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.