the ache underway

Here it goes, with the murky horizon swallowing up the sky, the first spoonful of the gloaming there among the clouds. Here they comes the whispering of facts and riot acts, the holes in the roof and the unlovely truths. The place past prayers and nightmares, ghosts speaking plainly from their absence and their evidence. The place where the price comes due in shades and flickers, the plate in the microwave, the shards in the trash. The unforeseen collateral and the predictable outcomes there on the floor, the love that ran its course, the ache that’s always there and the ache underway. 

There it is, that long last reach of sunlight, the play of light in the sweep and sway of the pines. The body clenched between everyday arthritics and the bone burden of weather lore, between winds ambivalent to spring and winter, between small scale memories and the stories spilling relentlessly into the long lost. That moment when the orchestra hits that sting from the score, the peal of the big reveal sold whole hearted, eyes wide to the twists and turns of plot plod and bridges burned. Hat in hand, head bowed to the inevitable unforeseen.

Even once the years play out it stays, too close not to leave the occasional mark. The heavy holds court, the colors, the flavors, the clues you should have taken as they seem. The very favor you feel you labor under as much angle and attitude, the blessings unclear below the rubble, the spell lingering in unspoken lies and lives. Time flies as you witness it more and more, the current of clock and calendar a river in a rage. The words don’t want you, and every eventual uninviting becomes a force of the rote, the things done routinely take on the sheen of the norm and the radiance of destiny. A year further on, close enough to burn.

the whole bang and whimper

There you are amid the din, this immediate tide of every returning river another signal on low and high. What is this among the numbers you might say if your the type. This tuning in upon the morsel, this ancient hymn glistening upon the bones of the respite, the whole wide stride of it somehow come to the well tied tongue to symbol and drum. The light there right in your gaze mirror and glass and the immense reflection. The light there in your eyes as you squint and listen. The wish always weighing each consideration, down to blood and equivocation. Right there where what the heart wants is a better warden.

All balled up, sheets and sweat and breath heavy in the dark. The fleeting memory, the shiny teeth of the dream, something livid just behind the moment. There in the reach, names and reasons, some dreadful exposition treading just outside the mind. The nightmare lines all taut in the wheeze and crackle all close up with the shadows in the lungs, the body’s burdens clinging to a bedlam of incorporeal antagonists, bad dream boogie men and the evil astride these ill endings. The thoughts rushing in on waking to another world there in the night.

There’s no telling what you’ll miss, the winds getting their wander on, the crows as they place their orders. It’s the sounds of bells and traffic as another month bleeds by, painted skies and all the harbingers a buzz. That banging on the door that only serves to set the nerves to jangle and the dogs to barking, some tired patter of words the decrescendo to brushback the bother of cold calls and unwanted salvation. Sirens softly doppler out of earshot as the sway of sunlight and pine boughs offers its counsel through the open window while the dogs howl and howl. The inkling mutters beneath the skin, that ever there dread that indulges us little threats and glimmers as the tide comes crashing down. Now and never, the flood and fold of this desolate forever, that moment before you blink. 

the dope

Here below a single lit bulb the shadows lie still while the walls tremble with the laden weight of countless freight cars going through town somewhere out in the night, distant clatter a broken rhyme for the grime and clutter, books and props and clustered wads of intentions left to drift and die. All the wisdom left here just spittle dribbling down grizzled barbs, the ring around rhyme played out, only dust and downfall sticking around for the postscript. Every instinct left is tooth and fist, gnawed on scenery and oration aimed at the cheap seats. Like a late twentieth century clock, the illness blinks on and off and on and off since blackouts became the rule and exceptions found another pate to crown. The pretense there only to serve another shoddy plot, the room read down to the appendices.

The ceiling blurs and blends, a thatch work of smoke, breath, and regret. There the consolation of light’s limitations, a wan halo, the long reach into the deeper dark. That steep descent that Duchamp nude takes behind the peal of the paint, the room ringing out in the wear of the era, the heritable swaths like the rows laid by belt in the muffled hues hewn by time and dues owed to dirt. Myths borne by weary fictions and a mattress on the floor. Radiance and radio waves, aches bathed in blue bias light. The memory fades as it becomes more certain, scripture taken as gospel, the gasping of a carp writhing in surprise upon the rough sands of its sudden ascension.

There goes the day, sky blue sky and bright sun and all that sort of meshugaas, as one orients the order of these origins. The eyes opening to the light escaping from the curtains, the raven call among the usual gang of crows, that spark into this earnest remark. Dogs lazing with the stretch of the afternoon, dust ensorceled by the slow reach of the stars long game, this looming now commanding every available attention. A recorded voice reports treading water amid the flood of other tones and tongues, beneath the rumble of the league of machines, a truth easily reaching all it needs. The one thing, then the next, just as prophesied. This tumble through the lines that reach from the sky through kites of chiton, that reach in leaning teeters of rusted capacitors and hanging cables, from the feathers to the fence. The barely measured favor to await the next breath.

spark and spigot

The spine speaks in crimes not in infractions, it leaves it to the other bones and organs to indulge their gripes and litanies. Don’t even get it started on that crybaby skin. It bends, it breaks, it regulates tensions and lays telegraph lines through the torso and up to the brain bowl. It speaks in augury and prophecy and allotted outlays for infrastructural recovery. More often than not it’s called a Cassandra for it’s plain spoken declarations, the allusion as usual emptied of the detail that Cassandra was right.

The earth too doesn’t dally away the day with riddles. It’s an old brick and mortar operation that isn’t going anywhere. The deadpan crack of cold hard facts, the stick and stone tome read all alone, bruise and pang that arise despite the wishful objection of that gray mule mind. Every insipid ghost whispers blasphemes and blisters with the body bearing the brunt. Those faded shades only embers of glimmers, adding afterlife to afterlife the as if improv show species breaking boughs and bones as it ascends to apogee enough to assure a fall splendid enough to act as earth’s answer to the miracle covenant. 

So the body bruises and squelches and pisses away it’s existence, revisiting the old myths and histories, reviewing the tape and revising the rules. They whittle away at chemical compounds making sign and alphabets, stacking stones and making circles, writing their reasons after the impulse and the consequence makes them need to explain. They drill spells through their skulls to insure the direction of the gaze, building mazes out in the open, making puzzles out in plain sight. It goes like that from spark to spigot, a fire and a flow and a long night where no one is ready to face the certainty of their dreams. 

another name to know

Outside my window there are birds and branches. Sparrows and finches busy in pine boughs, songs and burbles and a springing of squirrel. The day drawls on as the old wound weeps into sock and slipper, always a reaching between earth and root, this music stippled with want and star traveling from was to are. The muted sun casts winter shadows, a brightness ringing into aches and gray pauses. Restless memories and an artless heart, this simple drifting into dark.

The day drags its conceits and glad bags, it scrapes the driveway and scuffs its rims on the curb. The road rises but the tide goes higher. Thoughts turn to a relentless river, ruinous and cruel. Rain reckoned for later and the roof already riddled with surrender, my heart is bullet starved, my blues blackened gunmetal. In the nation of gun plenty still so many hurdles and murders, the self a sickness raining in hapless peals of fire and phosphorus down on strangers, kin to a people that think there’s safety in strangers’ corpses buried in rubble. Too many years wrought with no reasons, too many flashing fangs pretending at faith to be won over with lies and prizes now. 

There were words I thought I needed to write, things that need saying. I’m sure they still need saying, but they don’t need me as mouthpiece or amanuensis. So no summaries, no famous lasts, just empty conceits and full ashtrays. A beggar’s bowl of attitude and euphemisms, rags and tatters my only flag. I’ll spend my final coughs and spasms feeding birds and beasts and maybe spreading something more than mayhem and woe. No wiser for the wear and tear, merely aware of the enduring, obdurate foolishness of my crummy existence. No ellipsis or trailing off, no motto for the meat, no epitaph for the mass. There for a while, then gone with all the good.

tempest tossed

The bird of breath has fled its cage I think, leaning forward on the rocking chair coughing, seeing stars towards the edge of the precipice. It’s an ordinary night, all sirens and storms and drizzly little deaths sprawled across the scenery, the wheeze in the machinery sounding louder than the passing train. The gutters fizzle with deadfall and star spotted wishes. The streets sing with tires and declarative engines, our mystery firmly rooted in the filters and the findings, the amplified environment lit with Dopplering water. The shape of witness and the world that fills it. 

The rooms are always ringing, sometimes with silence, sometimes with sadness. It varies by the hour. The surety of shelter so conditional when the weather puts its weight to the wheel. The story ever ready to take a left turn. A freeze, a flood, an odd sort of feeling to the colors of the sky. Coin toss physics decided by gust or gale, misread significance as destiny dishes it out with both fists. A song comes on and you can feel the room turn. A few short words you can’t quite hear over the bathroom fan. That Barton Fink feeling when staring down the drain.

It’s soft momentarily, the water steaming, the shower effortless and persistent. Routine and ritual in a small noisy room, the comfort of familiar ablutions and the aspect of ten thousand actions escaping through the plumbing. I soap up, I spray and scrub, I rinse. I shave my throat then my head, moving left to right and front to back. Then the toweling off and dressing the latest wound, there is the ambience of fogged mirrors and another song, the crawling rumor of the living in stray webs and small heaps. This eye wide, then another opened door.

runoff

It is the more obdurate of elements that linger, muddying up the gutters, poisoning the wells. The long list of molecules that create an unsavory sentience, a pretty heavy asterisk when it comes to the ruins we imbue, the long apologia of our wisdom bound inexorably to our fields and our flesh. Inundated with ambiguated superfund sites and the ubiquitous invasion of the body by microplastics, drenched with the spit of ten thousand lies per hour and ears ringing from the radio’s level headed discussion of the economic benefits of death squads, the illness is water to fishes. The illness is the zeitgeist as it readies the graves.

I run a little toxic, I’ve burned through lives, both nines and halves. I leave trails of mud and expletives, muttering curse and superlatives as I stumble into brick and board, the decades of decay on display in my wake. A rat-a-tat-tat of tatters, a dirty standard of smoke and grime moving against the rhythm, a ballad fumbled by tongue and intention. Nearing six decades at it, heavy with the inevitable breakage, the lessened being a full time job. Harmful even a distance, the aura irradiates the wide collateral with shards and shots of entropy. The hazardous runoff of this drag and drop.

We say goodbye to our elders as we serve our dumb death gods, pledge allegiance to the telling instead of the truth, go for the words when we lose our grasp of the actually extant. I serve my sentences in the classic run on style, huddle in structures deep in epilogue, rot and wreckage the only reasons. The cold and the rain running through the roof and the statics of the contrarian construction meet the limits of the instrument and a table read of diminishing returns. Each day there are vicious little violences, each day the braying cackles of pitiful villains, nosy neighbors and all season snitches working every angle. The horizon rises to swallow the sun, the old wounds all worse and spreading. 

the air apparent

The storm keeps talking once it gets going, it spills it all in sheets and waves, a tide of beaded apparitions pacing out the very air. It lingers between ghosts and dreams, wearing the flickering of mind and light, the arms of that old rocking chair. This tattered breath, this worn through belly blazing bright behind the night, mementos stricken on the brick and mortar of being trailing sparks. This accosted shuffle along the coil, these curses clambering down my tongue, the rainfall carrying the warmth of wishes and the aspect of your gaze. I sit beside the window with the rain holding the sky for ransom, a bone sore beacon for horrors yet unknown.

It is that nude in descent, the downward trend of the aperture’s aftertaste, that incandescence of cognition that lays the gospel step by step through every chamber. Rain through the pines, the shifting of old timber, groans and cracks the stress singing through the structure. I breathe outside your atmosphere, the one breath rolling from root to crown, awakening in the dreaming skin of gathering dragons. After the figure of the river, after the form of the snake, the water boiling away in the eternal impermanence. My heart clenches around the sharp end of the moment, a pattern painted in negative space, the lock holding tight despite the kicked down door a bedlam of hinges and splinters. 

The days blur beneath the deluge, flood warnings and secret symbols, the structure shifts and bucks. The thought becomes the shadow, the shadow becomes the body, the body stirs in the indeterminate boundaries around the now and the name is set. You can speak it out loud, ask it your questions, tell it all your stories on and off the clock. It goes on stalking, it comes a- knocking, never mind the weather or the hour. There’s always someone else’s party, someone else’s tomorrow, the music riding down the rooftops with the rainfall. I never see it coming, but you always managed to play it close to the vest. The walls full of rumors, the roof lousy with holes.

signs

It’s the season where faith wakes up and sees its shadow, where the reasons are all by rote and the words serve to justify anything that’s indefensible, whatever is said is what is seen. I leave a trail of vapor and litter, smudging up the surfaces, gumming up the works. I am sin and missed syntax, the labor left to language to explain away. The last bright gaze of the horizon, the hour when the moon has to go. That breath clasped tight in amber, forever just out of focus in the snuffed out eyes. That ring of ashes on the brickwork, the shadows painted on the sand, the heart skips and stutters and the last flame gutters.

Another night where the shower gets took after midnight, the carcass all abuzz with the same old tariffs, flea bit and past scratching with the clock dropping granules down the glass. There was some bird or another haunting the bridge between phone poles in the graspings of the gloaming, there was an owl from down the block calling from outside the window, a notation by the lyric, a way of keeping score. The south end of the block has an obsidian sheen to the foreshadowed streets, traffic a tear and a tussle, but mostly crickets anyway. 

I wake to the dog’s bark, I wake to the crow’s call, I wake to the sudden silence of the screen sleeping with the dark of the new day shuffling around the room. My sleep remains sporadic, and largely a formality. The days fade beneath the waves, the nights are nicked and scuffed by wings and popped cuffs, fables left on enable at the tailings of these trials. This name is little more than a tension between the neck and shoulders, a scraping breath over tooth and tongue,    a stand out in a few poor reviews amongst an otherwise well received ensemble. The crow squeezes the sky under a handful of black feathers and through the rasp of its exquisite instrument, the sun in splendid descent. 

Curtains!

So this is how it all ends, not with a bang but with a whistle. You know how to whistle don’t you? Well, I tell you one thing, you won’t get there by banging stuff around. Put your lips togetherness blow? Sure, if you got the embouchure down. Otherwise, it’s a raspberry and a spit take, Bacall. There’s just so much time left on the shot clock, and there you go with the whistling. No time for final bows or last words, the game ends and I’m still arguing with the officials. Thanks a lot, whistly—.

I float towards the fizzle as the world of mouth lazes into the past tense, these balloons full of static sticking to the pillars, the holdup from foundation to the firmament. The sky holds its hands high, long ago giving up its gelt. The least kerfuffle leaves my old heart gasping, treed kitten in every limb, and left with well-armed titans to battle bare-fisted and weak kneed. Another fine kettle of fish ahead full steam, working to the last whistle. 

These are the words that find their way into bones that aren’t so funny, the truth in the joke that hurts. I work with whatever is gifted, when I’m out I’m out. I came of age back in the old days of New Vaudeville, I carry on with the bit until I do it to death, then I do it more. It’s fungible if you talk to it right. It wasn’t until decades later that the shtick got stuck and we sank into the clowniverse. Most of all culture is a spell, it’s a call and response, it’s that old mad djinn vamping around the ritual. A scuff of the knuckles along the ivories to scrape out the scales, a Meisner Technique to keep the plates spinning, breath spent anding every yes. Now you see it, now, not so much. Plus, there’s wind chimes. 

out in the anecdotal

It’s the numbers where they get you, the assembly that is accounted for, the company intended to count you out. I burn a little something to make my breathing harder, I drink the dose of poison paternally preferred. Occasionally I’ll do some remembering meriting the memory, honor the absence I was born into. The dead man’s craft that holds tight the rafters, the remains left circling the grave. They keep score so I don’t have to, the lead dwindling by twos and threes. I take a drink on my father’s 95th birthday some 19 years past his death, another legacy I cannot look in the eye. 

It is inked solely in intent, the drift of days, the litany of the long dark night. Every lost bet, every stagger down the hall to hear the alarm, to stare at the sky where the stars once were. You walk around to test the earth, you move to hold the weight of your bones, the words still too slippery to take flight. The sun beats down despite the cold, the sky leans blue just like the crayon says, the days so many incidents and anecdotes left in a heap at the bottom of the drive. You follow your compass and the rest of the rats.

And so it goes well into the aftermath, the spent events there clinging to the calendar as the numbers shuffle along. Sunlight in my eyes marks my natal star, squinting from the bright and the smolder, letting the radiance into my flesh. It’s this obdurate attitude that besets, so malleable and impermanent, all our meaning stuffed meat singing out so readily snuffed and extinguished. I sit out in the remnants of god’s laughter and the plans of humans, a scoop of Ozymandias in every soul, wreck and ruin in every lullaby. Someone banged on a piano some 50 years ago and the song is resurrected through phone and speaker amid the scrub jay racket and the schoolyard din. I blow a smoke and say my goodbyes. 

the repetitions

The sun wanders towards the west

hunkering down below the horizon,

the world replete in silhouette and

wing, crows calling out quitting time 

while the sky switches skins, smoke

curling in the myth of mapping the wind.

The din of the uncut day spent in weed 

whackers and traffic, home another name

seeking harbor in our loosened parlance,

these eyes opened wide to 

the blindness, machines singing 

We are here, we are here!

touch

I couldn’t say what I miss the most, now that missing is mostly all I am. The failures of the flesh, the drift of the dream. The expenditures of lips to lick and rocks to kick, the drag and drift of smoke and sky as the coyotes and stars close in. Currently my hands are gloves and my fingers largely unfeeling, beneath a standing count of snakes and offal, symbols that I haven’t eyes enough to see. The years speed away, treading water by changing tense, the tongue becomes a heavy toll. Everyone now many worlds away as I shrink into carcass and collateral, fed whole into the maw of the intangible.

The explanations remain inexplicable, a stack of givens as kindling for the ramblings of language, inherent imperatives blazing away through the bones of beast. The dull daily diet of heart hollowing horror, hope a caterpillar paralyzed with potential devils devouring it from within, the tide of blood and bedlam thundering through the banalities. Teeth and knives assail the drudgery of identity, vertiginous limbs and the forever fall in the feels. I shuffle a stack of cultivated distractions, the very soul of disaffection. Every surface livid with a smudge of thumbs.

There are distances that are unbridgeable, finalities and formalities and engines perpetually idling just outside. There are words weighted with wishes, words spent as spit and breath, thoughts and prayers thought experiment bears. You walk along with open wounds— the ones you loved and lost, the loves that up and left you, the damage accumulated by the vessel on its voyages by the usual goons and perpetrators. The hallowed empties out, candles and kindling and localized tropes. Another touch starved stranger stretched out like a shadow, vivid flashes in mirrors and echoes, missing you like it was the point.

John Cusack in the rain

What more could we want from the world? A road or two to hobble on down and a whole sky there for the scraping, a place to put all your labels and plenty of art to fight about. It’s the sweet spot that we miss, the moment where desire and intention sync up the DJ’s selection within the happenstance. The song that lands upon the just so, the movie that reminds you of something missed in your life or shows you that you’ve scuffed up the circumstances to your favor. John Cusack holding a boom box high as Peter Gabriel makes his case. John Cusack in the rain shouting out your name.

The world is on wheels, the world is all wishes and wires, the world mostly lives in your head. We exist as the gist of ancestry and origin stories, a series of applied myths that gain or lose traction depending on the matter that erupts outside the mind. We scramble and skitter, receiving our orders to deny life and limb for some set of brutal abstractions that amount to little more than box top rules and counter factual fantasies, encouraging us to end our lives for the sake of the worst of the worst. Personally, I’ll stick with the sticks and stones. Words do not work in my favor.

It’s down to the skips and starts, poor service and a deadbeat heart. Another litany for company, same old same old on a roll. The hint of some lost song playing behind my eyes as I listen to the wind and the television. You always come in in the middle of the story, it goes just fast enough that you can’t catch up, and you leave before it comes to an end. The myths a movie that’s always on, projected onto the tattered sheets billowing in your head, outside the observable anecdotes. Our reasons are parsed out contractions crafted from contradiction and faith in something conveniently unseen, partitioned wishes claimed against the odds the flags of whatever hill looks good for the hyperbolic dying. Another story waiting for a screen as we burn the future down on spec.

harpoon

You like to think of it like lessons, only they’re the ones that never stick. You’d like to think that you know enough to know better, or at least enough to know when to brace for the blow. You hate to be the sort for burst bubbles, but you’re not the sort to keep it to white whales. It’s all rockets red glare and blossoms made of phosphorus. It’s the racket and the rattle and the tremble of the beasts curled beside you. Sore from the speech, sore from the symbols, the glow and the glare and the sounds of glass in thumping repetition. The press of breath, a fog of condensation, winter reaching its busy fingers through wall and window. There’s one point, and no one ever stops making it.

It’s a dirty deal from an old gimmicked deck, a timeless patter that you’ll laugh off later but you fall for every time they work it right. It doesn’t help that you can see it coming. It doesn’t help that you can tell us how it’s done. The language is the misdirect, it’s the visitor in the smoke and mirrors, that trick of the light that tells us what to see. It’s a hard rote ritual, the sort of etiquette that teaches you what the magic means. It wears a thousand masks and bears a thousand names, and it loses its way in the story and the reasons, but it really can stick a landing.

It’s car alarms and small arms fire and yet another year is upon you, as if anybody asked. The cacophony is profoundly ubiquitous, all yawps and yowls and hoots and howls, unsustainable yodels and ill considered gritos sounding out all at once. Like a paratrooper, you’re always surrounded. There’s always explosions to spare, the streets strung with smoke and refuse, the rituals ongoing and often perpetuated loosely and with varying degrees of vigor. Some clock, some calendar, something to shoot for on down the road. Another season out to sea, another day more and less.