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.