vessel

The sun sets soon, if it hasn’t already. A rectangle of sunlight claims a patch of the neighbor’s rooftop, a thousand word parcel in the picture puzzle of transience as the rain dark skies close ranks, the sharpened cold holding my lapels tight in its fists. The neighbor’s roof already one shade again nearly as soon as it’s noticed, the moment always missing before the words work it out, all the feelings ending up hard as the marker moves along. It rained today, it will rain tomorrow. The weather washing cars and filling buckets. The weather effortless with the last word.

It’s the same old outlook looking out, the translation caught with its hand in the till. Sensation so fissile in the afterglow, the bandwidth burnt with spark and ricochet, sentience the residue spent as heat. We cling to the paths we plod, trodding on shifting stones and feets that can’t but fail, doubling down on bad bets pride begets. Felling ourselves with cheap shots and cognitive dissonance, having fallen in with the cult of hallucination, the narrative fickle to style and the particulars. It’s the wisdom granted of tricks and beatings, the strength of bones clad by blows, bum luck and an aptitude for taking a fall. The mystery receives us in our boundless limits, silent as we miss the mark.

The night is here, full of every fact and myth that fits. Out on the porch with a light bright in the corner of my right eye, facing east and the cold street, a date a time the ache of cold fingers. The night both word and world, a vessel suited for any reader’s alchemy, ready for any blessings or baggage. This old hat lived in hurt shuffled from day to day and page to page, the magic somehow always short a rabbit or two, I report dutifully to my station. I unwrap the empty, again the absent offering the vessel. 

tin can trust

There like a coat abandoned to the drape of a chair, the bitter laid flat out across the palate, the uninflated phrase warm in the warrant of the breath, this framework of a name unspoken. The stormy evening, the warm cup black with incidental ink, porch chimes at a cantor in the revenant winds. There with the sounds that walk through walls and tap at windows, the cobweb cling of memory shaping this arrival, the song rubbing its hands in another room at a cold remembered at the door. Rain on the roof, this ringing always the outwards drubbing the within, the reach of a stifled stillness painted on a page.

The thought comes both summoned and unbidden, scratching at every hour, the bustle around the bell. A life can mean anything left running through, it can be any light switched on. A kiss fumbled, a beauty bemused past reproach, the air thick with anticipation and animal passage. Something scribbled after— a taste, a scent, a sensation missed without relent. The bared belly another hunger jutting from history’s worn bones, the skin flayed with spent feeling, always awake and rattling around.

Every day the cup is empty. Every day you wake to the mistake, wrong headed and soft hearted, the stone smooth from the pace of the river moving on. Like the labor of the tongue toward a lost tooth, the tense informed by the lingering rumor, by the end the aura all that’s there. The order of storms, the rate of rainfall, the shimmering surface of a slickened road. The gutters gush and the eaves spill, washing away all the wishes meant for first seen stars, a legacy of oil slick rainbows and cracked sidewalk weeds. The past all misfired lore and will shaped stones, tomorrow a street picked clean by crows. 

attention deficit

The day goes gray as the days are wont 

dusk comes with all the fixins, swift wings and 

furtive rodents, fast traffic shaking 

the walls with the songs left 

thumping in its wake, the note held

too long, too much sound to leave

much for the music to be. It stands to reason

there will be some shifting in the sands,

what passes for castles collapsing, 

the tower taken by the tide, built

bit by bit of this knowledge 

that give and take taking more,

the sky lit like a mirror or 

clear like a glass gazing against 

the remembered bones of this slip thin self, 

touched by the givens that 

gave out, the reasons on the label

read for this labile animal a broken seal

the spirit a fizzle of this burning bridge of flesh,

furls of a flag snapping aware

its truth is to wear the wind.

reanimate

Dusk settles in early, with the Queen of the Night strolling up the disassembled driveway, passing through the closed gate by yard dogs and vivid greens. Never quite waking the words go wasted as they tread tooth and breath, hot animal extensions of the spirit expressed against the stress of atmosphere and organ. We go this way, or so I say without thought beyond the heft of rhetoric, we go like that. It has the taste of observation, it ambles like a fact. It finds us where it finds me, like the wonders revealed by idiot angels or the admonitions of the provincial gods, some strummed ballad rising like an anthem in the background of a dream. We follow paths or embody ways as second nature, too busy swimming to think that we are fish all but drowning in our own design. Awake to the pen scratch and brushstroke, we paint ourselves plain. The muzzled impulse, the colossal rebuke, worn syllables arriving warm in the mouth of the gloaming. 

Night so quick with the black cat at the fence, shadows strewn in all directions abound like elongated vowels of cartoonish exclamation, a throat cleared for no purpose save the sound. Another motion come and gone, arrival and departure, life’s perpetually burning fuse left as navigation through the possible. Mark and map only measured when read well enough to know, word and number magic when invoked. The habitual begets the ritual, the stipulations met and set of a mind, the kind of rekindling only allowed in the expansive stretches of the imagination. The appetites awake at once through the broad continuity, the wants without worth wanted all the same, the self a sizzling of the senses.

It comes down to the looking glass, the equilibrium of the atmosphere, gasses loosed with the insolent raspberry of the emptying balloon. The adulation of the vessel expressed in chaos and flabbergast, muttered like prayers by a miserable coterie of ham handed thieves and indifferent priests, the hard poverty of a hunger so unsated it is only the empty sounding out. The spilling wind, the chattering gravel, a winter of old bones and open windows written in the present tension. Waking from word to word, the lonely of the light left on as the dream wanders from skin to screen, this moon smitten bottle bobbing in the restless ocean. These tides always the take away, limbs swaying in the flicker of the resurrection left on read. As if a djinn at last unstoppered, some semblance summoned sentence after sentence, the mystery in regular intervals.

devil

Soon the bones are always speaking

tossed by meat and prophecy

the needling of bent practice 

ends in shrugged collapse, never now

a matter of repetition and paradiddle, 

the reason to rosin the bow 

evaporated as the trickster 

makes the stakes, the spirit 

wishful all the while 

the flesh presents the evidence 

unwound, the stuffing torn

from hope’s rag doll

the deal broken by the least 

breath, damnation pretty 

much like everything, 

dosed by the day.

rare bird

Midnight doesn’t leave a mark as these bones ring out the hour, the clock clotted with the myth of digits, the telltale heart chiming in daily decline. Hollow gathers around the sound, the ringing out getting around to where the tolling slows, the linger of the afterimage after a savaging of shine. Here where the light undresses into some feathery resonance, where the toothache grin bears each break, this hush hard upon us as the lonesome looms. Dead air love letters skitter in the street, no longer certain of the difference between static and stars.

It is the pace we are making, the dances all spin and spin, the buzz of collected imminence pressed against the now. Tensions that have never settled there sizzling between your image and your entity, the elusive and the elastic stirring the embers, bridges burned still blazing away  in your bemused gaze. Particles of smoke dispersed into a photon huff, high test bourbon and spotty bar ware, the weight pelting at the bandwidth. Lifetimes are short, but just cluttered enough to seem like there’d be room for more onces than just the one. There was a rare bird, a glimpse then memory and re-creation, a phonograph playing somewhere in the background.

This is the stared at ceiling. This is the played out gray to the clutched blue blazes. The colors named if not identified, heaven’s hosts unleashed across the visible fill. It isn’t so much the magnificence of witnessed plumage or the poignancy of the overheard song, this persistence of vision, this cargo cult. The world washed with the absence of your wonder. This revelation only words away. Hands hold tight and turn to stone, pockets full of fists and wishes. A lost letter on the wind, a whisper of sudden wings. 

the script

It starts in the shadow thick hollows, these excavations to your nature where conversations built the station where these longings wait at bay, the depths touched most at the drop of dusk. The sky trends dark and falls down, this breathless crush to extinction, a story that holds its promise as cliffhangers and prophecy. A dimming square between the shoulders, a burden upon the revelation blood, the Sisyphean weight of each unyielding day. A dull light to reprove or remind the distance that is left behind. A squalor of untended thought and lurid alarm loosed with the wanderers and stars. The sort of words written to drip off the tongue, the words written to drizzle down the script.

It plays out in slow smoke and drowsy light, the clock kept in the sight line as the texts turn over, the aches left to the remainder biding time in the long lean. The day turns over with the shifting mass of self and the complaints of bed springs and beset bones, the dreams that drone on still and those that only flash arcane error messages as their files remain unrecovered.   Found images appearing in the curtains and the ceiling, rats scratching in the walls, a name remains unspoken. Some theme song is playing again, the show always going on. The day and night with no dream in sight.

So far, so long, the tension of a sentence, the press of the pen. Too late you learn that you’re the story’s ghost, unreliable around sharp turns and blind spots, this compass spun and spun. A few ripples upon a primal surface long ago gone still and blank, the lonely face of the moon bathing in the mirror black sea. Left to the memories of broken branches, crown shy and storm sculpted, the past tense so insistent. Whole plots and speeches stricken, a gathered absence flashing teeth, a figure in the distance as the credits roll. All out of context persisting in the vision always waiting witness, the vinyl scratching out a past plus pops and sizzles, a skip like a struck match as if you were singing soft and close. There as the almost lingers, sinking as the absence steals the day.

run on

The rain runs through its prepared remarks, the sneak thief moon is coming on strong above the roofs and trees, days washing up upon the daily everyday. The context amorphous and ambiguous, old hat and hanged man the token of efficacy, the moment peeling away like casts of chitin as shapes bleed into the periphery. A notation of sore bones, mixed analogies and assorted alkaloids, and a vaudeville of emoting and other miscellaneous pratfalls. The point where knowing the accelerating countdown and the urgency of mortal stakes is just another day of sloth and sin wages. The sentence served running on and on, the nowhere story on a need to know basis. 

The moon climbs the tree in the yard, a neighbor paces disapprovingly about their driveway, long shadows and blinding beams cast by security lights across the street. There’s no end to the play by play, the calling of the caster and the dither of the color, consequences disbursed in particulars and clouds of probability. From the shroud of dusk to the flagellations of dawn, the day just goes all day. Round and round, we all fall down. Long after nightfall, this longing left on.

It’s all in the numbers, it’s all in the talk, any symbol you choose or chooses you will do. The universe has room for you and all your thinking too. Mistake by mistake, we lose our place, the sway of the song and the mark on the map. Build and build, break and break, we love and fight and fail only assured of an inevitable extinction. So cold fingers and an empty husk tap away at the old one two, a modicum of smoke and the losing side on loop, and the loom of the moon make do. Something saved, something spent, budding limbs and the way the shine went away. The weather and persistent ailments as the nowhere is written in.

kingdom gone

There are no mice, there are no men, just the scratching rats as the chord progression is filled in. A soft flatter of words on the wing, the usual waste of space and breath, a trudge up and down the steps. A little sick about the seams, a little sea foam flecking lips, the tongue somehow does alright. A prophecy of the imminent tide, rising to foreclose hope, gazing at the moon with a dash of Mars. The dusty fables of some ancient reign stippled across the stars. It takes a lifetime, it takes endless retellings. From wished upon to once upon, thy kingdom come, thy kingdom gone. 

It’s discontented, though not nearly as winter as winter can get. It’s the tune that it takes to get to the one you sing. It’s the story they built before the bones of your telling was set. The cadence of a work song built on lost labors, or the myths that got stuck in the stars, you hum a few bars and the fix is in. A thought that will last past the words that entangled it, a thought that won’t last to the end of this sentence. Sights are set, knobs are toggled, a variety of variables awaiting the phrasing. Something in the rhyme can’t carry a tune, something like the beaming of the cow-cleared moon.

Buds weigh the boughs, the sky shapes the crown in grief tinged blues and rainy day grays, the cold aura of the reaching green splitting the seams of sight and soil. Gravity is incremental, it works it’s way down into the languished mass, it gathers its sway straw by straw. A sheaf of wheat, a bright bouquet, a quiver of arrows to sling outrageous. The ink is imagined in by pen line and brushstroke, in stitch and spasm and spill. Soon the days grow swift and fierce, the crow calls get further and further away. The cold in the bones becomes the rule rather than the rather, some season of staggering almost theres, the street all but aching from so much empty all at once. This singing, so strained and plaintive as it ends.