the habit

The dog is barking and you’re sick in the dark, surrounded by the sounds of the wind and television, dying hard with every habit. Now the light by the mattress, now the meandering of the ash. For a moment smoke tattooed the space between the lamp and the ceiling, some slurred slogan, some mumbled oath. This the air, this the light, the sawed off end of the night.

The moment goes barefoot, the moment unpaved and woven around the flicker of unspoken intentions, the knock knock of the ubiquitous joke. We live or die by our plot points, by the chosen flag and the choosed up sides, stories thieved and spun and given a paint job and served up day after insidious day. The sky slick with tears and dreams, you stare and stare. This madness, this silence, the road hiding behind the horizon.

It’s too late for much getting better. It’s too late to save your soul. The stars you never see oblivious and obdurate as the cold seeps in and the rain rattles around. The dog is breathing in its dreams, head heavy on your knee, the cat curled against your ribs. You feel it in the ritual, in the weary unspooling of the feeble routines. So much more, you’re less and less. The dwindle in the spin, the certainty of the ending in the way of things, you pace the cage and make your mark. You hear it out there, drawing near.

slow to the slide

It’s the next time your eyes meet the sky, the sirens sound and the dogs all howl. Such a sharp eared season with the summer on loiter. Such a sad sighted dream between here and the horizon. The numbers stand in stacks as the ceiling takes its time to settle, last long lights on emptying days, headlights in ribbons in stretches and strings as the road sets aside all reason. Sitting indoors facing the sunset, a life of yields and screens. It’s slip and slide living in second glances, a moonwalk into the rhetoric and the architecture of sensations slow to take. 

The night goes wide, all those gnawing worries and wrecked romances salting the clock. The walls dress up as the thoughts strip down, fragile in the swaddle of anxious shadows, painted in the misread colors of someone else’s dream. Wind woven into breath, breath plied into voice, the stories all strung upon the tongue as this unbidden stitch work is extinguished on the page. Time told on and time told off, the dogs all bark for the thrill and in alarm, scars and stretch marks and tattoos now a touch from me and you. The moon goes missing and still hits its mark.

Here’s where the road ends, unremarkable and unmarked, so many shrubs and stones. Here’s where the words lose weight, every saying only so much spent breath. The time it takes is counted in your blood and bones, the years adding mostly the mad and alone. The day goes dark and the music shifts, another singer, another song. The world is over but the seasons do linger out in the yard beneath blacked out stars, moths and mosquitoes and the thinning partition. Words that would slur or drawl or fizzle if left to the air sink beneath the skin, below the dreaming. All this fuse to feed the fire, autumn tumbling on in.

the drop

Again it is the slow sweep of green against the crawl of cloud and sky, the wind on its hind legs kicking up the dust, this strange drawling afternoon of shade and swelter set down in the particulars of these posts. A happenstance of rhetoric and idiom, of summer and sprinklers and the breeze borne whiff of water as the heat of the day gives way. An all but abandoned habit, feeling like ellipses leading up to the end, a glimmer of a picture unseen and unsaid. I smudge the screen, I irk the cursor with my fits of symbols and my empty hesitations, I stack a few phrases long gone fallow in the great unshaped nation of the waiting page. I hit all the hackneyed marks and tin-eared beats I yet inhabit, longing towards that final point. The punctuation one longs for as the pleasures all play out.

Again it is the blur of days and the blues blazes burn, the shiftless lean of dreams, wild beasts and dead friends fill the notable corners of the barely remembered as the going keeps on getting gone. Each day is a drag, the blade of being plunged again and again into this empty identity, the well plumbed depths long ago dredged and done. The scraped knuckles, the sweatshirt shrugged across the back of the chair, details gleaned and hearts turned cold as each witness walks away. The words laid out, the words left for dead. Better has been there and is done with it. Left alone in silence and ill transmissions, another illusion bled out like any baffled bystander, another refugee in a country gone wrong.

Another dusk, as the day drowses in its flights and fevers. Another flock of birds lighting for the blue. More oaths and idioms, more rhetoric and flummoxed reasons, this empty inventory, this list fraught with avarice and loss. This incessant noodling away in the margins, this petulant impulse to pad out my part, the foolish urge to never let an empty be. The spaces stretch between the words, greater than silence, more faithful than punctuation. Time takes and takes, this lingering less and less a small alarm, a light blinking on and off in some cluttered corner. I suppose it’s all the said left undone, these scraps and apparitions a lamp grasped after in the strangeness of waking, the room dark and unknowable, your name a thousand lives away.

the call

Yet another day, the front porch spilling smoke into the shifting afternoon, dogs barking and the music plays on with the show. The wounds and the wear even worse than it looks, this old campaign all carcass and guff. The inevitable seems to still, some event horizon cognition trick, and you fall forever in the flicker of a leaf. Bearing the brunt of dull curse and bright blessing I stall, blood failing as the ghost goes spilling over the sides. The road rises to meet you and then some, another clout for flinching, I collapse into my latest frailties. Spending days soaking in burning gloom, nursing the latest flaw in my cognation. I hear the long call even spent and ruined. I hear the call.

All wrong turns and enduring regrets the day plays out, the house and the habits having had their say, only the wind and the sky left to linger. So it is that we find the low leaves in a shimmer, towed into novelty and motion as it all falls, the touch of sun in the spectrum of the most grievous scintillation. The familiar brush of something in the shuffle, alone in the stimula as the grip of the familiar tightens around the myth, the story always champing at the bit. I slump under the boundless stretch of the inferential majesty, aflame in all the unpleasantness of this endurance. Whatever our luck, whatever our strengths, we can’t outlast the continuity. I smoke what I got as the song carries on.

The quiet earth is cursed with voices. The blazing core, the burbling rock. The teeming grunts and squeakings of the innumerable multitudes. A fool can be forgiven for hearing some steaming jet gossip on by and taking it personal once in bygone blue. The work becomes its own truth however the words may turn. Useless past delusion the day comes due, however I phrase the devil or doom. The call goes on, though it doesn’t mean you. The answer is all you ever had, whatever or whoever was meant. There is ever a sparrow falling.

simmer

The hours drag and drawl, the vision blurs and fades. The world is more at once, this flight of wing and flower, this litany of sudden silk and tiny spiders as the greens elaborate. The words lose the trail, tire chasing life’s fierce ebullience, assailed by the earthly urgings imposed by a yard lush with threatened labor. So we steep in these invariable aches and solemn smudges, caught in that spark before the wish, the streak across a settled sky while someone’s favorite song is selling souls cheap. The words silent for fear of waking up. 

The kitchen light is on, but there’s nothing cooking. The stove sits cold, a wiped down skillet and a dish towel where a few cat dishes dry. The evening pulls its threads, the habits given to habitats, the fire devouring the fuse. The stories stack like bowls and plates in the cupboards, the stories there in boundaries and degrees. The ones I think of as I wish the dishes, the faces I see as I feed the dogs. Object permanence and the retinue of ghosts, Aristotle’s causes in kind clinging with the mind, each memory an apparition and a map. Curtains close and exits and entrances join hands.

It isn’t in the instance to harbor the art, providence found in the process, the hackles immodest imagining that which awaits as the labyrinth slowly unwinds. This sticking of landings, this noodling of scales, another oblivious witness scouring the dirt and the details as the world rots and teems. The evidence sails across the sky, the evidence pushes through the writhing earth, the reckoning of every direction at once. A white rabbit for every hat and every hole. I post up and pace the tangle of shadows and fluid blues, a scribble of whim and impulse in the endless deluge of lore and tongue. The ending just as it begun, the words wasted to leave words unspun.

chiming of the vendors

It is there in the playing out of the song, in the fade of the light, in the knowing sway of the neighbor’s palm tree as it seems to pulse with strange prophecy. It is in the lone crow speeding low above, almost something spoken once, almost a wish warm upon the lips. The clock counts down and the neighbors home and aggregate, I sit alone, a startled curve of smoke and spine, leaning hard into the rituals of the screen. An ice cream truck rings out, waiting to turn left at the crossways corner. I shiver in the gray and cold.

Old habits die slowly or they become the rituals that hold the world to the wheel. The sense to the getting up and the going, the place that sets the purpose, the staging of the ladders and the snakes. This crawling day, the creep of night as it rises, the smoke and the scribbles. Ancient ways and obscure machines work through the dull daily retort of flesh and breath, tatters flown like banners, forgotten claims and obsolete gods. The house I haunt, the madness I inhabit decays along with the reasons for the motions, the motives that hold up the stack of stories we carry wadded up in the name we knew. Every season another hard sell.

It is there, the light lingering on or just leaving. It is there in bump and grind, the common good giving way to the wide unkind, the clampdown in jackboots and body armor laying down beats without bars. Here I sit, ghost and pariah, belaboring my lungs and blood with these sorry refrains. Here I am at the dull end of prophecy, shrugging shoulders and clinging to receipts long past accounting. As frenzied overlords spew their ill considered decrees and prescribe lead and truncheon to each convenient outlier I clutch at the heaven’s skirts, the true and the tender in this land of brutality and vitriol. Each day I fail and fade, the remainder to a problem all but solved. The old lonesome, the same song. 

recess

There really is no alarm, no sharp end to this report. I sip a microwaved cup of this morning’s coffee, I breathe and blow some smoke. I hear hear a crow call, I see two gulls— it’s the tail end of that sort of day. It’s mostly the dull thud of the body, the burdens of form and frame, the only thing that says my name. It’s a bitter tongue slick with epigenetic blessings and Babel ancient curses, the hoodoo of a mad omnipotence that never learned to read skinned and worn in callow mimicry of the mystery. I swallow a last slug of cooling coffee, I light another smoke. The same old story, the punchline to the same old joke. This wild wind, this fading blue.

Existence puts a pin in it, the shouldered portion, the pain you frame. Fixed on these sins Jesus couldn’t reach from the bloody rood, this ache I am wrapped around, the aperture opened to let slip a little light. Again waking in reckless breathlessness, the featureless dimensions to fumble through, eyes flecked with spectacle and dashing shadows. Limbs and bones and pangs and burning brands and pealing bells sounding out across the geography of being. The clock and the time and the phone’s fixations. Seizing any purchase, clinging to life’s hard alarms.

It’s closing on three am, the lights are on, a movie’s playing. Taylor and Burton and Edward Albee, the clinking of highballs and ice, all pretense of sleep abandoned to screens and words. The rituals all come rushing back, the fulfillment of the moment, the mud of sense and memory and stubborn habit. The self a long abandoned stagnance, the sinking loam a settle grave, the blur of stations the skin of transitions reflected in the witness bearing windows. The sound of movie frogs returns the focus to the story, this twisted husk moving flesh and memory, the lacked and the longed for another signal never shared. The lore locked hard in the carcass, steam and symbols and the striving of thought and salt. I almost know, I feel as if I feel it. The record a list of things left out, this sky where the earth was once.

invocation

This is how your letter finds me, as beaten and bowed as nature allows. This is how your letter finds me, a little lighter on the metaphor. The yellowed, the deft hand fading with the ink, the parsed telling of art and tender. The name a shine, a shell, a weight pressed against its absence in the air. Icon and invocation, fetish and ember, the kindling living makes of memory. An act like all acts inspired and unsustainable, faith and ache and bone and regret, a face fitted into the framework of my mind. Time keeps counting after you’re counted out.

A sea of blue, a sea of green, the ink dark moon and the owl and the pussycat in the flood of echo and allusion. The rhetoric in pitch and key, the bag of tricks lousy with allegory and apostrophe, taking on the meter of smoke and the skin of the sky. Staring at up at the puzzle pieces cut by the reach and riot of bud and branch, the cold wind scolding deep within the fundamental forces of breath and perspective, the drumming of the body beneath the cacophony of its business answering away without question. I think I spoke aloud. I think the words weren’t mine.

So the sky sways, so the earth departs. The ancient masonry shifts and sheds, the fortress of strength built upon shifting sands take Ozymandias and labyrinth alike, the song left without singers. The predictable jolt of the odds catching up, the drawn out dwindle having limits nonetheless. The name fades with the ones who knew who it meant, dust and mementos, tchotchkes and drizzles of workaday words. The name is left with the ones that changed it on the way, the details of how this who from that other lost in the weary distance, the attrition of so much lost while traveling alone.

skyward

Weeds spill from the eaves and the puddles ripple concentric on the picture printed surface, rain changing the reflection as the day runs thin. The rain either a remainder of the storms that’ve passed or a reminder of the forecast prophesied by the local news. It’s blues and grays and scattered droplets out here in the sticks and stones, a call and response from the all alone, crows and gulls and turkey vultures all these silhouetted wings spread through the on high. I am weary in the spirit, I am worn down in the flesh, I am a curse carved in spark and steel, hewn into the blackened bones of the once was world. I scratch and smoke and stir, a few muttered words, a few shameful claims. Almost down to where the names can’t go, almost down to the flight of that last swallow, the sweet song that never touched my lips. The fire and the fortune, this mortal portion, spilled salt and spent breath.

The setting sun casts its gaze east, a bank of clouds stacked up like a screen for the last beams as the light subsides, drip and drizzle as the frayed senses sizzle in the cull of dusk. Sick with dreams and marked by consequences the habitual husk wavers, knowing there is only so many left, only so much more. Low enough it feels like I’m down to the counting, from the West End Blues to Saint James infirmary. I scan the scene from over my spectacles, slick curbs and muttering gutters as the suburb changes phases. The returns from work and daycare, groceries and diaper bags and all the shake and slag left of the shaping of days. Ambivalent traffic and whispering neighbors the tide of strangers through this threadbare alienation. 

Once it was the weight of the moon and the dragged along blood, the ache towards meaning, the longing for love. Now it is circles worn through trampled prayer rugs as I spend my time tending to extinguished candles, the repetition of worn out rituals, the marking of moments given to staring at the clock. Remembered peaks and the rainbow’s end, the durable words dwindling into ruins and catacombs, myths folded into letters and syllables with the haste of the hidden stealing mystery as the mind starts to turn. The urgency all that’s left of the words that once walked in flesh, leaving prints and casting shadows. The light once spoke, the surface of the sea. What is left for me to say? The winter greens, the blues gone gray.