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.