molecule

It is the cadence of the common 

chorus, the bet within

the spread before us, the courses 

we are blessed to receive 

the transmission of the feast

beast to belly to the earth of our 

burdens laid down. It has been gone

so long that most of our bodies have 

replaced down to the atom

these entangled selves

an exchange of kisses

uninhibited by time or matter 

flavors and orbits all spark

like eye contact with a photo 

a pocket cognition, that classic

quintessence of elements 

rapt in this bare legged 

chemistry, like a fingered pulse,

shadows hushed and

thick with touch.

space invaders

I am the sound of the engine running, I am the ringing of the room from the lights left on. The hollow hush of the rush of empty through the air, the way the silence is sounded out in the static stippling my skin. This is the body, this is the embodiment, the careless retread pressing through the passage. The inhabitant and the husk left careening down these corridors, the claim and the sign, the fretful incarnation and the vessel of its translation. Here I am, going to and fro, a dull dose of active ambiguity. There I go, staggering out dots and dashes, trailing dues and imbues. 

Here in the remnants of the tattered myth of sentience, this listless tapping on the glass, for all the moment that moth beating against the bulb. Eureka unto the punctuation of bashed brains and mistaken moons, perhaps the phrasing a flavor of the metaphor, the mangled magic that drives the mind. The furtive depths of transient antecedents, all these roads bound for Rome, the ‘yes, and’ properties of inheritance evident in broad strokes and slow orbits. An artless strumming of the senses, a melody always playing out of tune. This light left on in a cold locked room. 

It’s the sear of the thousand pinpoints that miss your needlework, the ache left where only devastation abides, the want as time takes each space away. In this hereafter only hurt and hunger endure this turn of phrase into flesh, this mistake made of mirrors and ghosts, this tongued and toothed exhalation to the hollow exalted. It’s not what I said it’s the way I said it, a low growl, an atavistic gear of the throat as we sing along wrong to the eternal song. Chains and charms and chemistry, faster and faster as the sky come a tumbling. The stars crash through this sieve of cognition into map and myth and cosmos, threading constellations into the beadwork, dancing heaven back on its heels. 

dew point

Even the old ways abide

the creed of thermodynamics—

gods and devils forever

scraping the sides, dish and spoon

all the ready runaways,

busting down the doors

bursting through the gates.

So these prayers are set

against the endless stars and

long shot heavens, steam and spark,

breath and spine and expectorate 

adding up to atmosphere 

counting in thousands from the flash,

mumbled words and grotesque pantomime 

the hard want of worship 

spat at the wily sky

asked in haste, answered in

drought or drizzle, blessings 

all percentages and precipitation 

the dew point the altar

overwhelmed by the offering

drop by drop by drop. 

the city of the dead

This is that moment of warm bright sunlight smack in the kisser, where the heat and glow adorn your flesh with such attendant mention that you feel the shadow pressed from the dead center of your chest, the plaintive tear where the darkness separates your shoulders the way wings would if you gave them any thought. As if the sun sent bullets through this daily drudge and carapace to ink in the long lonesome that spreads wherever your breath abides, instead of this litany of marble and granite, corridors stunted by their breakneck grins and collapsed intentions as the rapid fire repartee riddles the slabs and the timbers. We are the follow up questions left unanswered before the pestilence. We are the answers to all the questions never asked.

There is a riddle in the architecture, a secret sealed within. Like a myth of an angel’s disfiguring touch on an upper lip, the words somehow built occluded to rapt silence, a hush to hold to like an oath. The long decay, the slow collapse, the infinite unwinding of the transitory— some details die off, some facts fade away, some gut clenched truths are taken with us back to dust. Facets held by brick and whisper, plans that seems implicit from the direction of a stairway, a frame that could have held a door. Some buried then, some intuited so, all our motives left to the elements like meat. It’s a further that exceeds almost all of us, from blood and bone to embodied ink.

Your stories will outlive you, at least for generation or so. Or your stories will flutter in your wake  for a few moments then settle into the piles of the past. Or there are no stories, there is no you, and the words keep happening anyway— the city of the dead always dreaming in the wide awake. Sleeping on their shelves, wandering your dreams, turning your words over and over and over. Worm and beetle, moth and mouse, the workings of ten thousand mouths making shapes of these stray syllables. Making sense from the saved forms and minted coinage of abstracted minds, shades at rest in the boxes in the backs of brains, ghosts alive at the least glimmer of attention. The empty streets where you and I are all but gone, tomorrow waits for yesterday. 

sir duke

From the wilted wish hued blue of the sky spilling over the eaves, from the trees that buck and bow as the wind pontificates, from this slow set gaze of this longest light always reaching for a lost horizon I fall in the moment the song’s let loose. I fall along the ley lines, I fall along the faults, the flattened affect of the undeniable earth. Only the bright deployed in lilt and sigh, note and tone so loosed that all you can do is sing. The here and now and the long ago sway hand and hand, everyone dancing it the best they can, the rhythm slipping like silk and gripping tight as a fist out here in the nevermore. 

We are there for the first reasoned moment. We are there until we are turned back to ash. There where we hear it to the binding in the bright, we turn from skin to skin, then we deny it and burn so fast in act. Between the revelation and our composition, between the resignation of stones and the stir of stars in the short singsong night. A smile all teeth for the taking, a matchless smile that just shakes it off, this fast footwork a tango with the truth. We are here waiting on letters and kisses and oaths, the sky a breath and bloom. We are here at the edge of the epilogue, summed up among the they, the erased in a line or two. The gone and the easily replaced.

Everything’s sacred, everything’s profane— like I heard in that Patti Smith song. I may be mistaken but it goes both ways. I might be wrong but I won’t be at it long. I smoke and spit into the dusk at the long toothed end of a day, the altar and the offering as the lights go low, all repartee and singalongs as the shadows sink their roots and the sky overflows with stars. This moment all that is certain, the hook in the horns, the dazzle of sheer dreams. As the sea pummels the shore into sand the moon smiles in a wry sliver and the trestles shake with trains. Heaven at the cross rails wringing with alarm, I keep to the mystery, I sing along to parts of all the songs. God exactly like they said it is, but backwards and inside out.

elegy

The season settles again on the unseasonable, my bones ring with the resonant chill, something’s always missing after a death. The hard shift to past tense, sifting through the remnants as the days dull the sharps down blunt, the different drummer beating out a rhythm of body shots and heart attack threats as the consequences play catch up. Boxed up belongings and cherished mementos with the cherish switched off. The words I would put to work staring towards the horizon as the late sun reaches east. Something to sum up an everyday impossible absence, something to make up for countless failings, to honor a long life cut short by my insufficient best.

Another afternoon painted strangely on the senses, another day of spent dreams and trifling shadows. I clench my jaw, I grit my teeth, so comes the numinous glow of the mortal grind. The passage of the dead always hanging around doorways and gossiping in the halls, whole corridors gape where once were walls, propositions that plead and clout as we give due diligence to our naked druthers. Booze and blossoms and the brutal truth of past tense kissing booths, life and limb on the tab when the payment shows its paws, all efforts to the contrary made evident by the unwinding of time. Scattered seeds and broken oaths, cracked pavement and the troupe in the loop. My love another documented loss.

The days roll out, the days pile on and pass unseen, the days a story and a stone. I cannot speak to the loss whole cloth, the way the world will never recover for a loss it barely faced, the truth of the matter strangling myth after myth. So sharp in the certain, so graven in the grief, the light goes out never to be seen again. Words clot and words choke, no matter how softly spoken, no matter how aptly put. Here past the head and heart of poetry and art, where the world is dimmed never to be brighter again, I wish and want. The final wave on its way we gather on this shore.