As magic as money, as tragic as any football plucked before the kick, the joke we take at face. Animals that hunger for the words to go so, each impulse devoured and spent as breath and ghost, the synapses rippling with memory and anticipation. We sort through our tastes and shapes and agree at least to be aggrieved, senses rising from the reading of a sentence, the skip rope spell that raises up a reel. The world that we’re done with never quite through. 

This is grief that goes with missing kisses. This is the spinning kicking gravel, stuck bad in some way off track. It is done, but never over. It is gone, but it shows up each day. Maybe sad, maybe pretty, maybe just a formality of the further failure. Broken down to thoughts and habits, to the persistence of this system of words and ways. The lost and the wrong compound until they are a second skin, the first whiff of you anyone gets at a glance goes the story. The story that you learn while you’re taught your place. A whole world where you have no purchase, all these impacts that made a voice out of these lost threads. A style made from my stranded curses and selfish prayers. 

wane

It’s no different now that the word is out, there’s no difference now that the moon remits its luminescence, the sky still too blue to know which wanderers at last align with your precious sentience which shape at last you grant. So strange how these horizons move and apexes hold, the turning of heavens, the tickings of the earth. A shadow pressed like a flower, the arc of the beckoning and the bloom. The sun tips its hat, the stretch of light heralding in the incarnate dusk, this old whisper of synapse and signal. Oh this meat and bone. 

I slept through most of the last unmasking, catching the embodied moon staring through my curtains a few days ago, turning my back to the archetype as if I had a choice. I dream dark and drear, sleeping in self defense. Too much less and less all at once, I say because this is yet another saying. Spells cast from the twitching lips of the flesh in fever, oaths burned into smoke smudged across the dancing winds. Will you go to your window? Will you reach for your pen? I sit in this long drag of last light and hard fall, neither now or again. Hungering depths and tasks unmet, all roll and no bet.

This want of moon, this wish of work towards intention, all the yammering of a heart that knows the number. To attend to the missed moment, to turn the corner of the labyrinth and find the exit sign in neon relief. To step off the carousel with the ride completed, loosed from the pain and ache of the fail and fall. Some slice of wonder witnessed, some sense that there was a moment of intersection, a right shared in the way of things. Instead the wind rises to the spirit of general heckling and ridicule, a sentiment parsed in heaps of numb symbols, hope huddled up in a corner.

apostasy

It’s penetrated the foundation, it’s cracked the bright blue firmament, this smoke hardened heart. The arteries thicken and slow, the mortal blow a fist and a scalpel, a hurled brick and a dull blade permeating this fester of meat and mind. The nerves burn and fizzle, hot sparks and blunt howls. The whole of being turning into fragments and blurts. Words dribbling down my beard as I bury my breath star to star and stone by stone. Words thumbed from touch keys and the lumbering of blood, the continuity will tell you when it’s through with you. The scorched tongue touches the lips so slick and tender you think maybe all your telling is done. Then the mystery begins to contravene your conventions. Again you’re preaching against the tide, waves crashing down, fustigating you faith first.

There’s no pinnacle of abstraction to speak of, though it’s only the ghost that goes. There’s no banner to billow, no flag to proudly unfurl. It is the bones and their burdens, the animal always urging away. I scramble for purchase, I adjust my center and shift my stance, this self of skill wrapped around the empty I embody. Traffic passes, my cigar goes out, I gaze over drugstore cheaters as I feel around for a lighter. I drag at the cheroot, the flame feeling out the fire, this ritual at once this moment and a dozen intersections of the unintended intimate. Habituated to the text and the chemistry, the entity turns over. Burning in words and sparks.

I sit and smoke, so on and so forth, adjusting my breathing and moving my body according to the latest varietal pain. I do the things I have done before, heavy with the thoughts of what I will never do again, just old man war stories and a hunger for the halcyon never was. Still threaded with all manner of want and longing despite all the oblivion and devastation, these micro doses of subsistence hedonism, the paths and tangles of this tumbling down. This press of intention arising out of this litanous return, this poorly incarnated process spitting reasons, setting suns and rising winds. A breeze drawn through the reliquary, these prayers to faraways and long losts, this change of station the offering all along.

aperture

I have reached the age of unreliable instruments and staggered sense, staring over the foxtail swallowed yard, gaze fixed hard on the figment blazing in the residue of my thinking. Thoughts burned into the meat, icons and myths and the complications adjacent to abstraction, wheels that spin some ancient spark as my engines turn over. It is the persistence of absent objects and names we never speak out loud. The things the senses learn to anticipate, this endless urge to simulate these bricks and blurs passing while I sit and smoke, words to skew the witness tugging on the fabric. Words to weave and echo, the math best left to the afterburn. 

The world bites down on my vestigial stare, slapdash shadows and motion mottled light. The worrisome turn of fantasy holding my every attention, a separation from sight and sense, this modicum of meat and machinery bristling with unbirthed worlds wanting the purchase of words. An incantation awaiting invitations, the words always there in swarms, free at a moment to burrow deep or take flight. The dappled asphalt and cracked concrete spilling weeds, chain link geometry threading the perspective, this smoke in my heart and throat obscured from the motive as the code takes over. This art an illness overflowing, an aesthetic of the weight of the great unseen held in the pressures of the flesh. So want begets want, and ache begets ache, but the work of the world needs no witness or word.

It is this patch on laughter, this plodding tread that becomes the path, this harness that you learn to pull whatever wagon or plow they hitch you to. The wide open limits of the roads you know, the sight unseen of the other side of the pass, the moon and what it obliterates. The rough touch and the gentle, the busted knuckle and the folded crane, objects now nothing but fetishes to burn the soul bright enough to shine unfathomed distances. These flashing fragments, this blinkered vision, these laden graves carried over from the equation: the shutter speed, the focus, and the aperture. These frailties falling harder than the flesh into earth, the reaching that remained a stranger, these reasons always arriving late. The want inhabited left just words left to sift and scatter. Every star so far away as to have always been gone.

incidental

It’s not the sparrows in the feeder, it’s not the doves on the wing, it’s not the blue blazes sky and the wind woven pines casting some cool with their shadows, some respite for a sinner come a sunny day. It isn’t the tremble in the telling, or the foretold dogging its day, cracked pavement and each shadow soft to the touch. The words work the stretch of tense and the scope of scale, hand me downs and ne’er do wells, heavily laid in the stir and the steer. The drag of wish the straying breath, the whisper as a touch, so attuned to the trip and turn of the arc of the slow burn. The heft of the memory as I think it back alive. The spark of that kiss the moment it is mentioned. Here among the begrudged gods and the hapless magic, we arrive.

So it goes, this rigmarole. So it goes, the warmth lingering on the lips. A wild hare, a pursuit of prophecy pronounced off the cuff, the countdown to this hungry arrival. All the days of bleak ache and resonant empty, the terms of mitigation and emergence somewhere stirring in the shallow earth, root and rot and fungal emoting. The heart now knows, the head at last irrelevant, the gut ringing out its riotous assembly. The reasons lost, the spell unspoken, only the drawl of the dreaming between our struts and seams. A shape drawn, sand upon sand with the only tomorrow the return of the sea. Knowing of this fall, this frailty, and the drag of this covenant with the tongue. Hoping to share a taste.

Shards of pots and broken bottles, puzzle parts and context clues to add to the heap. Rusted swords and hidden bones, ancient sanctities observed in the barrow beneath the fertile fields. These golden hills once occupied, the witnessed struggle and strife surrendered to the turning earth. All this gilt once coveted, all these rites now rocks and names never said aloud. Not to be the declaration, lost in the ubiquity of creation, I return to ash and loam. Want and lack, the fool fumbling each loss. The long star sprawled empty, the symbol spattered page. All these inferences and apostasies feeding some fertile other, this bespoke flesh at last a worthy dirt. I return the words as they come, invisible down to the incidental.