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.