the lookout

I’m down to nouns as the day runs long, all bleak grays and dull rain and gulls cutting across the storm.  With my crooked spine oriented vaguely to ley lines strewn haphazardly throughout the landfill the signal runs from rote to riot, ache and inflammation this last vocation as the vessel feathers and splits. I chain smoked the dread from the litany of days and the sky weighs down on these shaky frames, the sediment of cravings scraped clean on the crumbling curb as the gutters overflowed, rivulets and waterfalls and landlocked lessons where my dreams ran dry. A pile of words to hunch over as the dusk spills from the eaves, the open eyes of a diminished return.

It’s growing thin about the matter, though mass heaps it on thick among the consequences and the givens, the means turns meager inside this animal act. Side eyed glances of intermittent reinforcement to take in the length of ash and ember burning between my fingers and the percentage of battery left, to take glimpses of the greenery and the names of notable birds. Shivering a little in my shirtsleeves as I give in the creed of the scribble, the scripture of the screen, following the path of the blinking cursor and the stumbling thumbs. Sore to the bone as the exits glare next to everywhere with the inside running out.

Words written while facing the east with the skies a storm grumbled gray, everything that sways in thrall to the gusts waving treetop to tall grass goodbye, the wind lost in the weeds. Eyes wide open I miss a lot, filling up long passages of blurred sense and poor transitions with disputed data and old maps, looking to see the pin drop of perception while the spirit spins out. Some words that generally mean the weather, some pictures that haunt me when it rains. Mismatched songs stride on by, messing with the tuning, addressing the lens. The gaze beset by hungers and appetites alike, echoes and reflections and narrative deficits flickering in the bandwidth, sitting somewhere beside the point. One way then another less and less as the lookout gives way.