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.