houses in motion

Somehow the sun managed to swim the sky out past sight, the afternoon stippled with screaming children, Paul Simon songs, and crows. Somehow the story, having long since ellipted out, winds up right there at the station ready to replay the whole dull tale again. The wounds of winter hardly healed, and spring comes knocking, unwanted weight and all. Succinct increments and indeterminate eternities, depending on how you adjust the tongue and the air to the carburetor. From every angle they’re going at it blackened bones and blue blazes, you untouched by giddy grace or the angles of alliteration, catching the gist and hitching a ride on the tide of the latest contention. The music fades in and out, the poem right there waiting for you to open your big mouth.

The world weighs in, and mostly the palaver remains unkind. The senses makes sketches as the details endure, the calumny painting over the particular and the impertinent with broad strokes and old chestnuts, the story always overflowing even when it’s on empty. Nothing lasts save the worst and the best, the riddle only ever answered in all the rest. The hills slide away beneath the sky, a wide swath of wishes bubbling beneath the fissile cinematics that hold sway in the everyday. The world wanders away from you if you’re not careful, it forgets your form and face, names you from its myths and nightmares. You turn your head for a second and you are the stranger in the streets.

I’m out here living on the borderlands of the givens, hidden in a shambles of black feathers and old skins. I’m lingering long in the all but gone, trailing smoke and trickling libel. I live mostly alone, a mutter of dogs and sticks and stones, a relic and a remainder unfit for life and whole numbers. A shibboleth of saved receipts and spilled milk laments, a stutter of past cyclones and butterflies fluttering through leftover love language, all extant evidence proof against these claims of poetry and burnt fingers. Life gets spent in the wrong tense, only nows and nevers playing at forever, flies in the window and ashes all down. Shards and silhouettes and the brittle bones of spent regrets, the sun comes for what’s left of my sight, bright horses and fires in the night.