animal

I have come to pick my teeth. I have come to part the seas, these winds that befall like ellipses the stagger between stories. Enough of this stitch of itching, this glimpse of sky, this depth of flesh. These lungs at last emptied, this voice at last silent. No claim, no grace, no contagion to give a motive or grant a name. It is just staying too long where the love’s all lost, nothing to grant the traction, nothing to excuse the blade. Oh words, how I have failed you. This brief blooming extinguished, another animal out of place. We lose pace, spill into habit and the periphery, eventually only memory and punctuation. I could tell you, but my trying is all but done.

At the moment I am meat and I am sorry. I am on yet another day atop the blur of hours and words I metabolize and exude, the story as it stutter stops, the horrors of the geologic and the historic. All around sound klaxons of dissembling, the dogma of doubling down somehow now the de facto, the race to oblivion prepared one billion ways. Thoughts smeared across the sky in some typical stupor, I breathe and cough and long well enough. Something in the way the pain bears down, in the way pleasure disappears into the rear view, the visible spectrum of the freeway lit that ceaseless moment as we move on and on. These words only glue for the mood I imbue.

It is the roach favored by surface tension, the ghost by the story and the crack of the fire. It is another last day, the reckoning of the rest, the restlessness of 3am in music and sign. Just me and the beasts on my bed, a bellows of song and sighs under the ministrations of a reading lamp. I have lived past my dreams and my readiness to pretend. Dust settles as smoke coils, a muted trumpet plays with the melody and the scales. Repetitions of the singular, recursions lifting their skirts, every plot eventually tennis. Each of us our mythos and where we put our mouths, red of tooth or bleating bloody murder, a set of maps and calculations as to every stiff and stray. So I long with the lights left on and the music playing. So that old black magic comes beating down my door. 

the golden hour

I admit I missed the moment, heels dug into the metaphor, stubborn to the extremes of every sense. Time was that the eye could witness even if the words were out, time was that was among the unnumbered duties held sacred by the heart. But the material grows more permeable as the soul cools down, from thunder to fumes in a few short years, beauty becomes another ache as the world goes on without. Yesterday I saw some crows sweep west just as the horizon was flush with sun, piercing the will of the wind with a lean and a nod. Today it is children walking yip dogs that hurl themselves heedlessly at my dogs through the fence, it is the neighbors attending to their yards and cars. Trees sway and wind chimes ring and the moment waits until I blinked, and again it is the aftermath, an instant gone in a white hot flash. I sit and smoke as the dusk leans in close enough to whisper oh well.

I don’t know what to make of the silent crow in the crown of the tree above me. I didn’t speak of it to the crow. Sometimes your destiny is to mind your own business. More and more there are stories that are no longer mine, I follow along as best I can, pass along tales I don’t understand. There the distance between this want and this witness, the once was that lingers as I know it’s gone, the slow swim against the rush into irrelevance. Once all the lessons are only language, there is little to be said at all. This press against the inevitable and the unknown all you own of the blood and bones. This kiss just in case you still want the touch and taste, a morsel for the ministry of tooth and tongue, this breath held to measure in the syllables you incant. 

Days have past since I started another round of saying that I cannot say, this dull plodding perpetuity trudging the boulder uphill, the bare backed rituals of calendar and clock. All this smoking, this spin of the wind beneath the eaves. A clout of sorrow and then the measures never met. The slow assembly of the inevitables out past the drift of probability. It takes time to awake as the fool tossed by indulgent follies, the twist in the telling, the fork in the road. I dream of lost worlds and flirtatious ghosts as each day the world is birthed anew. The radiance spilling over the rooftops, the shadows swelling like sails taking wind, the magic of this mortal portion. Facts moldering into fable, the mythos like a lover as it takes my tongue, ancient offerings and carnal sacraments. The feel through your bare feet as the the earth and the atmosphere dance a reel around your spine. This beauty that you can only pass along.

relent

It’s 3:30 in the afternoon the way it only can be on a Wednesday, on a clear eyed day in the summer just after a beast of a heatwave at last relents. And leaves stir beneath the spinning winds, coiling hellos and goodbyes from the branches, the vivid scenery through a dirty window shining just so in the only set of eyes I’ve ever known. I start and stop in thick strokes of circles, the brushwork of blood and breath as the signals fire away, like any rooted thing some how turning towards the light. Here I exchange symbols for what I sensed despite my many impediments, magic beans for living beings, the world emptied of all but the incantation. It’s how the love is lost, how the hands are emptied, the sea of all I couldn’t imagine. This day and all I’ll never know or see.

This is one of the received worlds, the framework and the focus. A wording left over from some singalong. Clock and calendar, the black phoebe on the rusty porch swing, the dint of detail and the manipulative lens. This little spat of wonder, these fits of want and hunger, the laborious repetition that spin our habits into ritual. These actions that reveal the moment we were hanged from, the spice we paw for first. I am stuck in the sad and weary, I keep witness to the burn. To use the words until the ink rubs off. To surrender the shell for the seed.

I crack my back and plant my feet. There are always motions in need of going through. Traffic passes in wave and gleaming particulars, the flash of sunlight reflected through the screen. There’s the sort of wind that comes on a Wednesday, a sense of motion to hold my eyes open to the glare of a summer afternoon. This blue that wants so much to be the first blue on your mind, though it knows it will always be those eyes instead, this big spill of sky running late to the day. And you see it there, flashing before me, teetering legs and failing eyes. Seeing it as I never could, this moment where the prize had found me out, this pause before the work of the earth. 

into the black

So the flesh begins its meditations, drifting from the mind’s ministrations into the varying moods of meat. So the ache settles on a direction, so the instrument bites the lip of the allusion, the bearings corrected for wear and tear and spiritual drift. Something to the ardor of the singing, something to the reason of the rhyme. The breeze laps at these perspirations as the heart cries out, the remembered incantation a hound loosed upon the hart breath on the heels of the word. The notation floats between phrasings, the notions held close at the angle of observance, the world ever turning and perturbed. These lyrics the stitching that fixes our stars.

This comes from the tatters I inhabit, this from the very conceit I intend. Headphones and stand alones, a shuffled list of many decks, a forced card from a gaffed deal treated as a covenant. Buyers markets and tactical retreats, this version always returning to the earth, this incarnation another arrow off its mark. These old echoes through conceded strongholds of ego, this eerie ringing through the rock. It’s the most wearisome of combinations, fists without snap or follow through, the mistaken segments of the text. Stuck in stretches, struck by stars, the tongue keeps at it. It’s a process, but particular disasters stand out.

It arrives in answer to unknown anticipations, it takes shape faster than the thought can follow, so abrupt against the perceptions. A swelling of the stir of leaves, a shadow pressed against the sway of limbs, inky feather or sun plummeted wing. The crawling in the dark, something coming up the stair, some 70s melody with a Karen Carpenter hook shuffling in dark. So these metaphors make the most of us, willing spirit and wasted flesh, the words we are buried in as they fill in for the want. We wake following the lead, tracking the dream or filling in the journey. I speak aloud to remain unheard, the radio left on against the night, static crackling into the black.

out of the blue

The trees sway a ruddy green stencil casting in my first glance mind tiny bouquets of sky blue blossoms of blue sky, a brief startle from the spark to the cognition, another moment where my first words go so terribly wrong. Casting away illusion for the next perception in line, the say so of my senses another unreliable narrator, still I try my hand at tuning into the sloppy seconds of the signal. The pieces I pick and choose, the pursuit of lie and line, the slick simplicity of the symbols that ring true. I say it is more story, I say that it’s a poem. But it’s only the smoke of the moment we burn and fuel. The shadow saddened by what the sun has missed. The absent guest, the empty setting.

We worry at the impossible while the ordinary provides plenty of limits to go around. Making proclamations to posterity that won’t ever cross tomorrow’s shores. Declaring our trajectories in arrows fired blindly toward the star specked sky, casualties and consequences freed by our self service, each of us easily so broken on our own and still insisting on the solo. We throw low blows and elbows to get beaten about the map. Sticking to the script of the deceivers, each of us alone responsible for protecting our neck. Legions of us, taken out one by one by the words of kings and gods. We have been shown the world, and have trained in the mystery.

What’ve I got left to say but the same old thing worn thin by ten thousand tongues and endless letters? Every day passes in brutal form, by name and number they tumble by, moon phase and featured constellation another sigh and ache. Sitting outside and dwindling with every breath, less with every lungful of smoke, eventually each of us all consequence as our stories dissolve. Voice and vapor, I sit in perpetual discontentment, the ache of is and the deeper hurt of is not. There are words of every stripe and flavor waiting to be dismembered and transformed. Skins of every description to creep into, all manner of pleasure to promise, every wish imaginable to grant. Tricks to how we long and tick, our fortunes stolen for otherworldly investors and all you grifters grubbing after crowns. The more I witness, the more I ought to keep to myself. Leave you to whatever heaven you would have. 

on swallowing the sea

This is still in the habitable range, though too pronounced of heat and drought to last all that much longer. This is still carried water, though the reservoir doesn’t show it. We move in haste across an estimation of our terrain, thoughts deep beneath the exhibition of turns and signs, threatened and threatening by tradition and design. We are known by knives and appetites, names and shadows always along for the ride. Carried along by tides and currents, dragged lucid and magnetic, the cumbersome storm and the overhead bag. Still you seethe and open wide, wave after endless wave. It was only ever more, despite the grandiosity and the high hatting, beyond all capacity you can claim. So it makes you a liar, and a dead one at that. So it becomes a poem, or at least an epitaph.

There are the ones with a pocketful of rocks. There are the ones drowning drunk on the moon. The stories passed around the fire, the verses added to the song, we stay up late just to keen and long. Tales told to elude confession, tales told to explain the stars, there in the details of the day and the shaping of the stones. The long path up the hill, the road all slope and bend, the structure there yet unseen in the foundation of the forest. The dimming dream, the brimming day, the way a whim becomes a way. The symbols and the stitching, the trail burning as you enter metaphor. The wants and the whereabouts, all the murdered darlings that make up the work of the heart. Nothing to follow but the moon and the shore.

There are the details of the day and the form of the story, Seven Brothers or Billy Goats Gruff, swallowing the ocean or clobbering the boorish troll. There is the prescient power, there is the surrender to the incomprehensible. This work of words, this unending flood, time comes thundering down and we tumble on. The depths and the delving, this cycle of the story, this engine of the moments drumming down. The sky stills below your belly, the earth an urgency in your bones, your heart repeating “the tide, the tide.” The etchings along the shortcut through the happenstance, this tale composed of anticipation and negative space, the restless tongue gently cradling the flavor of saying it aloud. It is more than and I am a morsel trailing salt and grease. The ambivalence of heaven left breathing, leaving words as gravity trails off into the past. Leaving words, waiting for someone to speak.