flicker

The door is open despite the cold outside. Cobwebs cling to the screen, the latticework of steel and neglect cookie cuts the passage of perception, the sequential shimmer of the tv and the dull insistence of the bare bulb socketed on the front porch. A little bourbon and the air weighed down by the smoke of cigar after cigar. The attendant fiction spilling out into thought and feeling, stuck inside my outside mind. Glimmer and flicker, shade and movement at the borders of the periphery, the story caught between the babble of being and my lost voice.

Ritual and impulse, the bell tolls for no one in particular. Dawn’s furtive gaze rises upon the wasteland of cracked pavement and drowsy houses, a crow calling sharp across the street like a bible bound prophet, a few useless stumblers scuffing along with the building bright. The blue sky blue soaks in between the golds and grays, the last stars seeming to wane under the indifferent arrival of the local orb as commuters speed towards the traffic gathering east and west, hurry up and wait amid headlights and the contained curses of yet another day alive. Hollow habits hold me to this earth, however the world might toss and tumble, sick with consequence and irrelevance.

Things wear out, things wind down, matter always swapping spit and clapping hands. Days wheel by, months turn to years, time takes its toll upon us all. Take a number, mind the line. This worn welcome in tatters, I slow into the stanza, I miss nearly every mark. Memory is forgetting’s forge just as death is life’s lot once life becomes leftovers, food and fuel, ash and dust. Night comes calling again as smoke curls in the light from the doorway, night is here with the cold singing to my bones and blood. Old and done, pain in the pieces and pain in the whole, pain in the psyche and pain in the soul. Intention worn to inertia, motive broken down to just another sad machine. A tiny spark, a windswept whisper. No one speaks. My heart runs empty, my head full of broken promise and silent song. 

apostrophe

It’s not the day it was, it’s not the clock I’m watching. It’s not the crow in the tree or the dogs in the yard. The lines are off, the rhyme is broken, the light is bright and useless too. Blessings and curses come and go; neither are enough. The riotous rain is gone, but the damage is done, seeping through the ceiling in the dining room. The roof won’t take another determined drizzle. The house won’t stand much longer. I am lost and you are gone, and I still keep going out in the on and on.

a note to blog participants

 Thank you for recent comments. Google isn’t letting me reply to them, but I do appreciate the kindness. 

pins and needles

The light turns on

a blessing and a curse,

eyes pitted in alarm

between days and dreams, 

this bell brought down by 

a face beaming out

our uncertainties so sure to

me, this image sticking to my sight

through the dead weight of this 

burned up world, pins and needles 

smiling in the dark of this life alone.

Dawn and dusk, kitten paws and

unmarked graves, the long 

slide downhill, dirt and gravel and

the unfulfilled promise the mind 

makes of pretty pictures, foolish

mistakes, the breathlessness 

breaking thinking’s forth wall,

bed empty save for stories 

crashing on the shores,

a moment run clean through.

nonentity

The mountains too will melt and crumble

tumbling into the sea, and every castle

ends up made from sand. The list

ticked down from one thing to 

the next meant to put the world to order

or at least make some sort of map

contriving all these whos and whys 

painting a description of the dervishing down

the drain. A face, a name, some defensive

inscription to sum up this strange

continuity— a toddler excitedly 

offering and then after and then. 

You look both ways, there’s no

there there. The caption below 

a photo you know, the freshly unearthed 

lede. The mirror always gets it backwards,

the self sugar glistening 

slick on a stranger’s tongue.

new

There’re days where it’s down to the charge on your phone or the cat in your lap, waking startled to wake again, this shadow steeped ceiling, this eternal alarm. Some stone rolled, no longer there, now risen. There’s days where you’re drunk on your porch and someone fires nine rounds in the yard next door, fireworks showering sparks showing above every roof. It’s just the soot smeared remnants, Rome everywhere in the render. Every day a fresh onslaught, caught in the crosshairs of duty and contempt. Surrounded and there’s no one coming. Alone with what there is it arrives. Oh brand new year, oh fusillade.

And so the day goes by, sunlit and wrung out, the rain taking a breather as it waits for a re-up. Every moment smoke and embers burning at both ends. The whole neighborhood a bit hungover, treetops reaching for the fruit of moon, core sore and drenched in leaden light. There’s a song now and then, maybe you sing along. I could be singing from the sounds in my throat. Folding each cool breath in the depths of my belly, firecracker and fuse, bellows and flame. The rules keep changing but it’s the same old game.

All is not lost as long as the moon is dragging at your billowing shadow, all is not lost whether falling down flights of stairs or still a-stagger after some iconic fancy. The venerable day and the nascent night in turn come tumbling, only as old as the observer, only as old as your transitory bones. Brick after brick crumbled to dust as the construction slows, an amble of expired masonry and poorly rendered cement, an uphill climb on dwindling limbs. Spewing steam and heat and hyperbole into the continuity as the odometer turns over, the cold night piled upon the unboxed date, the resolution blurred as the credits threaten to tell us all we already know.