this old man

a hatful of smoke

a bindle full of bones

a hanger dangling flesh

and death there around

the eyes, this glimpse 

at the last page

awaiting punctuation 

template

Cleave close to the carbon, the coming salvos are meant to do more than shake rattle and roll. Attend to the poem of self, keep the roots on and in the loop, the clay ever lit with spit and spirit. The magic may flow, the magic may fizzle, you change it up and stay the same. That’s all you from the blue blazes to the brick house. Built among the blessings, ever striving across oblivion and bardo, enduring and eminent in the house of night. You and the forest of the fading moon, you and the song unfurled into the wanton winds. 

There’s a notion I never get close to, something ruthless and sublime, something always offstage or hiding behind a curtain. Out in the night, here in the room, carried in with the mud caking the boots of words. Always traces, always footprints, always conversations abruptly departed as I step into the scene. Hunger and want and varietal ill blowings going on, chasing phrases and microdosing depth, the fool of the ten thousand partings still nursing dead darlings. The seal of kiss or fingertip silencing the idea before it can quite find the mind. I lose and lose and still won’t look.

The days all misfire before they are spent, carousel and Ferris wheel and these gears chewing up chains and scenery. Something met somewhere on the downbeat of the middle, a trust rekindled or an apostasy that fizzles, passions stacked like salad plates wherever the mood contends. Maybe there is a magic witnessed, maybe candles are lit for the ritual, maybe a spell is cast. From memory to the unknown to the forgetful end of the atomic bond. I see you in the sky, I feel you through the earth. The words wander around, the framework fixed in place. 

everybody knows

So the coiling smoke feathers past my face, head and shoulders hung over the lit ember, weary down to the word. Bones soaked in the oaths of blood and the black grasp of gravity ache unto ignition, ache unto the crush of days feels like destiny, slab after slab of certainty on you from the sky on down. Dizzy from the breath pressed, prayers gone forever out the window as the road blurs by, you know me by beckon and by burn. So much live spent for such a poor return on learn, the earnestness of every grave. 

The earth hits hard though halos abound, buttressed by rock and root and concrete armor, on your ear with a message from the sun. The place staggers and stumbles, a contagion of crossroads and mislead physics, the collateral of self strewn all about the landscape of the senses. Betrothed to worldly burdens and mortal stakes, we play on until we’re played out. Arrows loosed to heaven and the terms of fate’s aim, some agency given up to god, the dirty done to so much work. 

As if it’s anything but a spent missive, an undetonated valentine. These miserable years upon the wheel, these ages left to longing. Some story about the constellations, some story about the way the moon reaches around the shoulders of the world. Eyes that can’t be unseen or seen again, the way a window opens to another world in the first brief moments upon waking, the night a notion always open to interpretation and witchery. What do I but fizzle and flicker, a riddle left to the whims of the wind? The list and the litany, the hole where the thoughts and prayers trickle in. The echoes in the sky at night, the stories we pin on the stars.

later daze

The days exceed,

the days digress,

I am a hole worn through 

the world, the turned screw,

the pounded post—

mommy and daddy and the Holy Ghost

as the miracles and infinities 

add up the faith and fascination as 

I pace out my forlorn portions, 

dead reckoned devotions 

known by rote and bone.

Prayers pressed against 

expired flesh, the kiss

goodbye like coins for 

the boatman, forever 

closing the world away 

as your gaze goes with you

dear traveler through 

the ashes left the earth.

stimuli

Here at the long blue end of the afternoon, with the heat bearing its heel down hard, each breath heavy in ache alone , the ghost turns around and around in its tracks all wail and bruise and wound striped bones. Head hung low, elbows fixed upon the knees as the smoke rises, ordinary and inevitable, redeemed through ritual alone. The words follow where the mechanism transfixes, the senses wasted, an exhaust of symbol taken for sign. 

Here in the sun’s last reaching with the shadows pressed like a stone into a palm, the illusion of some endurance of this tenured flesh, some supplication offered after a casual onslaught. You never know whether you’re a marker or the mark, whether you are the pot or the ante or the hand that’s bound to fold. There’s never telling where a game might break out, or the stakes that the gods have involved. I’ll believe it when they see me. I’ll believe it when odds stop with the defiance. Feel and fall, and the ephemeral fills it all.

Here the shadows reach until all that is left is sky, stars and wanderers and prognostication, obdurate thoughts and the mystery off the chain. Once a dreamer, once a witness, once a bearer of the flame. Trip and turn and burn again, carrot and slapstick, ass and fool. This is where the habit planted, this is where reasons ran, earth and river and tide of sea and sky. All that’s left isn’t mine or me, just the filter of nerve and circuit. The spark as it travels, that light as it fades. Heaven is only looking up, the whispers that pass us in our prayers.

entropy

Sometimes the friction gets inside, it seeps through all the seeming. The still beset by the breath, this burning down, this reduction to dirt and rust. The work reaching through the roots, the depths blessed by the imminent sun, the earth climbing up through the architecture towards the star on top. That confectionery cherry to finish the treat as the distance to wish, counting in thousands like it was expected thunder, the illumination to last word from first spark in hyperbole and aching heart. Maybe it’s an echo, maybe it’s a signal, maybe someone’s signing on. The ego gets the message, the animal does its inventory. These moments while the names give out.

It is the idea that beckons, the spoilage past the sell by, the dogma as it’s taught. The engine and the enigma share the ambiguity, the traces of your being behind your deft and knowing brush. There is only the reckoning of this absence, the light of a far off galaxy spinning like a top, the bright and blessed notion left entangled in the atmosphere of spent arrival. This once that passes, this once that sets in at never. Only the words trailing wonder, the waves that lap and break. 

Mistakes accumulate, it is their given state. Borders fade and rivers bend, the tune is noodled there and back again, the streets scraped by skateboard tricks while the sky bends blue. I take my turn at the wheel as the events again overwhelm, careening through the calendar while the movies fill the screens. Warrantless and keen with need I climb the dull blade of appetite, holding to the ritual as I rattle and buck. These bones bump around, this blood turns over, the engine of meat and wind only moves one way. Here I steam and smoke, reeling time and tense. The song gives in to saxophone, then follows the train into the wing leavened dusk. Bird song and laughter, the fade and the fall.

flesh severance

There isn’t much salvageable once the curse comes down to cases, earthly burdens dragged around the carousel, ashes ashes as we fall. There isn’t much left once you know it’s surrender, the spark withdrawn, the spirit all but expired. We move slow with the deepening shadows as they sweep, the dull brushwork of the wind wielding leaf and bough, the afternoon streaked through tree and street. Gasps and gulps when out of breath or in the cups. The stagger of the beast as it realizes it’s been bled, this waking world, these dispatches of ache and awe.

There are words I wrote and words I meant to, the things I said again and again, apostrophe and epitaph and the glistening of the so and so. Flights stolen and wings unfolded, a flag snapping to. The negative space held open by stray syllables, the incidental capture of the parting of a star, eyes always open somewhere. Only episode and story, the leavings of the entity, the making of the most. What is stuck to encrypted in glyph and script, what endures the puzzle unexpressed.

There is a meat alive below the grander magnificences, an animal above the tread of tales and tongues. The further a fever founded in the boil and steam, the turn of the fallow flesh upon the spit, always more gravy than grave. The stiffness in the breathing, the burn down to the bone. We learn to live alone, down to each stick and every stone, less for more down to the seethe and sore. The reach of the mystery, the blue across the by and by. This uphill struggle, this downhill trend. The flesh never on the mend.

etiquette

The bells are few, three in

the morning never much for

ceremony, more sharp jolts

into the inhabited dark and

insomniac rituals, the flesh

resists the blade only just so. 

I am the alarm that never stops, 

sloppy and improper down to 

task and hour, askew 

outside the lines, disheveled 

among these ill planned 

outcomes, a few scribbles across 

familiar symbols, the scratching 

at the ceiling, the staring 

as the shadows change shapes.

The body and the blood

low key high stakes static,

the water glass the corner of

a color, the passing of the light. 

black lighter catechism

deep down in the meat and 

marrow, you permeate 

the soup stock of myself 

down to where the flavor founders 

you lead by deft example while 

I earn my nevers moon by moon.

your salt and spice 

the altar of the palate 

the prayer at the feet of the day 

lighting up another breath

between the words the smoke 

a hint and a hope

dashed by wind and constellations 

heap

Sieve of sky, heap of bones

the words hung on stars

the riddle written in stone

a single thought from furious iron

all the way to petrichor 

this reason unfolded like a flower

a thousand lashes of civilization

each flinch a cave in and 

a confession, fists by

the handful dragging the ladder

down to heaven through 

the night filled with livid winds,

this ache an empty made of dreams.

explosion forecast

Now it’s down to what the day can’t give. Now it’s down to what you think in the dark. It doesn’t matter what they’re celebrating, it doesn’t matter what you’ve lost. You’ve gone so far that there’s no one who’ll answer. You’ve gone long past people you can call. It’s not the shadows that want to put their hands all over you. This tension between tense and sense, the blessings of the atmosphere, the strange supplications of strangers with sin up their sleeves. The hollowed out portion of a holiday that they celebrate despite you. Plots and spells and go to hells, extinguishing any threat that gets too close by old rigors and rote reflex, only this stubborn hunger and romances long since murdered and dumped in a bog. You wait while the day lets down its hair. You wait while the pyrotechnics punch themselves out.

And so comes the blaze and bombardment, so go the customary displays of froth and fervor. The dogs tremble a rattle from the shower stall door, cowering as is their custom in the bathroom, hiding from a fusillade that won’t let up. This is the way the world walks right through, flesh steam and bones strung beads for all their mass can manage. The surrender of tongue and tense take hold of the telling, time just one thing after another. A riotous cacophony comes wheeling around the corner, yet the latest barrage in broad daylight. A sound rises almost despite my throat, crow harsh choking, a gasp for something more than breath. Even if it was a prayer, the knowing is going with me to my grave. 

I sit still and a song is playing. I am still as the weasel goes pop. The piano keys go trinkle, tinkle the way they want to do. Thrill seekers boom and crash, trashing til they fizzle and tap out, a fire dying in the hearth as heaven gives way to the deep leaning sky. The earth will reach to meet you, the earth will seize you by the salt of your soul. We dawdle in the slow of saying as the flowers read the room, this clench of lies and iron, the shameless gaze of naked motive and brutal truth that permeates the ritual that justifies the thrall. The miracle crawling out from the rubble all frying pan and fire, the words there cutting bait. Braced for the beating, wishing on a kiss.

stutter step

The slow burn sky fumes blue as the green limb loll and sway, summer here at long last despite the calendar settled seasons, the air glistening with the contentions of the flesh. The breath grows shallow as the conflagration marks the wind, the heavy heart never learning to lift with the legs. The body both the lesson and the learning, the message and the bottle bobbing in the froth and spittle of the unrelenting soliloquy, the ocean a reliquary of the unrequited reachings in the tide of mind. Every telling comes after the epilogue, every lesson shows up at the wrong door or late. These last days spent coiled in the aspect of the animal, the beast always a hair trigger from a raised occasion, a head fake to break the knees of the inevitable and a stutter step into the attack. The branches from the break, the reason from the roots. 

These are the downhill days, the little by little adding up to a lot, the same old story suddenly alarming and new because now it’s landed in my lap. Life and its slapstick and its shtick, the mission drift of the tried and true written in stick and stone and black and blue. The script straight from the appendixes of the canon, a warning shot fired off across the brow, the language with its ugliest outfits laid out on the bed. The downward dwindle as our specificity gives up, our portion mostly in the past tense until it isn’t there at all. A correction so coarse that it peels the bark off of me, another wound due to the way the world will walk right through you.

We are the prophesied ash, we are the resignations unto the earth. Either the dire or the dotage, the limits of the mettle, the obduracy of the bone. The mysteries linger as the seasons lap us, slow to warm and vulnerable at more unreasonable extremes, everything worn down but the wishing. Accepting my failings and my fate, I creep and crawl these dull circles, the ritual another intrinsic engine left out in the weather, the path clotted with foxtails and strewn with spider silk. Left with duties to shirk and fights that can’t be avoided, my dreams don’t find me in my sleep. Only ink, so to speak. The story, so you say. The words where they could be left on read. The swelter breaks late in the day, endings come like the providence of sparrows.