pedestal

Put your kings back in their cubbyholes, hang your gods out in the garden. Kick your faith off its pedestal, know your way is a course of water down a slope. Here in this passing fancy, in the pained turn of the day to day, we find our way. From just desserts to devout pursuits, the circuit to the drain consumes us all. Written as if rules the inevitable again and again, wrung hands and gossiping flesh, the moment full of such certitude collapsed into tumbling photon and a flicker in the feels. Oh, such sorrow! Oh, such beauty! We post our apostrophes, we roll them bones.

The lighter sparks then it ignites, a flash of light and heat below my right eye. Almost at once the smoke heads towards the heavens, the restless winds not offering a lot of options. I burn a knuckle on the blazing ember of the cigar butt, another small offering to the improbable unknown, smoke sent east while the sun sinks west. I ease back into my habitual station, spine and eyes effecting the ritual, longing and the heat loss of the complimentary. Something holy in the dance around the empty, the hollow of the vessel ringing through the whole.

I serve the ashtrays and the negative space of sky and branch, I serve the dirt and the hungry creeping legions that abound. This starved soil, this blasphemous destruction of the building blocks of soul, while we feed ourselves words glutted on words. The tumble of these unseen axes, the animal loosed in every revelation, our ferocious trajectories and our determined dooms. More and more my eyes are fixed upon ghosts and games, the long con entangled in our chains. Species spent in fits of pique and power, the top down desolation another destiny imparted from our suspiciously absent gods as we stack the odds against ourselves. My heart beats for our desperate bids for life and beauty. A light left on, a tithe for all the asking. 

kindle

I live in the sworn at aftermath, in the avalanche of curse and consequence, where each effect unfurls. Fading flesh and bitter bone, the long high lonesome isolated in the epilogue, the glory just another story reordered with each telling. Here as it all unravels, here as it goes by rote, this kiss folded in a fist the diamond in the mire of my mind. Before the ghosting given by the dusk, until the rebuke of dawn, I bristle with static amid these fissile rituals. Sizzling at the subatomic but still beneath the eaves as I smoke on the porch, I am the promenade of ashes greasing the tongue of the greedy fire of time. These bones bear down, I fix my gaze beyond the horizon. Another wave of walking dreams. 

This is the long way around it, full of dull meanderings and ornate tombs robbed for their heft and molder, words leavened into unseen fields and left in piles to mark the path. This thing of passing in and out of abstraction, the way we follow our footsteps back around to find our shadows seeding our journey, the way we mistake our strengths as we stare at our prophecies as they change their minds. The discovery is always part of the puzzle, the enticement of making a mystery of bricks, the man behind the curtain there pushing snake oil saying it was you all along. The self is always the last place you looked.

So I go sorrowfully into dusk, so I dread the break of day, the burden only shifted by the shovelful. The long night spent winding watches and sweeping streets, thoughts pacing with fists in pockets, ideas turning vicious in a turn. This heavy hand of shadow as the sun sets its shoulder to the horizon, the way I stare and stare. The words left to work the earth, the body failing at the fray. Something left as bone or smolder, feast and fertilizer. Standing as if spark had taken hold, the fragments taken, a purpose served.

come around

Sometimes I wish the moon would’ve asked me before taking up so much of my mind. Sometimes when I’m waiting for an invitation I get invited the wrong way. Everything is down to the resolution of the details and the limits of the operation. Mostly I’ve been too busy wishing not to wake to get more than a gist of this business of being, other than the 24 hour neural bus tour around the bodily aches and all their mysteries. Here at the heart’s stubborn drumming the fount of all this troublesome dissolution is this distance between who I think I am and who I am. So I cast a shadow, so I covet the attentions of the moon? Even standing perfectly still is a long, long way to go. A lot is geography, the rest is character arc.

I suppose at least it’s proof of life, these lashings of the everyday, this leaning on the horn. Got born and kept hanging around, taking it day by day in doses of months and years. I ran out of roads in several directions at once, my candles all burned out. It’s as much the isolation as the time served Sisyphean, the same old bolder while the world just goes on. Some souls torn from me, some that just walked quietly away. The choice between this sullen spark or the thought of posterity, the habitual frippery giving way to phenomena and a familiarity with death rattles. This wind rushing in, to intimate, too familiar. The way I wish you would come at me, when I wish you would come around.

I don’t know how long I will linger here, sitting on the porch, fiddling with transmissions. I doubt I will out wait the moon as it wanes into third shift, always an ambivalent mix of blessings and spells, the secrets and hungers the goddess imparts. The flesh remembers its aspects, the magic and the all in grins. The smoke only hopes to jiggle the levels a little, taking the offered vacancy on the wind. I curse the day and mourn its departure. This enchantment still burns down to my bones. It feels like violence, it feels like breaking. The way it takes its time with my turn, knowing it’s over as soon as it’s said. It feels like I’m supposed to say it anyway.

earthly

This late in the day, the mail delivered and the banks all closed, the traffic keeps spilling as the shadows stretch and the pavement implores. Cracked asphalt and the perseverance of weeds the whole of the story, just life and the varying impediments that apply, the statistics on the can and will the tangible matter and the visible spectra. I wish I could credit anything save life and limb for this perchanced dreaming, these load bearing placeholders that are most of our work in this world. I watch as my stories unravel in the telling, as the earth persists in taking all our claims in stride. 

The day drawls off, reconstituted moments unspooled between sense and sentience as this song plays as notes and the inferred actions of tongue and tooth, the shape of a kiss sending shivers towards the mortal. The sun in the shrugs of trees, this spark caught in a torrent of remembered limbs and lips. I sit, a mess of spoiled meat and recursive regret, caught in these hair-triggered synapses firing in loops and closed circuits while the point goes missing. It loses something in the ephemeral, these strange wishes granted by the daily blind grinding, something lost in the perception. In a world of infinite possibilities, it’s hard to get some probabilities to play along.

Smoke ascends and the winds take the leap. A sore headed heart and a broken starter, these aches that long ago won the war now spend their days rubbing my body’s face in it. I am all bad posture and stiff shoulders, leaning awkward over these pecked out fragments. Absurdly counter factual in my implicit ambitions, the abstractions fed by the self delusions of the ancients and the stubborn declarations of the design, I turn with the worms and seethe with relentless appetites. Touch and taste, sight and scent, and the music at hand. The sky is a held breath blue and the dogs are barking on spec. This want wants what it wants, however you work the words.