lockbox

It’s the numbers I assigned to see you in the repetitions, it’s the name I wore down to letters and lore. Something to fondle in fist and fingers, something left to leaven the dreams. The weary report of the body, the circling of the thinking as the batteries give out, the mystery you give and the mystery you get. Always wandering from scene to scene and year to year, the self the cheapest sort of cheap cinematics, a narrative broken over what you cannot say. Someone dwindling in the rear view, someone waving in the blinding sunset sun, mirage water rippling in the black tarmac heat. Those first stirrings, dust motes dancing in the lush morning light, arriving from the elements as this flag unfurled into the reckoning. Relics kept in dresser drawers and old shoe boxes, the soul a story loosed in gasps and bluster, the sputter of a fire drowned in fuel. Treasure held until it is trash again, middens turned to barrow tombs, counting the days back to ashes. 

The moon fills and empties, the signaling seasons arrange their portents in incense soot and mantle dust, the count of closed windows and open eyes in the variegated light. Here in the aches and appetites we scheme out the signals we heed, the senses always swelling in the music of the mind. Stranded in the alchemy of accumulated ages we exude the certainty of our abandoned incandescence, we fight against our fall as our stubborn materials follow their chemical continuities, these fierce stripes and stumbling phrases trailing into unknown bandwidths filling out the forms. I am bludgeoned out of sync just saying it aloud. A locked box and a three panel mind, a page of pictures with the captions pencilled in. Your shoulders a swelter remembered in this life of cold and rain.

It’s down to the trembling of the animal, it’s up to the illumination of the room, blood and guts and the vagaries of luck. Wretched flesh and glorious ghosts in the spaces between the stories,  the shimmer and slide of streetlights over gutter water, the eaves stupid with the swagger of storms. Madhouse motions gnawing holes through the routines of clock and coffee, the heart thick keening of a need never met again, the sun bled slogan on a fading billboard encrypted by highway and forest with all those miles left to go. Stacks of books and the roads not taken, the ache the seasick tilt of the light of the lamp left burning, what a wonder of words without anywhere to go. Out in the epilogue there’s another world over, a name wasted on my breath whenever that number comes up.