door to nowhere

So it is the scintillance of wind and leaf, abundant boughs swaying in the long last light as the sun sets off and the world falls away. So it is the anticipation of the spill of stars in the bright sky shine between shifting sheaves of greenery and this mottle of light and shadow. The dirty windows, the weary doors. A porch thick with sound and smoke. Some wishes so tired and improbable they are a burning holes in my breath, these afflictions so resolute, the crows coming home to roost. Empty in, empty out, the soul just a whisper when it shouts. Dusk comes, a curtain drawn so slowly it seems still, heaven still photos and plagiarized shine.

Night is here, always written inside the eyes, always sleeping beneath the skin. The awake world a car alarm, a buzzing fly, the old ghost glow of a sitcom laugh track. The ache unswayed by your capacity to assuage, the ache the meat on the mat. This wilt of words across the surface as the senses make a mess. Just curses and revelations and the gruesome highlight reels, patterns in the ceiling that read a room and go with your mood, eyes awake and terribly aware of the ins and outs of the here and now. The skeletons from your closet dragged to the curb, the portal turning with gritted gears the dreams into dust. 

The cracked pavement, the slabs of sun, Gilda gleaming black in the lap of another afternoon. Sore to the bones and seeing stars I am all intent and bellows, puffing clouds and sowing fire, the empty set of a settled bet. Ill from root to crown, I shift with the soil slowly changing tense, this long sentence served awaiting punctuation. The trees wave and bow beneath the fickle wind as another day makes way, this bright hour unto the gloaming. This ruin cast in glowing embers and the gemstones glitter of the roiling swarms. This organ grinder turning the song over in its grave, dancing with the monkey though the monkey’s long gone. 

the empty up ahead

You can bring it to the dirt upon my doorstep. You can leave it melting in the rain. So many motions left unopened, so many stations that only the wind will fill. We fall away and the world keeps going. Little by little or all at once we are a diminishing return. Pass it on while you still have it in your hands. Shout about it while your lungs hold out. Enjoy your once agains before they become no mores. The words are well worn, they circle the block just to say it again, the stories we think we are telling, the characters we want so badly to be. One by one, we go until we’re gone.

I say this as my heart takes tumbles. I say this coughing fits and furies, sputtering away like a dying fire, only with spit and phlegm. The dead just keep on happening. One loose string on the tapestry, soon your context begins to unravel, the world holes and consequences once your framework gives way. Tulip dead on April 19, my mother dead fewer than 24 hours later, the neighbor across the way since 1970 dead two days ago. There’re more, mostly that I didn’t know as well, some I didn’t know at all. Every journey, etcetera and so on.

I wait out the dusk facing east, I endure the sunrise facing west, at home and out of habit spilling smoke and salt. The day is a blur of screens and dreams, the night careless stretches of shadows thick with sorrows and hard truths. Another weak translation of some lofty far off star. Names no use to speak, faces only tricked out light. Another year with nothing to show but the burns of the slippage and the lowing of my bones. Funny how it turns out, this sigh all at once this snuffing of dwindling flames. Oh, bold candle. Oh brief bright. Now it’s only the passing traffic and this ember as I take another drag on all the empty up ahead.

archetype

There a glimmer amongst the salt and ash, a stranded wanderer envious of the stars, a map without a means dragging a path around. Words that fell without thought past the press of tooth tongue and breath, a light left on a reason all its own. The struggle of the bellows, the work of iron and earth, held to the workings of these buried wings. I say so it seems I’m saying, the lift of bough, the plunge of air. This missed kiss, this symbol folded from vapor. Oh this flash, oh this atmosphere. This plummet of consequence and stone. 

We leave our living everywhere, in hauls and heaps and artifacts, these middens of words and waste. Twisted and tangled by ardent attachment and dull habit, we plod and plot and scheme until the last wisp of steam escapes us. Here among the heritable relics, broken clocks and mismatched bar ware, we move with rat and minotaur in the labyrinthine depths of the abandoned. Death scattered like ash, only the tenacity of blunt object and tenured dust. 

So it is I take my station, facing east as the dusk comes running, these gray skies bum rushing the spring in May’s first glimmer. So it is I witness the Black Phoebe feed on the glut of crane flies in the lush green remainders of the last rain. I smoke and drool, spitting embers and evidence on broken masonry and cracked concrete, this restless portion of the vast decline fading with me one more time. It isn’t in earth, it isn’t in ink. A word or two sprinkled upon this dream, a lingering passed along.