incant

I can’t speak much for where I am, it’s only where I seem to be. Willing spirit and wanting flesh, left outside the fold for a few common apostasies until it is the mark of the mechanism, this penchant for ritual and automation. There is a fog in the prescience, a blur between motive and causality, the road followed for the writing. There’s a glamour of holiday lights, a slamming of the doors of cars and houses, the push and pull of headlights straining down the way. I’m sharing scant breath with a small troublesome cigar, bright ember and heaven headed smoke astir in the eaves. Saying it like it makes it so when it only makes it said. The spark, the bolts of incandescence happens somewhere else. The words there, the work another stanza hewn in available stone.

The hours plod and malinger, speaking in dust and remorse, eyes emptied of agency staring at prefabricated dreams. The drift of agency, the smudge of witness, this burned down world still riddled with nights too cold. Three in the morning, curling plumes of smoke by the back porch light, the scooped out moon oblivious to such obdurate prostrations. The animals figure something’s up and have launched hectic patrols in ones and twos in pursuit of this obvious truth. I leave them to their investigations, sitting still outside as the freeze sets in search  something even more ephemeral than my motives. Reaching for reasons that aren’t there as if summoned by the winter in the wind.

The years go on and the husk it hollows. Somehow the chemical exchange rates are adjusted and our ams change to wases, something perturbed in the mix as things begin to lag system wide. No longer serving whatever god or purpose or words there were, knowing the ring won’t come around again. The day’s gray slopes gathering west, the dogs rooting around the yard, the street strewn with dead leaves and offerings. I write it down as smoke and breath dance a reel with this dizzy witless blood, low obdurate will stirring through the consequences, to want and linger useless as a prayer. The ritual itself turning over and over, this interminable engine of ink and symbol, the spell of ought and naught. The words this want of magic, the waves moving on.