pretty bad

The times find their note from the tuning fork of the unkind, leaving a sorry song to wonder after your mind. You can follow the directions, you can read the instructions aloud, your train of thought left to rattle the rails to hell or heaven. There’s still the sounds of the street through the window, plastic wheels dragging over grass and gravel, traffic growling in the distance as the wind lays it on thick. Some rumble from someone’s speakers, some dying of someone’s dreams, the wait for rain and some essay’s theme. Nobody sleeps anymore, they just drink until they drown or smoke until they float. Only bad actors and missed boats, and everywhere the sound of cages and rage.

The calendar continues the conceit as the days dwindle, the past piling on as the future evaporates into sighs and furies and falling leaves. Stacks of books and peanut shells and last century’s stains. Wheelchairs hunched with dust and absence, the sun stippled seas and every measure of never. Bullets for wishes and crow weighted boughs now lighter for the trope of flight. Black wings and broken mirrors and spent luck all nestled in cradles and coffins. Despite all your beliefs and fool heavy philosophies causality ends in casualties. There will be a fall you will not get up from.

The punch lines all come with bruises, the promises with caveats and a shit ton of small print. It’s the cudgeling I won’t recover from, I have fallen and I can’t get up. The hangman’s handiwork lingers like a lure, the gape of the rope the zero sum and the punctuation time served delivers. No comfort to the creatures left in neglect, no consolation to the heart’s prize. Eyes closed in resignation, hands bound in infirmity, the sparrow’s flight says it all. Dirt and damnation and a line from some show you don’t know. “A fate worse than a fate worse than death? Pretty bad.”

new moon mantra

The sky above is blue and blurry with floaters and figments, the cheap cheaters smudged with the devil’s work, the new moon monstrous in its absence. Eyesight and vision often take separate trains, tracks crossing traffic clanging away in intermittent flashings and the side just short of hooroar. The given inch falling fathoms further in low effrontery, audacity pairing so frequently with the self declared self aware. The nations continue to insist on these defamations, the obvious lack inherently enraging. The uttered intentions caught in the wind, dribbled down meanings chin, a completed rotation around the sense to so much sentience. The curse closes around the desperate ink, the blessing spread like dandelion seed, buoyancy the confederate of geometry. Confession yet another consequence of gravity.

The crow calls late in the day, its cries cast with the stretch of shadows, with the spring of the evergreen ringing in the follow through. That corner of the mind where the paint never dries always peeking out from the unfinished edges, the circumspection of the unfocused familiar, these observant strangers serving tea from behind the blinders. The known amounts to less than the observable, these obdurate forms that linger in the vast occlusion, the blazing blind light that threatens to reveal the unfleshed aspects that bump and grind in thoughts unfettered. That coarse throat aiming at the assembly of kin and kind harkening still unknown marching orders, spilled tea and grievances and the map to the evening’s roost, all of the possible furtive in these great heaps of ignorance that serve as the world.

Lurking there in eternal nativity the shadows root and reach through the mumbling foundations, on through the blaze blue and maw red into this weary rally of roof and brick and bone and leaf. The cup is filled and emptied and spilled, cracked and reformed and filled to the brim yet again. The whole thing sheaves of the same ol same ol writhing and wrapping around the new, eyes aging out of the thousand yard stare, items thick with the dust of dead cognition braying out fresh intentionalities. All hat and no rabbit sings the hungry earth, the hearth only so much stone and mortar when the fire stays extinguished. All sizzle and no steak the song that hell has habituated in these parched hearts, as this unconditional surrender has its say. As in heaven, so in the hooks. The empty pantry has its fill of flatware, the set table a bounty of bowls and plates. The window remains ready to receive the moon.

wing it

Leaves fall, building piles and patterns and grievances, dry soil taking up what the season’s short of. The flesh takes on the torpor of the slow roast of summer, the meat only falling short of departing the bone, stilling to stew in all available juices. Land ho, sore hooves, and gaffed limbs stuck in whatever spot of bother the last stepped in. The local fauna know, with squirrels draped over fence rails and cats disappearing below unkempt homes. Climate and geography wrap them all up handily, with only the birds on wing escaping the day’s cruel escapades. Fly away, fly away, red red robin and kettle black crow. The sky above a wide open road.

Canadian Geese fly low above as gray doves spy from the farther pine. A scrub jay drinks from the old galvanized washtub as sparrows pick at the feeders, opportunity always a cost. Clouds dim the smoke colored sky while the ocean of the atmosphere drifts past, the firmament gone soft with the unwinding of the wind. Thirty more geese more or less add to the gaggle in the field behind the fence, and the neighbors’ chickens cluck with the thrill of being fed. The feel of rain brushes up close and intimate though so far it’s mostly drought dry, then a few droplets stipple the skin, and faith is momentarily restored. 

There is a magic on the wing, a spell woven with beauty, envy, and resignation. Once stolen away in flight, most everything comes down to trying not to fall, avoiding the sort of clouts gravity advances in spades. Something stirs the crown of the pine above— a jay, a dove, a crow— a swift passage of half guesses sliding through the mind. A hummingbird blurs the bounds of the periphery, the soul so stentorian in its absence as experienced thick this trick of words, each sentence served in the echoes of some decoded labyrinth lingering in the original Greek. Here in the anticipation of the fled abstraction of these partial observations, until lift, until the inevitable departure. Like the custom of the nation of yes, and the counter clicks out the signal, filling in the blanks left for cognition. Birds fly over that rainbow, wing it (where available).

capitulate

It’s a blindness that exceeds the eyes, a blank spot that only widens with time. The words go one way, the actions another, the mind makes up the difference. Mostly it’s just animal sounds, air escaping through an orifice, the grunts and groans required by physiology and environment. Chest thumping, howls and displays that came with us on the long road towards the particulars of our species. Rationalizations to pave over our fears and motives while we use laws to commit egregious crimes and pretend that we’re good people. We take whatever stance that allows our cowardice to count as conscience, to rebrand our bowing and scraping to clowns and criminals as proof that we are free.

Whole lives pass by in the callow mirrors of others’ eyes, seeing the meaning of that hobo culture the way they see that liar faith, heaven and hell and castles and thrones made entirely of far flung shit and shaken branches. Hollow hierarchy and tacked on reasons that prove little but bad intentions and weak knees. Can’t save souls, can’t help fools, can’t strike without heating up the iron. Caste systems and social Darwinism and varieties of apartheid and Jim Crow’s bones remain the building blocks of most politics and opinion where the dumbest of lies prevail. Every generation engages the same old holy slop and says Behold!, revealing the entirety of their ass. 

It reads like Revelation, but these days all the prophecies are self fulfilling. We elevate rapists to high office, canonize deception, and hide from our painful history and hard truths. Nature and nurture long since obscured by naive acceptance of the new bright and shiny, we turn away from the skid, so we spin and spin into the void of our hubris. Fly the flag in earnest over ghoulish slaughter, fly in the face of facts in favor of premeditation, fly off the handle whenever the evidence is mentioned. Stare into the rear view, see as it all speeds away. Every day a further capitulation, you find your self farther from your made up soul. A straight razor and a beggar’s bowl, you bear the bruises as you genuflect. Tell me that you’re good.

wisteria

Open wounds and empty arms all the valentines you’ll find among the offerings once fate finds out where you’re holed up, sometimes guns blazing, sometimes with serpent’s venom tippled in your ear. Always a reminder you’re not the hero or much of a villain, just another point in the plot, just something that goes bump in the night. Nights that once were scented with honey suckle and wisteria now bloom with the funk of dead blood as the cold cold moon gives nothing away. This too long life now a romance with the dust, bad medicine and spilled salt. Your face another fever dream, a montage of memories, bitter and dull with the obligatory damnation.

You wake pursued by odd notions and strange images, nothing but low impact nightmares and high concept jokes. You try not to engage the inevitable slings and arrows, the sticks and stones of this life alone measured in silence and desperation, minus the occasional groan and loose epithet. Back aching against the wall they feint and fall, the unseen hordes and the useless host only there to jeer and foment some hapless fools to the mortal ends they fear. The world won’t let you go while there’re still oceans of contempt left to loose. There’s nothing too terrible, nothing much good, just the relentless tide returning to offer injury for every insult spat.

There are moments where it seemed things could have gone differently, paths untaken and doors that remained shut. You forget it would have still been you there fucking up the road less traveled. The shreds and ribbons from just being yourself. Those long ago nights of an ancient spent summer, floral notes and the roar of the crashing ocean, are little more than mirage and revision. It’s these nights that plod and malinger that reveal your truths, stars no longer visible and spiders camping in the corners. You will sleep some, you will endure your day. No dream worth living, you live on in the lies of others. Some plot trips along, the illness you foment all yours.

inside aches, outside voices

There’s a sound out there you can almost hear, a voice caught in the throat of the wind, an animal lowing beneath the stars you never see. How’s that suit you honey bee, waiting on the weather, ever seeking the newest bloom? Rats in the proving drawer, raccoons on the roof— hardly how one greets the hoi polloi. There’s always points on the license and a party down the block. There’s something in the night you can almost sense that can see right through you.

The window is open to the air. The walls are there to bounce the noise around. The doors are locked to mark the hour. The ceiling is there as a stand in for the savior. The floor is there to soak up all the blood. The closets are for remembering skeletons. The mirrors await glares and gazes. The lights could go either way.

We grieve in place, rolling that rock uphill as the world moves and moves. We mind our Ps and Qs while everyone bows to partners and dosidos, dancing square against the ambient dance macabre. We bear the empty in busy limbs and hollow husks, hauling ghost and gristle over obdurate foundations and below the sly firmament.  Monsters and murderers gibber gleefully as we endure our grim certainties. Embroidered red letters stitched to every dream, the world slowly ripped apart at the seams.

reoutcarnation

You get a feel for the wheel, if only the repetition of the spin, and the counting of the spokes. You’re never still but the sameness becomes the suchness. You run out of words because they’re never quite there and they’re never quite enough. It’s a shrug, it’s a sigh, it’s rain from a clear blue sky. Pennies from heaven pounding in the nails, death the great croupier.

We are born into this world, we pass into the next, at least according to popular slogans and pamphlets. We plod along amongst the many peoples and the hosts, late comers to the continuity, killers and conquerors and halfwit clowns. We name our progeny for gods and gurus and culture heroes in hopes of ascendancy or extinction, hapless in our hubris. Blow out the candles, cut the cake, let the good times roll and do it again the next turn around the sun.

I can’t count the number, I don’t count in the reckoning, I just keep the cascade going. Busy hands both too clumsy and too clever, leaving the devil to their own devices, only sure of the next catch and toss. I limp along, wounds weeping through their pitiful prophylaxis, dead blood soaked sock and shoe the measure of every step. Father of abortion and miscarriage, I have no offspring to fall short of the arc of my own aspirations, no sequels to love and worry after. All the stories disappoint equal to their source, the heritable war come home to my door, lies all that’s left to lean on.

fast as you can

I move slow with the sun, old bones all mumbling beneath the searing sky. The heart seizes, the heart staggers, the bell tolls. Halos hit the pavement, boots hit the bricks. A song is tinkered out all hammers and picks, the work of the world set loose upon the wind. I walk in circles, alive in fits and starts.

Then the stars go all pointy before they double or they blur. Vision and sight become separate spheres, the music the clinks and clunks of unplanned impacts, constellations happily unaware of their human affiliations. Shapes crowd the peripheral, only scurrying and fleeing just as they’re nearly out of view. Mistakes made again and again, every day until they shake the stigma of their births and become culture. Another story to fill up the vast unsaid.

The horizon watches each further excruciation, the fierce work of tooth and talon whittling away at the stubbed toe of the monkey mind. The heart stings out its dusty tattoo, the paradiddle at the root of the rhythm a tale of busted sticks, the long game played out so long ago it dwells in the epoch of myth and legend. Grinning in present perfect as the past insists through all hogwash, the sacred somehow forever spilling blood. These lows delivered from on high, the evidence overwhelms.

the late John Garfield blues

Long past sleepless, the blue shadows flicker in the style of early fire and expired dreams. Objects loom and recede swaddled in restless light, the lean of screens, the bones of test patterns and cathode ghosts trailing like ellipses these stretched thin souls. No longer static under glass, hints and suggestions leap and strut along the ceiling and walls, the struggle of the story to remain unformed. The dead air always waiting with tension to draw, everything new and nothing changing no matter whether the postman rings again or how Lana Turner wears a sweater. The habits of the ancients, the customs of the form.

It isn’t always the channel, it isn’t always the cigarettes and Captain Kangaroo of the eternal ruin, that too close to the gutter to rise to the insult. Telephones that are answered on the second ring, letters of ink and paper blur beneath fallen tears and Paris rain. The reconstruction of consciousness, words and pictures and the uncoiling of the mystery as the pull of a voice and a match ignited on a heel. The spin of song, the skin bruised from remembering again and again. The primal compact of the stared down ceiling, the law of forevers made of never. That god revealed in the cracks like in the Dobyns poem, the fearsome stitch of the old oath breaker. 

After the art has ended, after the love has left, just the stubborn husk and the curtains astir. The eyes stay open as sleep goes through the motion, dreams clambering on the rooftops, the night scratching out cyphers with broken nails. Blood gone wrong an open book idling in the backlots of thought, the changing of the station, the whispering of the grease. The movie keeps moving well past the credits, loosed in these fevers of flesh and the cloister of the known. Dawn arrives printed on a broken deck, the last games always played alone. The hand that’s dealt, the corner fought, the script familiar but the casting unfathomable. A wash of color before the fade to black.

I remember California

Even in dreams the roads run dark. Even in memory the lights grow dim, savoring another savior, singing along to that favorite song though you never knew the words. Watching from the hollowed out tree of a heart, wings and their shadows. An inferential intuition of flight. 

The moon fades away into busywork and backdrop, crimes left from scene to scene. Oh, the echo. Oh, the clue dropped in an envelope. The die is cast. The sea in the air far from now and here always there, the crashing tide and sea lions barking, a Ferris wheel unlit and still. Kisses upon cliffs.

It is in the way they write memories, slips and snippets bound with song and scent, a flavor for a moment met. The bright stars, the shadowed woods, the way redwood trees descend from the roots of heaven. The incremental ambiance as details are recovered and reconstructed, taking on the savor of the immediate flesh. 

It is in the way we absorb occulted culture, the myths that wove the primordial tongues, the way these stories grow unacknowledged in these deserts of the telling. The Madonna and the monkey do. Highways dotted with signs and fairy lights, numbers for names and numbers for exits, the ghosts of the Central Pacific haunting the brutal passes where their bones lie exposed. Hollywood and the latticework of irrigation across the old latifundia and the Big One always in the wings. Streets sick with gun culture and serial killer migratory maps, and Bigfoot embarrassed for the lot of us.

The freeways always reaching, white lines in the headlights, white lines fading in the rear view. Faces with disappearing stories, faces etched into the blood, names folded into the forbearance and that feeling where you disappear. The flicker of years cards in bicycle spokes, newspapers flung into the drive, teenagers hurling stones and epithets as the clock ran out. The sky gone red and every breath a burn. Bridges collapsing into the sea. This old ache, this ageless enmity, the roads run and run. 

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.