crosseyed and painless

Maybe the message arrives in the moment as a bird on the wing or a bolt from the blue, something lifted by the wind or moving deep below your feet, a spark to strike a light inside. Maybe it comes as chemistry, a tumble of pheromones feeling their way into the tussle of your blood and atmosphere, the structure a signal running through the ley lines of life. It could be the riddle of physics tickling at entanglement, the spun silk story of particles talking across the distance of some old collision, some ancient introduction in the primordial cauldron boiling over into your being. It could occur in that flicker of cognition, your consciousness a stylus freeing it from vinyl or clay or ink, stricken into the record by your prying mind. Then again, maybe the message is all in your head, Occum’s Razor always cutting it close.

Never mind trying to figure out the signal, too many years wasted between the measure and the map. The means of transmission often obscured by standard bearers and nervous messengers, unknown customs and dangerous strangers, words that move so knife sharp through us that we seldom notice the wounds. Bled out before you know, what a way to want to go. The rhetoric invented to keep tailing the truth, the talk too ready to turn colors, we follow the arguments we can afford. We stare through the frequent fires, the red glare only the occasional rocket, dollar signs where our eyes once were while they follow you around the room. Time will tell, depending on how it spends.

They say you can catch a glimpse around the corner, peak behind the curtains hanging at the bounds, take a look at calamity and beneficence in the days yet to come. Some shuffle a deck and deal, some throw sticks or stones, spill the guts of beasts or birds to earn a glance. Some will parse and piece their dreams, consulting scrolls and oracles, exchanging words for words. You watch the other monkeys, counting on the safety of the numbers,  the power of crowds. Others just crunch the numbers up and give them back as odds, reading you the chances as you gather wits and spine. There is a hole that will stay a hole. The facts are the first to stray. 

misunderstood

Chances are I took it wrong, hanging there outside custom and context, words left unexpectedly on the line. Objects in the mind may be other than they appear, given the labors of the self and the lingering of the smoke. I typically miss the over or the under in good standing, pick a cards and nothings up my sleeves muttered in deference to the form, forever working off cheat sheets and ersatz odds. It’s the problem with levity that gravity doesn’t always allow for ascent, bodies at rest and motion and the serfs of sentience. When looking for the evidence of recorded beneficence the rudiments of my cognizance will often find a slew of hurts don’t its and two for flinchings. As far as navigation goes, it’s not the most utile map to follow.

It’s like the bumping in the night, the creak of floorboards, the indiscreet hinge. Sure, it sounds like murder, but is it really worth all that getting up? The confusion is really more brand building, cosmetic alloys and the slide of misalignment, a flag to unfurl and a smattering of stereotypes. There’s no road sign for how far to go after getting it wrong, everything done to the tune of the dramatic turn and inflamed apostasy. Waking to a world so brutal even the mirror leaves a mark, creased and leavened with mayhem and spilled salt. Scraping footfalls and hushed breathing in the dark halls, the flesh itself a fever.

I saw the moon in passing. I didn’t wave, or say anything. The moon has made it pretty clear it has nothing to say to me, window creeping not withstanding, most of its signals aren’t mixed. All the heavens brush on by, clouds and stars and alibis. Sometimes the reason comes down to the season, sometimes it’s about hats and feathers. The signs are read, the signs turn blue, the signs are for entertainment purposes only. The inkling teeters on the precipice, an imagining of drumrolls and music in the minor key as the mask is removed, another mystery for the mistaking.  I fold fetal, clutching at an ache for comfort, curling into question marks and involuntary exclamations. The knowing comes and goes, as soft and elusive as smoke.

anecdotal

The shadows are reaching east, filling in the desolation in soft grays and cool blues, the spectra spilling swatches in the visible bandwidth and then some. It’s a day of dust and sparrows, a compression of comprehension along bands of beasts and birds, counting cracks and flies. It’s a day of disarray and bad beats, the stuffing coming out the seams. The old blood pauses and pools, the aches flowing unabated from lung to limb, breathing a slow sizzle spittle flickering throughout the forms. The structure is to suffer slings and arrows, the roots always good for a reach around, the words stained with smoke and vapor as they still in their stands. 

It’s like the way the blank page would thirst for even the pressure of the pen point, the dark longing of the ink another invocation moving across the water, the absence identified its own sort of summoning. It’s like a falling leaf sending sparrows dashing into flight, a particular stimuli touching a nerve, the stone rolled away from dire memory the stanza standing there in the paint. The timing of the tide inside dragging its skirts up and down the sand, the traces there saying grace as it erases it. The throat cleared with intemperate smoke, barking and gasping away after incantations. 

Now the hours beneath the painted on sky, glitter and asbestos and dust, a lamp lit firmament. Animals named in their comings and goings, dirt man’s first gig rehashed by association and disinhibition, heaven hale and hearty if only fishes were wishes. Bodies at rest and bodies in motion, first principles and poor rehearsals, no more broken legs mentioned before the current cast. The need to embrace the fade, the feeling a kind of feeding, cards turned and lots cast clinging to the transitory. This stirring, skin scratched and livid, words teeming and uncalled for tumbling over details, picking teeth and bones. Everything a secret until the say so goes.

stars apart

Another boom and the moon is peeking through the part in the curtains, neither cause for the streaming tears, those only the parlance of our times. A breath goes down wrong and it’s all hack and rasp, lungs like the billowing tattered plastic bags flying from a fence like the standard of some long buried battalion. The curtains stir and the moon winks, the world watching every move. Asleep and dreaming with eyes wide open.

Spent ordinance and the refurbishment of the spent narrative, the other caught in creased missives and exposed by the ever expanding nature of consequences. The sky reaches until the day and night touch, the moonlight spills and swells, the sun ablaze in blood and bone shining lies upon every skin and stone. The red queen always a black jack no matter what the eye might say, there’s always some extra legerdemain left in the tell that gives away the identity below the day. 

There’s the weather and there’s these perpetually refitted memories, moments that linger despite every last spark of life of them long since turned to dust. The gone goes on through the observable universe as the heres linger while every there puts more space to its where. The discourse of the everyday quickly becomes fresh omens and old chestnuts, as each and every star departs, leaving little consolation but the still recognizable constellations. We are spent, we are burning, we are temporarily here to stay. Here but for the auspices so far, the worst well assured by the constitution of the fuse.

least

I wake and try to find a way not to face the day. From the first turn of phrase to the rigors of the litanies it quickly slips away, sand to castles, tricks to light. The illness at once sets in, faint salvos and thunderous whispers, words emerge in fusillades and flurries. It’s the way flesh finds me in a heap and drags me to these dragging feet, the stations I pace and the muscle memory residuals, bait cut breath by breath. I succumb to the ritual of any available crutch, the placement of the lighter, the lean of the incense burning the mortal at both ends. The animal gets lost in the apologia, the gods too busy with their acrostics. 

I vie for distraction before the flags unfurl, before further atrocity carried out by the nation state is revealed, before the inevitable revels over the dead. Witness has given way to a narrow ambivalence and a sense of isolation in the decay of old traditions, words set ablaze in gleeful malfeasance at every turn. Ugly and flustered and full of beans. I fix my focus and follow cat and crow, the bolts loosed by wind and bent bough, leaning heavily into any loose chemistry left in the mix. Like a fever the press of stones and sticks arises from the languid brick lined pit where the bound words dwell, dull and drowned until summoned like a fiend stuck in a craft store star. Beneath the heat and tumult, I watch several fledgling crows figure out how peanuts work. 

It’s the rattle upon inhalation, it’s the thud and shutter of the heart, that ill meat between sense and sentience sputtering in sparks and strokes. That first hint of cognition in collision with some shape disappeared in the peripheral or some suddenly met mirror. The swell of shadows as the scenery overflows, unspoken words swarming a heavy tongue. These palpable pitter patters so close to the surface, these names that come craving articulation. Twilight gets stuck in my lungs, all cough and clamber and bees in amber, wheeze and spatter beneath the implicit proscenium as I return to earth. This long fall the slow fade from the world, the least of men and beasts, the passion a scratching at the lid of a coffin.

mitigate

It comes in strange dreams and onerous portents, the hawk on the fence post, the owl at your window. The abrupt elocutions of a raven amid a chorus of crows, the stepped crack, the snapped bone. There is always some score being settled, always unseen pieces in play, forces brute and subtle displayed cavalierly in the clatter of the marbles and the music of the spheres. Here within these cursings of the cursor incidents of fearsome happenstance and ambivalent fate mingle in this bucket of inklings and tingles, marking every I with a wearily sighed X. So we move to mitigate all the alarm, mingling small hopes in with the harbingers of dust.

There is the broadened blue idling in the sky, the seen spectra and assorted life proofs tool around the scene in blip and blur, we barely stir under the weight of entropy’s embrace. That impact of depth and brevity changing the temper of the flesh, the bruise you choose from inside the incarnation, the self settling like smoke in the notes. The very air a buzz with divisions and collisions, the glint of dragonfly and the hint of hummingbirds, the firmament astir with the feats of ascendant swallows. A nearby mockingbird sings its greatest hits on shuffle, horns honk as a raptor drags its shadow across the yard. Place and placeholder, mirror and map, the rigors of the razor and the rule of the strop. 

The wind picks up a sets the scenery all a shimmer, the green sea sieve of leaves tickling scintillations from all the weeds and succulents. Sirens sound as the afternoon just vamps, snips of the songbook and snails wrought through hints of scales, awash in the breadth of the broad continuity. Sometimes you needn’t bother with the signs, the wroth of unacknowledged gods and the affront of local spirits are always awaiting fresh heels to hound. The hum and drum of this heap enough navigation, this cavalcade of bum and crumb enough onslaught, just the dusty shelf for this generic self. Let the sun dim on a cloudless day, let the dead rise for judgment, leave all these ominous wings to the birds. You are beset from all sides.

unbidden

It is the earth that moves and not the cursor. It is the feet and the fields and not the map. This warm sun, this striped sky, this river of sticks and soil and detritus that spills out of frame and into the continuity. The landscape pervades the atmosphere as the unspoken is spelled out as a lapse in milk and honey, a wandering so far away from first tongue dirt that the words can only serve so long before turning feral. There is nothing, then there is speaking. There was speaking, now there is nothing again. 

Smoke curls towards the eaves, the swole moon is waning unseen, and flies light upon head and limbs like a test of the flesh. Trash and dead leaves skitter down the street despite the season as the porch ants work their algorithms and a lone fly schemes about my elbow. This is the slow of the growing shadow, the stir of the statistics in the atmosphere, the dull plod of the settle as it spreads. It is the spider by the lighter and only ash left to offer up or down. There is a pause at the precipice, a vertigo above a yawning hunger, then a breeze resets the arrow. This plunge and the flame a flicker.

We echo into specters, we grow into the ghosts, these notions that we once inhabited now just light upon the water of the open road. The night arrives in illuminated rotation as the room is confined to blithering screen and earnest lamp glow. The loosed arrow falls, time on an incline, only music and mood. Curtains rise and curtains close, the show just goes and goes. We arrive on the scene, beneath these stars, within these walls and doors unbidden and unknown. The breath will ebb, the breath will flow, no worse for wear no one the wiser. The battered slate, the scuffed up silence.

episode

This one starts with the pines through the window, though I don’t know where it’s going yet. Maybe there’s a lesson, maybe the moon shows up. Maybe there’s nothing but the vamp, the one, the two, the old soft shoe. The wind is on its hind legs, and the sky is a gentle brushed blue, and the pines half shrug as they sway. I falter on without much else to go on, aimless efforts stranded in strays and eddies, a shuffle of loosely parked cars and gossip. The wind and the waving, and the obdurate stretch of daylight.

There’s a train wail, then the whole catfight raucoustra choreography with every hiss and yowl in the canon. The window is dark now so you know it’s night. The big empty yawning straight out into the air and localized effects. The empty on me all the time, then all at once. The fading of a pair of motorcycles, the keening of a far off siren, this feeling away from my aptitudes. Sometimes there are dogs barking and they aren’t my dogs. Other times, well, who’s to say? 

Mostly it’s the scene you make of it, dead branches blown to life by gust and zephyr animated by the sameness of the background. A sense of mountain range or star spread amid the spider silk and deadfall. One or the other, then one for all. I begin, a flinch or a feint, then some is or ain’t. There’s no telling because I am out of things to say. So brick by brick and bird by bird, there is a shape inside the skull. The path made clear in absence and inference, the passage becomes the text. An open window, and on you go.

the effin ineffable

It’s the way the world watches you through each crack and crevice. It’s the world that watches you beguiled inside your sight, this testimonial of chemistry, this scribble of quantum epithets. It scratches at your itches and lies through your teeth, a victorious laurel or funeral wreath. Every breath all rasp and ration, syllables slipping through flesh and bone, the cloister of the nasal and the brothel of tongue and lips evident in every prayer. The are a million million transitions, sums tippling from the tree roots, staggering calculations made entirely of the collateral coiling into infinity and exhaust. You build and boil in filament and plume, your secret only lasting as long as you burn. 

It all keeps coming so you fill in your fire with whatever might fuel you, the hard won placeholder as you tack against the billowing moments, the star you are in the minded map. Immediacy always currency in the profane exchange of nows, the seeing only after the say so, the vow gone as it is voiced. Everything errs on the effin ineffable, this expression of scads of peculiar particulars, this stir of collaterals reaching out to the firmament. This slow inventory, counting down by unfathomables, blood and breath and the stubborn depths. The stagger, the struggle, the grudging not so fast. The grace despite the placement, the strive behind the trash. 

It’s there as the sun beats heat into the scene so hard I can feel it in the shade of the porch, a soft opening of summer, a stamp upon the back of my skull. It’s there as the scenery is shaped by the laborious light, plaited grains and blazing chains and symbols shed to the syllabary, a loose conspiracy of various wings and halos and the usual harbingers hearking it all to hell. It’s that natal rhythm section bending your ear, all these lessons having evaporated years and years ago. No leads, no limburger, if it’s dancing then we dance. No primer, no paint, just this faint pulsing of the process. The tilt of the wind in what is missing.

monkey’s paw

I lost count of the answer staring at the ashtray, the remainders in some strange arrangement, the what it was that I was smoking. Maybe if I took a picture, maybe if I read the room. Instead there’s only evidence, the residue of ambient wishing, the hint of some coded clue. The song gets stuck in the shuffle. The song gets caught in the wind. I guess that’s what keeps me listening to the tuning out and tuning in. These gaudy stragglers, these spent fragments, the ringing of a chime. Sifting through transmissions, all echoes and repetition as the phrase overturns, awaiting this ignition.

So much for the scintillation, so much for the effervescent, so much for the spheres wheeling out a tune. The stars stay parked where they were. The moment gone the way they do. The plot lost until you’ve ridden off the rails. The flesh chills, the spirit slows, loitering in the leaves. I can nearly taste the kiss that sealed it, the magic and the monkey mind, the dirt to every deed. I can nearly see that bright tomorrow snatched away in the small prints and fortune stitched lines. The devil deal, the slap of the creator, something wicked shambling in the words. It comes on command and leaves you wanting behind bolted doors. 

Count your wishes as if they were blessings. Enjoy a mythos woven around card cheats and lawyers, caught as we are in the telling. The little dog nips at the fool’s heels and hams, such fun for the laughing, as they spill like Jack and Jill. The story is there for anyone to tell, depending upon such things as the rake of the stage and the average word count. The game is in your face and what is shown. The troubles keep coming, they soldier on and work in teams and platoons and hordes. Trouble knows you like the back of its hand, trouble comes looking. God’s love at best a beating, hell wide open because of everything you are.

underscore

By the time the day cracks the curtains you’ve already been up for hours, the pause and pacing of the night watching all this inking in. You’ve put your imagination through the motions, recycling dread and dream as the probabilities and anxieties race around the track, figure eights and tectonic plates in the gallery of your incessant engines. Daylight pushes through the grease and the grays in your drowsing gaze, rearranging the scenery and glamming up the dust. Again you press against boundaries, call down the spirit to stir your bones, scorching the firmament with your scalding prayers and pro forma epithets. Again you let the minutes fall as they may.

You think in eras, you think in titles, you think in hints and harms. You think in things undone and in the doing, scouring the checklists and keeping score. Where you failed and how you measured and the surprise that was yours and yours alone. Old masters and young turks, and the newest schools you never quite get the gist of, wearing the skin of shibboleths and the ghost of primal scams. You built the golem and tricked the djinn into offering up their terrible autograph, blue breathed and shimmering into the very semblance of the shape. The schism left like the lines of the tightly folded fist, another shape to take to when the light is low. The spell there smiling straight through your eyes.

There it is, the insistence in every ease. Here we go, the oldest tricks in the book. The moon shrinks, the night takes it out of context, Leonard Cohen is dead and stealing your girl somewhere between scrawled letters and needle skips. The dreams wear out just when you start to get good at them, the nightmares dirges made from drear threats and jump scares, prayers slinking unbidden out the door. It takes strange turns between serpentines, zigging when they think you’d zag. The stories fevers squeeze from you, turncoat gods and fine print devils pressing your breath through the breach, terms and conditions and promises made of lies. The squirming of the shadows with the light implied.

art for fuck’s sake

It’s not even halfway through May and the moon’s charge is running down, the day busy filling in the blanks. A long blue washed out empty flexing hard at the mirror or the spring, the ache a note sustained, a stitch to hold the thought so prolonged in its dissolution. The and ifs only as ifs as far as the metaphor will go, throat cleared to the sound of motors, smoke loitering below the spider strewn eaves. There’s a picture within the picture, a play within the play. A motorcycle dopplers into distance, the sky a blinding gray.

There’s an order read on rote, a way you take to scan the stacks, a science to your senses. The crow calling from the long dead branch, the wind splitting the tall bursting stands of grass into song and signal, a rhythm slowly swaying. The want in the wait, the jumping line of the story to the double Dutch skip. Something in the genre of foretelling, a feeling to the atmosphere, a wing waiting without flight. A convention to the conceit of these recycled symbols, the skin walking Lives of the Saints, the root reaching to molten stone and ardent star. 

There’s no altar obliging incense, no icon to receive any further flourish of skull and limb. There’s a hardly picture hung. The old ways insist down to the detritus, other nations and the anthemic thrum of ice cream trucks, the contrivances the earth informs weigh like covenants as the afternoon dithers away. Something is happening between the woodwinds and the brass, a stirring from the in between, a striving down to the dust. The details here to devil away at, the last light another round of Turkey in the Straw looping through the streets, the moon hollow hours away and already towards gone. 

hand fed

It’s a bright blue day when sight returns, gaze spilling down the grade that I roughly gauged as the angle of the wind, all docile thoughts and claymores without caution signs as the spirit checks in with the flesh. All is wanting in that crowded lost and found, the caprice long since having abandoned the capers, false shadows and feints of the blade up and down the cavalcade. All gallows and grist, the final hypnotist not hip enough to read the room, everything left to the open stance and other hand fed inevitabilities. 

I will burn all the letters left, I will recycle the dusty notebooks and chicken scratch journals. Believe me, no one’s archiving this media. No one’s taking notes. Still waist deep in hoarded gewgaws and frippery, drawers full of ledgers dating back decades, and all the neighboring hatred. The darling detritus left to mark the bright fire of a past tense life, this emergent hovel, this changing habitat. The urgency of the tomb as people watch the clock and check their phones while I bleed out slow. 

Then this long stretch of twilight, this slow spectrum of the locally available gloaming. Then the hours beset by mosquitos and the mistakes of moths, soured souls and the thickenings of smoke. Out west gazing westward deep in the costume change portion of this endless eastern plummet. Each sleepless stretch steeped in sameness, the dance captured in amber, the altered countenance as the struggle sinks beneath the tar. Here amid glimpsed spirits and extinct dreams, these screen whittled shadows. The grace all distance and revision as the night buries me again. 

tempo

Sooner or later the moment arises there in the tub, where the dull reveal of you meets the water at its lowest point. At least the water usually has enough decorum to remain close enough to silent so it counts, so the telling is up to you, you detail devil you. Is it the steam that rises from the steeping, the warble of the opened valve, that seal that is so like a kiss you taste it on your lips. Is it the memory crystallized from glistening slick in warmth light, fluid in the whispers that slip like a tongue between phrases. You shine without saying, where the words wait beneath the burbling all about.

I missed out on childhood sweethearts and campfire ghosts, culled early for absent self awareness, taught a place by elusive blossoms and blunt force. Another rage sick wallflower to drawl and droop on their summer stoop. Another magazine think piece past the time of the magazine, anti social low functioning old men are sad and because they behave in unpleasant and negative ways. Sing me another song of sorrow. Hang another sack of crap from the boughs of the blues. Reckless with furies and affections, I teeter away in the rigging. Most falls are inevitable given a little time.

There you are and there’s the magic, there you go and there’s the spell. It’s in the stretch of your neck, it’s in the muttering of your bones. The spell doesn’t quit easily, the spirit there forever voting flesh. Your presence credits the composition, needles always stitching, silk gleaming from the eaves. Your presence takes a lot with it when it goes. The wound does its work, the clock loses a few to the count. Knots holding knots, the grip of the materials even tighter than the grasp of your intentions. There you go making wings and waves.

affect

There is a weight worn, a countenance whittled with thoughts and burdens born, all the various sorts of worry and weather that a face can carry right there in the middle of the frame. The sore eyed sights, the busily bundles metaphors, the unconscious cold reads of prophesy ready and waiting for these furthered complications. What fills the mirror, what fills the seats, what is turned to words and worms by the dull repetition of the conversational clock, upfront and forthright despite our obligatory feints and obfuscations. The recorded emotion etched into the flesh, carried on and on through our long and awful lives, waving like flags or the relentless pounding of the sea. 

The moon waxes, the night wanes. The room rings with the shade of dreams. To wake is to turn a light off. To breathe is to flinch at the touch of the blade. Vision woven with what the mind would make of it, aware as you weave the very air of this entanglement. No one watches while you mark the moon. No one sees you as you rewrite the rules. Is there a redistribution of emotion while you try on your next expression? Do you feel it in your face? You are seen by the masks and the statuary. You are witnessed by creatures that you would not care to know.

It takes a lot to move the needle. It takes a lot to leave a mark. All that is lost to lay a trail, all that is abandoned to render a road, uphill with the heavy load. We part ways in familiar places, close folders and watch the sky go wing struck, the freeway beside the parking lot long after the scent was lost. Violins threaded through the vocals with the west a burning branch. The feather weighing down the scale, the scene framed in a roil of smoke and obdurate verbs, the now and then a little heavy on the now. Here as light touches flesh, footfalls where the imagination once was, the words slip away unfelt. The circle moves slowly, the feeling doesn’t care a thing about the fit.

it could happen to you

I would say the hour approaches, but that’s just the clock playing up it’s purpose. I would decry the hand that’s been dealt, but I gaffed the deck myself. It’s a typical description of a nondescript life, poor choices and bad turns, ignominy and pockets turned inside out. Due dates and remembrances that should be forgotten. I sit with Pixies in a haunted house as animals pace and prowl. I sit with Liz Phair amid debris and detritus, every deck a desertion. The clock breaks the plane of midnight. The hour is now.

The screen is smudged, my glasses are dirty. Somebody ought to see to that, but the impoverishment is on the inside too. Dust and spiders fill the frame. There is a lack of much, there is a dearth of more, there is no there there. The riot act is a litany and all the sooth has been said. Life’s a mystery, so you should start at the end and work backwards. Life’s a sentence and it runs on and on. 

I’m not quite finished, but I am done. I had a third act in mind, but the writing went wrong. Mostly it’s mundane and miserable, and well above my pay grade. Love left on in another room in a cupboard, simple tasks elude my grasp as I pine and bristle, never quite not human enough. A bulb burns behind me, its light sullen and wan. I still have no idea. Not a thought that will profit, not a blessing that will bloom. There is good, and there is beauty. There are multitudes of wonders waiting for the right eyes to find them, all manner of beasts to covet and burden, birthdays that will be celebrated long after my candle has been snuffed. So have a little cake before it happens to you.

onward

All at once it’s only you and the wide open blue, a shunt and a shade in wait of replacement, the numbers only there to paint by. There’s the open window, there’s the climbing pine, there’s the words left behind after the reckoning has been reckoned once the writing has been put down. Reasons and whispers left in letter form, these remaindered oaths and mothballed loves left in books and boxes, some ancient tenders waiting to clout you out of the mists of memory. An exchange of epithets when an epitaph would do. Slings and arrows and all manner of swearing, the stranger there in stark relief.

You strung the noose, you signed the letter, you looked to find satellites in lieu of stars. You know the moon is waning from the mentions in the margins, you know the laundry is washing from the racket of the contraption. Strata of ash and embers curling smoke as the cigarette dangles, an accumulation of intentions sacrificed to fire and blood as the clock winds down. Burdens and blessings trading hats and jackets, some tv mystery playing out there in the thud and wheeze of the heart, dull reactions and worn through promises where your love used to go.

The camera in your head follows the lead, always looking for a clue as entrances become exits, rushing the door as if one more action will solve the case. The mirror holds your gaze as the ghost gives up, listless beneath these mortal sentences, the verdict all that is left of self. Chores and appointments in exchange for the conceit of a soul, motive the first thing to go. A load of laundry to place in the dryer, a dial to turn, a switch to flip. Some last evil to face farther down the line, a horizon further into dust. Something to slip into, something to kick over in the ruckus of the reel.  

diffuse

It is in the angle of the shadow, it is in the sweep of the debris, flights of insects and schools of dust. The earth is tailed by a scintillating ellipsis of particular sects of mote and infinitesimals, these sections of milled infinites stacked like tortoises down below the foundations, logic never able to distinguish between metaphor and matter. Rise and fall a marble turning down the drain, every thought something mixing myth and perception, a hint of memory and a few closed circuits of magic pulsing under the rhythm of the devoted moon and the endless ocean. The waving all wind and limb, the cradle upon the rollick of the precipice, the lion and the lamb always at peace between meals.

So goes the stir in the soil, so goes the turn of the earth, the willful mauling of each mouthful as if the tongue were wing or song. A warbler singing in the sundown crown teaching what it is to warble, all the rest only the education of the guess, the general heft and hue as breath would at once imbue. Oh plea, oh prayer, oh cry in the night—! These are the names and these are the stars, and these are the skies we keep in common. These are the times and these are the trees and there are birds that will remain unseen that know me from sandal to skullcap. Embarrassments abound.

There are bounds, there are markers. The geography lost to the legend, the details missed on the map. Two years dead nearing the dot, the decedent long since flame and scattered ash, long since the labors of the plaited winds and the restless sea. A when to go with the where, this moment that persists in this stir of happenstance and atmosphere, the bone deep steepness of the arc of loss. The sheltered sun scattered through the yard and the imagery, green swaddled branches swaying to the clinging absence as momentum gathers towards more inevitable ends. So it settles, buried beneath the burbling walls of sound and the busy failings of the flesh. Hell forever happy to do its worse, and heaven only as good as your aim. 

the inside is outside too

So the afternoon goes aching on, shoulders heavy from looking at the shape of the sky, some song through the headphones and some song that goes tearing down the block. It’s prop work and physicalizers amid the haze and ash and dirt, sheaves of unruly green tangling around the frame. It’s squirrel biz and bird work and windows that haven’t been washed save by the rain. Roads hedged by mismatched trees down to the last band of bright horizon, until dark clouds lour in bunches against the dense thread count of the gloaming as it weaves. These wants taped to the dithering mirror, these wishes unwinding at the first loose web.

So your breath slips and slides, your body and its wild tides. Earth and water and wildfire, this subtle symphony playing out in the brickwork of the elements, you all caution and chemistry. The night always new, the day finally broken, another scheme fulfilled. The story somehow stalled out in the drive, here we are, still amongst the livid living. We rain down our exclamations and declarative spittle as of this reading, the voyage between moments full of fine print and the unknown. You feel it as it drains away; you feel it come flooding back.

So I kept it inside, out below the night. I kept it clasped tight between heartbeats, down beneath the stars. I left it here where the dust gathers without dust. Where the words return to the dirt of the unspoken, to the furtive nursery inside these bones, the gallery proofs of some dark garden. That seething through the soil, that hint of the myth of self, the stir behind the curtains getting the point. The sun is gone and there’s no tomorrow. The sun returns the same old day. Something someone’s always saying wearing my sworn to skin.

goose eggs

It’s that sort of night, the dusty light hardly trying, and the room ringing out with a seething silence. You left the window and every appetite wide open, an absence comes leaning in, and it looks like a shadow or a screen so you paint it with words and witness. These secrets that will not spill. These secrets that will stay that way. Nothing always short for something as soon as you name it so. A buzz beneath the belabored hush, the meaning right where you put it.

Time stitched to the half lie of gray skies, the thud of prowling music and the strains of vague engines slide along the mind. The glide of headlights briefly barging in, a shuffle among the categories, a haughty reminder of the alphabet quickly slipping out of sight. These secrets inked in balloons of comic strip exclamations, a gleam of abstractions from deep inside the machine lore, the puzzles we put in place from root to bloom. 

There goes the song that seeds it. There’s that sweep of the leaf, the goodbye in the bent of the bough, the sky to flicker cyphers and glim symbols. There’s the recent dint of dreams and the reach of memory when memory has a mission. There’s the length of your boot, the swish of your skirts, the way you warm with the rumors of the rain. The wind adept at the directions past the maps, the light always a little bit too little for arriving so late in the game. There goes the last song leaving, a blessing after all. 

separate

The train wails, and something arrives as it passes. The old ways awake, drawn to the sharp peal of feeling, the placeholder pull of that plaintive cry enough to call out even the doziest of unencumbered appetites. The rails another accelerant, an accumulation of atoms and intent strewn about the long suffering globe, these inadvertent antennae speaking in dialects that gods and ghosts believe belong to them so concrete is the extruded expression. Made up minds making up for lost time, dragging thunder through the cold mountains and haunted hills. 

We are recorded in our lapses and our capacities, the deep ache stamped upon our architecture, a resonance of the distant of our reach. We bleed and spit and devour trailing stain and bone, inducing gravity and scattering our myths across the scenery. The clenched ember, the cold read, matter muttering through palms and fingers. We plead case and cite precedent, knowing how hard we argued out the paint the joinery. Oh to want long past the feeling and the flesh, one hand blind to its opposite. Oh to dream in brick and mortar, in the press of living breath.

This is the napkin note, the envelope sketch. The words meant somehow to resurrect a moment or invoke a notion, the day gone dark as each hunger casts its shadow. A sign left behind like the broken dove savaged by the Cooper’s Hawk, cast down to be consumed by the earth. Every day the stretch of never, the uphill stone. A place spelled just so in the weight of a sentence, a drop of ink into the restless sea. Hands there to fill out pockets, motive put in motion by the sustain of the whistle and the clamor of the tracks, a separate mark to hold each measure.

know your mule

Dip a toe, throw a stone, the water isn’t waiting. Ask for mercy, pray for rain, the work won’t do itself. There’s a shortcut to most how dos, you cross a river by crossing it, the quickest path is the old straight through. The literature is readily available, life lessons and hard time. There are always steps to follow when you’re out blazing trails, bullet points and storyboards and parables galore. Put one foot in front of another on repeat and the rest almost writes itself. The rules you write are so written as you walk and whistle. Offer up and bear down, and hope your back holds out.

I am down here smoking on puzzles I have made of procedures, thinking with grease and embers about treetop mysteries while I serve my residence in the earth. I mumble and drool upon the fleeting phoebes and the fastidious wrens, watching a dark eyed junco attend to a peanut left by the crews of squirrels and the local crow, the collateral always there when you start this sort of conversation. My eyes turn up towards the picked over branches, still bare before the rumors of spring. The architecture of this arrival, time measured in root and reach. The phoebe dives stitching foundation to firmament, the crow in the gutter feasting on motives. 

We wear away our inadequate masks going from op to op and task to task, serving that which is speaking from behind the screen. The vivid predicate and the litany of flesh, taste and appetite and the pause to birth unexpired alibis. We carry our water and daily face our fates, here where the remnants drape the ruins. Here where the words give out and you wake with the sun and follow the stars, where you tie the threads and weave away tomorrow’s tread. Setting forth with your veiled disciples through wood and underbrush you put the moon to use and the sea through its paces. There upon the last penitent period the gravid ambiguity between the vessel and the path.

iteration

Again the wonder wanes, again the symbols slip into the lapse in the contraption rendering the ruins in common tropes and equivocation, the harsh and hollow economy of the hustle and the hop to.  Hands all of a sudden cold and set to trembling, the season setting to with its strict spells and brute cudgels, change and empty pockets provide the shiver and the strive. The spark ever close in this conscription of particles, the seethe of flesh and the shimmer of whet appetite, the inherent conservation of meaning down deep in the stacks. All the ache of this aggrieved meat, freedom always frying pan or fire.

It’s in the atrophy of the apostrophe, the better angels lost to hell working the sins at their seams, the tongue gone numb before you got the taste and now it survives in these notions always being run aground. The script sinks slowly into torpor, no amount of articulation capable of arousing the leaden lyrics left. The terrain so long dead of dreams reason can’t find its purchase in this conscripted alphabet, the cells of the cypher only a west coast ghost, a memory of a masterpiece burned so deep past the brain the images persist from mind to mind and flesh to flesh. 

So this is the shape of the missing pieces, the honeycomb of the mystery amid the cloister of bees, the buzz dubbed in to tune up the inferences through the atmospherics. It is cultured to grow upon the occluded and the occult, imagination giving in multiples, the expected amplitude when the open throttle may only muddle with the unknown. Language the stones and bramble entangled with the lathe of longing, the applied animal and the implied aesthetic tumbling in the dimensions allowed. Whether great art or blessed altar, it takes the suspect form. The road implicit in the path worn before, the ritual just victuals plus time. We come to to the truths they’re using, waking before the words.