invisible

You wake within your summoned skin, a sting of blue a slash of white, and the sky on high  spinning in circles chasing its tail. You say your prayers, hands high above your head, assuming that the projectile will adhere to the intention of its maker. You make your shapes, you turn the dial, more and more to feel a little less. The burn is the air, the burn is your flesh, the rust on the rails and the lichen on the stone. One more word will end it all, break your bones like the rumor to the rhyme. It all adds up, you think one more time. The numbers stick and stumble, the lying is all on you. 

This fresh flesh remains unseen, working your schemes, pressing your levers. The tell comes from the wake your mind leaves behind, the rippling materials, the exposed beams and that touch of tongue to teeth. Your world blisters with your beliefs, the unspoken oaths boiling over into being, even these simple symbols enough to evoke the ache. The evidence will overwhelm, this wan insistence a warmth, a dot painted with red light right at the off switch of this life. Speak so all this truth takes flight.

This is the way in the earth. This is the way beneath the sea. The muttering rainfall, the weighted gutters, garlands of weeds hanging from the eaves. We are bodies at rest and in motion, the work of translation and evasion in our modified verbs, spells of effort and desire. You will want as all beings will, you will pick and choose among dreams and occurrences, even as little a nod or a lean just to steer the vessel. One day you stop broadcasting, you stop deliberating, the signal goes dark. A stipple of stars, a wish of wings, and a sky to string them all along. 

it’s a gift

I suppose I could go from ache to ache striving down the line, like Santa’s reindeer or Snow White’s dwarfs, listing all the parts that ended up in pieces or begrudging every moment from birth on downhill. I guess it could be the sound of rain flooding the gutters and soaking the roofs, the only talk on the television, the only music stuck in my throat. The litany my identity, it slides along the black ice of circumstance, the gathered collateral and the comedic impact of all those empty plans. A rictus grin stuck on my lips as I send some more smoke to heaven.

The mass accumulates, hollowed out intentions and the sparks fly from the friction, even the strange grows familiar. The arrow loosed toward the sky, the rest is threat and anticlimax. The numbers riot and roil around the permeable possible, the wise and the foolish all caught upon the arc of the tumbling dice, blessing and curse a single call. The fire spreads because the fire is always catching. We haul our reasons from the ruins.

The fire blazes, the fire flickers, the fire fades. This is the thread we are woven from, the text and textile, the world we are thinking through. A door in the dark where our strangers keep knocking, a scratching from behind the blinds, the night with every light left on. As tenacious as the shadow of water within the shadow of a glass, neither name nor act will last. The wheel in the commercial seems to spin backwards dragging along the limits of this instrument or that one. This continuity that only lasts while the camera is on. This name that only lasts while it’s spoken.

day glo

So what of the run on night? What of the rasp and curl of a smoke cured throat? These stories that I never get right, these dreams that never come true? A life cudgeled black and blue, bouncing bumbles and sudden stars. A burning root left untended like a runaway wish. Everyone loves an ashtray fire, the only light left to guide my staggered traverse. It’s only the hurt that lingers. 

Midnight arrives to lose all meaning, the reading lamp halo on the ceiling, the cold seeping through the floor. Eyesight gone silty as my condition starts in, the resident aches in heart and bone laying claim to the fixed star fragments, the sketchy catch as catch can memory like a memory recently interred. Some commotion calls through the wall, cat or raccoon or enemy op as yet unidentified, but neither dog stirs. Still a few nights until the ubiquitous Yule and I don’t know from mice. The rats, though, clamber and gnaw away never heeding the chestnut on when to make hay. 

The blunted brights of literary hues mingle with the sharp intermittent shift along the holiday spectrum, the window aglow with hints of traffic, tinsel, and off brand ambulance. I pause between breaths, the very air ringing with whispers of wind and rain. Awake without reason to the tune of suspended swords and the falling of other shoes, haunted by worn out demons and regretful ghosts as time grows unkind to the ill prepared, I take another fall. It only hurts where we are.

go long

I am sitting here with the window open. I am sitting here with the brand burning down. I would stare and stare, if only your skin was there. The thunder that rumbles up from the gravel, the story that glory would have you declaim. A burble of words hung on pieces strung from the storm outside, rain on the rooftops, a mouthful of petrichor and incidental percussion. I have forgotten most of what I know. The moon is waning, or so I’ve been told.

I am sitting here measuring the desperation. I am sitting here observing the bounds of each breath, the wheeze and thud of the bellows, the clumsy clamber of the heart up the stairs. The constant trade of eye for sky, the gray for gray of any given day. A stranger in clumps of soil and soul, all that there is that isn’t. Every revelation a calculation, these insistent integers to frame every thought and spasm, each gasp slips as you lose your grip. Held to the gathered matter, crafting clumsy alibis.

I am uncertain of my footing, unfaithful to my feet. I am cast like shadows, I am drawn like lots. The runaround has gone around until it has become a fundamental force, the grift so thick it sticks to the teeth and torments the tongue, a compass left with a sacral pole. Another long night creeping down the street, clouds gathered and wishes without stars. The windows take their cue from the passing traffic, rattling out of rhythm as they do their little dance. There is no cure and little consolation. Everything is weather and obsolescence. Only psychopathy and curated cages.

reiterate

It is the song that ends at the nearest knuckle to your nose, the gauntlet tossed at the point of impact, the spill melodic at the advent of your mouth. It is the song that meets your fingers in the persistent chill, the bespoke faith of tattered breath and leadened heart, word upon word until the spindle clatters empty within the idiom. In the spin and spill, the feathery collection of elements all a glitter, the recipe there in the very air as the whole of the world hums along. It comes around to go around, the tragedy of the emphatic, the gravity at work baffling the bits and pieces with big picture givens. It is the singing best left to the stars.

It’s a TV theme, it’s a train in the night, it’s the answer you shout aloud because it isn’t what you’re thinking. The words keep on passing through, every allusion a portion of a resurrection, each inkling a disinterment and an incandescence. Every song winds up a singalong. It’s all invocation, it’s all where you put your hands. A rustle and a tumbling, the sound of sticks and stones. You anticipate the echoes once you live it all alone.

There’s just the one thing I have been saying. There’s just these words wasted with missing the mark. Scribbled symbols where the speech would have been. Flags that unfurl to become the wind, the insistent telling the ring around the moon before the rain falls, this gnashing of teeth and beating of bones. It is the voice of the rigging’s complaints as the sails fill and the vehicle trades meaning for mechanisms, the structure always trying to skip ahead in the story. An act of braggadocio, a birthday left uncelebrated, breadcrumbs scattered for the birds. This is the shape I am making, working out a way to say. 

namesake

This is placement of the degradation, these are the words with the sun in your eyes. The signal beset with subtle errors and abrupt glitches, mistakes in the punctuation amongst the other unspokens and unspeakables, static stippling the map of the mind. Plodding disambiguation as the shapes reassemble and the stencils assert themselves, thinking the world aloud as we slip on fitting skins, our ways mostly say. The sun sets as sparrows flit and feed, devoted to the known. Every line is scattered with a scan, the symbols and schema scattered, the 52 Pick Up of cognition in every act.

This is the perineal shuffle, the signs of the season, the tumble of the phrase. Meaning made fresh each day, a ship carefully tacking towards the ominous intonations of a gathering storm, tables for times and tides. The particulars take place while you weigh and speculate on the percentage of the coherence, using what culture you carry and the dictionary you rewrote, the dream revealed in the misremember. Leaves turn color and spill and spin with the hurry up and wait of the wind, the depth of detritus confused with wisdom in the mumbled candor of the earth. Each name a remembrance forgotten, every word a set of empty boxes and implicit matryoshka doll, a summoning of echoes.

The day ends in smoke and porch lights, in cat dash and dog exclamations, a rag tag cant of lore and remaindered grammars strung together across the gaps and the negative space. So I inhabit these inhibitions, the prophylaxis of noun and adjective, the earthly culling of the vocabulary of a semi sentience of gasp and grope. The two step stagger of the shtick, inside the guard with a hat tilt then the old one two, the rule of threes in partners and pairs. Neither the calling or what they called me I fade and gutter, an inmate of a thousand idioms and affectations left to the slow burn. A light left on for reasons only known to the dead.

slow

The dreams don’t shake off with the day still hours away, with the weary work of shoulders and knees, with the clamber of flesh and bone. It is still, though not quiet. An atmospheric hum, the low growl of pavement and tires and the vague machinery that grinds down into clockwork and case studies, slabs and wires strung across the breath and stir of the earth. The wind through the windows, the odd longing of left on lamps and anticipatory engines as the house and the host chase the tails of ghosts. The mind idles in between, the day to day, the scene by scene.

The limbs slow and the sun crawls, the sky sorted and cycled. Evidence accumulates and is almost instantly forgotten, the world as thin and permeable as any glamour, meanings shifting along the sinister as we are perpetually corrupted and sold into bondage or off for parts. A feather upon a fence, the shards of a broken cup, a pigeon killed and lost by a harried raptor now occulted in the open giving dust to dust. A shoe print in the soft soil, the green shoots and greedy sprouts going the way of a California winter. Silhouettes printed on the inside of the eyes as the day trades skins with the dusk, something gone, something lost along the road unfollowed. The going is gathering, giddy in the gutters of our beings.

Boxes and screens and asphalt, flags and words and declarations, the flickering nothing we have made of a once wide world. The worst animal now in crazed undulations as it dances its riotous celebration of victory in a slaughterhouse conflagration, a passionate expression of its transformation from entity to meat. The triumphant hallelujahs straight into the maw of extinction sound from every corner as some venerable line of hokum is sold as gospel, the infinite promised though is doesn’t exist. Your life is more than some Bible story, it is owed more credence that some dead tongued creation myth. Your life is more than the empty threats and hollow promises of the next world over, it is owed more reverence than words strung on shiny tinsel and colored lights. We go in these last spasms as we beat our brains into blood and mush, declaring our power as we pay our debt to the dirt. Night falls and we huddle in hubris’s last glow, our lullabies the lies that stripped us of our lives.

ingenue

The stumble comes along with the stipple of the stars and the mumblings of mud, the lilt as the phrase does the falling, this ache displayed as idiom as fireworks crackle and the train declaims. So much comes in the blunt almosts and the odd sparkles, the glimmer just beyond the horizon line, the world revealed in flashbacks and jump cuts as the echoes fill the blanks with flashing teeth and false bravado. The tumble of dusk, the dull color of the deepening sky, night alone all along in the litany of warm curves and wide eyes. Not so much the kiss, nor the thought of the kiss, but that heartfelt idea of the possibility ahead of the plausible. Love despite the evidence, the placement of a face.

We’re there in the paraphrase, the reconfigure and the strategic retreat. We are more and more beset with the same old stories in shorter cycles, old orbits and clipped obits within the weary mythos, cold to the bone and damned by omission. It is the soul below this shambles, the degree of ignominy left to pad out the reach of the proscenium and scrape away at the rake of the stage. The theater surrendered to long shadows and the glow of the ghost light, this dream left to a flutter of eye lids, a flicker of a form that you grew through. A name you knew at first as word. 

So bright skies stampede across the bruised and beaten detritus of sight, the weight of the anchor, the drag of more obdurate elements expressed in the blur of work. So the words empty out in their saying, the plodding on and pushing through, what was done and settled as stone the drift of a soft and dreamy snow trailing grammar in hills and piles. The breath drags and draws, the wheeze and saw of this weathered organism the pleading of the instrument, a song so deep in the motion of stone and star the least brush of it can spin a soul asunder. The plot trods on, the boards all abound despite the further pressing of the players and confusion in the wings. Soon the background gives it up, the roles fewer as the names fade. Something left there like a story, a story another reason to stare. 

same old man

The ritual reiterates, the stagger in the shuffle, the gaffe in the deal as the heel toe slides and slides. The eternal bluff waiting on the call, ashes ashes then the fall, the gait beneath the gathered weight. The slow to the circle, the wobble to the spin, the blazing branch lit from within and spitting dizzy nonsense to set the world on its ear. Back bent to the burden this shambles scrambles along the drift and drag, all the love left written in the gist of the bones. The spirit itself babel, the wind in the declarative as the eternal takes a whirl.

The beauty is there in the architecture, the music is there in the flickering of the fuses, each wire the fretting of some invisible choir. The self that you are bound to be comes in by dozens in twos and threes, depending on the orchestra and the instruments and the agreed to terms and services. Pledge an oath to the style of deception that you favor, be the allotted self that freedom decrees. Reasons change with everything else, the endings and the origins altered to fit the current tempo and the latest fads. Even the magic doesn’t see it coming.

The song takes hold before the meaning is settled, it takes root in depths that endure. The beating heart, the thundering blood, the endless tide of breath and sky. These stories that we encumber and untangle, these truths we tap in the weaving of each deception, the heft we seem to hoist on our personal petards. We are the terms of the turning earth, the expression of sentences ended, and song lines walked. The path revealed step by step, the map made the world again anew, each day the revelation of a sea parted to inevitably come crashing back. Our lives written in smoke, remembered as sand.

where it’s at

The scene opens, or at least the line starts to unwind, the sense of a spindle as the stylus finds a scratch. Again and again, the metaphor hewn from allusion and skull static, the old song despite my lack of even a single turntable or the clout of some hefty hegemon. Here on the precipice of the vast decline, at the moment in the fall indistinguishable from flight the phrases turn and turn, ever the glow from the burn. The breadth of the sky, whether thick with rain or stunned with stars, and strictures of the mind meat stuffed in my skull that measure out my limits. I am here, I say to no one in particular. I am here I say as no one in particular at all.

This loss is a location, it is a mark upon the flat circle, a setting for a settling. It is an awakening and a resolution, eyes rubbed back into vision, all the sites having left me sore. There is little done that is not debacle, tied so tight to the meanings in our minds we cannot help but spin from this speaking, the story swapped out part for part to ease all the other monkeys in the barrel. We say the things we always say, the quiet part aloud. The joinery of the hierarchical, the avuncular ape the unseen architect as we climb and hoot, going along by making it up. Cliqued up in the pitter patter as they name what does and does not matter, the coin that funds the crowd. 

It’s been a hard landing out here in my leasts and lasts. The old ways crumbling as the light shifts, the shift in shadows adding absent shapes that cling, eyes grown into the new sight now strangers to the earth. Towers rise from foundations of ad libbed myths and mistakes in the translation, ghosts of ghosts as the cull hungers and moans. I let go of a few dear habits and deleted the final drafts of my residence in the para ethereal, no outlet valve or repurposed brand. Giving up what isn’t good for you is immaterial, I am giving up what I’m no good for, these clades and strata and five things that surprise. There’re are two more pieces I plan to write in the ol Blood and Ghostal, then it’s goodbye cool words. Until then all blessings to the doomed, the danged, and the hanged.

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.