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.