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.