crumbum

It’s a song you can’t recall from some 70s FM canon, it’s the slip of the trick up the sleeve down past those same old razor wrists, cradling some plastic handset in the crook of shoulder and neck in some middle aged memory. The soundtrack of blackout conversations taking on the tenor of intimacy, a tension all but expired in the continuity you’ve acquired, a window always open to the rainy street below. Someone chanting their doo dah hoodoo on some indulgent vocal track, an echo of and echo, the crash of a careening shopping cart and the bad news flashing blue outside. Somehow the lows go lower as the song drains out into the good night grays, it gathers in the fabric and bunches up the thinking, so much worse and still not bad enough. The effigy they burn you in, the fetish they shape from your shell.

What the day won’t contend, what the night will abide, you move the lens from side to side. You see what the light provides, the dirt and grime and evidence in small doses and cruel rooms, from the filled in margins to the moody periphery. You turn from shoulder to cold shoulder, adrift in the demography like a body tossed in restless sleep, the dream logic left of the everyday. All haunt and hunger and a keenness for signs, the leaves in the cup, the hawk on the line. Wadded up letters and dusty old drafts, an object in a mirror, a shape moving across the blinds. Wrapped in your own arms, this inevitable embrace, this road of ruin. The animal and the entity a lost temple returned to the earth.

It all goes with the territory, walking the path between worlds and dreams, the colors are coming outside the lines. The circles become spirals, the scribbles heaven’s latest revelations as the camera pans, the swell of that song glistening on your skin. The ends wide open so every telling fits, from motive to mechanics, as the contempt snaps and paces at the boundaries of countenance. Your grubby altar like any feeder calls to all loose hungers and unanswered entreaties, reaching from foundation to firmament, a steady turbulence in the muddle as flesh and spirit dwindle to ash and spit. We eat their sins, we carry their shadows in the trappings of the other, the schema that settle like the strata of sediment into monuments of fossil and sandstone. The witness worn, need acknowledged only as lack.