below the belt

It’s been like this for such a passage, it’s been like this since the bleed at least, this other aim named aloud. The dusk doing most of the work, so when the night arrives all the stakes are already driven down. Hard to tell the lean of being from the falling stars you trail, cartoon sparkles and chirping birds when the hammer smites. Thoughts jostling with physics and fisticuffs, you hear train wail or dog bark or the savage laughter of imminent children. Flattened fair and square you catch the constellation by its dead give away, the reveal echoing through the realization, on your back below the belt. It’s all how the seasons hit, the settling of the senses. The sutra of hanging the frame.

There’s already a lot I left out; there’s so much more leaving out left to do. You can’t escape the associations. Nothing escapes unscathed, this faith of words surviving outside speech and flesh, a brevity trailing murdered darlings and bottle baby bastards. Pounding the pulpit or folded into a trust fall from the pedestal, every way laden and fated at once, from the improbable to the likely it arrives. I belly up and belt it out and stagger back to the Stygian depths from whence I started counting. The hours as evidenced by the heavens, the firmament emblazoned by the winter hexagon, the hunter whose specifics come and go.

It’s a story though there’s nothing to it. It’s a story because it got told that way. I went outside and watched while the dark caught up the clock. I looked up and thought hey there’s Orion, a muddle of dogs, belts, and cudgel. A smear of plots and archetypes, a becoming that happens again and again, breath and flame and the songs life sings. An experience so true and worn it feels quaint, an afghan strewn across the arms of a rocking chair, a saying worn down to words. I thought of you in ways that were about me, and some that were about you too. The easy depths at once too much, the letters scribbled with ache and panicked appetite, this animal too abrupt and abstract. It’s what I lose when I leave it there, written down as if it happened. 

legion

The clock slipped the count and so I stepped to a little late, the day time sky already set to goodbye, my life left sitting staring down the dusk. It’s the collateral of the calendar, all these days left to boxes, the stars barely stirring as the world turns and turns. All I seem to do is stumble from scene to scene, off script and stranded spitting bars that miss the beat, doing stunts and improvising speeches. The dusk goes dark and the days grow grayer, the old bones telling secrets, the quaint conceits of September Song playing in the well past tense. 

So time marches on, so the franchise makes concessions, trailing parts and pieces. The path is all process and it only goes so far until it’s a thousand other parts, a thousand other journeys through the flesh, the shuffle and the deal unending. All that’s left of the me I favor is empty pockets and percussive words, but there are a lot of mouths and feasts still going strong in the host I heave and haul. The husk bearing progeny and pestilence, partisans without flags all carrying the clock, atop this wave breaking in all directions. Life always falling under spells and curses, and waking up flush in new names and stories. I dance this mess to pieces, I dance until I drop, but the party never stops.

Still I scribble on the signal, still I write my manifesto on the back of receipts. I am a point in passing, a distribution of debris. I am the engine struggling to turn over, the genes left on read spinning circles in the mud. A story between stories, the probable fall of the words, a vague miming of looking at where a watch would be on my wrist if I wore one. The words keep coming in clouds and torrents as the pan boils dry, as if insistence was all the was to persistence. Waking into this want, the sun long gone, the light left on just in case there’s someone left to welcome. Colorblind, I paint by numbers, the night swallowing sight whole.