it could happen to you

I would say the hour approaches, but that’s just the clock playing up it’s purpose. I would decry the hand that’s been dealt, but I gaffed the deck myself. It’s a typical description of a nondescript life, poor choices and bad turns, ignominy and pockets turned inside out. Due dates and remembrances that should be forgotten. I sit with Pixies in a haunted house as animals pace and prowl. I sit with Liz Phair amid debris and detritus, every deck a desertion. The clock breaks the plane of midnight. The hour is now.

The screen is smudged, my glasses are dirty. Somebody ought to see to that, but the impoverishment is on the inside too. Dust and spiders fill the frame. There is a lack of much, there is a dearth of more, there is no there there. The riot act is a litany and all the sooth has been said. Life’s a mystery, so you should start at the end and work backwards. Life’s a sentence and it runs on and on. 

I’m not quite finished, but I am done. I had a third act in mind, but the writing went wrong. Mostly it’s mundane and miserable, and well above my pay grade. Love left on in another room in a cupboard, simple tasks elude my grasp as I pine and bristle, never quite not human enough. A bulb burns behind me, its light sullen and wan. I still have no idea. Not a thought that will profit, not a blessing that will bloom. There is good, and there is beauty. There are multitudes of wonders waiting for the right eyes to find them, all manner of beasts to covet and burden, birthdays that will be celebrated long after my candle has been snuffed. So have a little cake before it happens to you.

onward

All at once it’s only you and the wide open blue, a shunt and a shade in wait of replacement, the numbers only there to paint by. There’s the open window, there’s the climbing pine, there’s the words left behind after the reckoning has been reckoned once the writing has been put down. Reasons and whispers left in letter form, these remaindered oaths and mothballed loves left in books and boxes, some ancient tenders waiting to clout you out of the mists of memory. An exchange of epithets when an epitaph would do. Slings and arrows and all manner of swearing, the stranger there in stark relief.

You strung the noose, you signed the letter, you looked to find satellites in lieu of stars. You know the moon is waning from the mentions in the margins, you know the laundry is washing from the racket of the contraption. Strata of ash and embers curling smoke as the cigarette dangles, an accumulation of intentions sacrificed to fire and blood as the clock winds down. Burdens and blessings trading hats and jackets, some tv mystery playing out there in the thud and wheeze of the heart, dull reactions and worn through promises where your love used to go.

The camera in your head follows the lead, always looking for a clue as entrances become exits, rushing the door as if one more action will solve the case. The mirror holds your gaze as the ghost gives up, listless beneath these mortal sentences, the verdict all that is left of self. Chores and appointments in exchange for the conceit of a soul, motive the first thing to go. A load of laundry to place in the dryer, a dial to turn, a switch to flip. Some last evil to face farther down the line, a horizon further into dust. Something to slip into, something to kick over in the ruckus of the reel.  

diffuse

It is in the angle of the shadow, it is in the sweep of the debris, flights of insects and schools of dust. The earth is tailed by a scintillating ellipsis of particular sects of mote and infinitesimals, these sections of milled infinites stacked like tortoises down below the foundations, logic never able to distinguish between metaphor and matter. Rise and fall a marble turning down the drain, every thought something mixing myth and perception, a hint of memory and a few closed circuits of magic pulsing under the rhythm of the devoted moon and the endless ocean. The waving all wind and limb, the cradle upon the rollick of the precipice, the lion and the lamb always at peace between meals.

So goes the stir in the soil, so goes the turn of the earth, the willful mauling of each mouthful as if the tongue were wing or song. A warbler singing in the sundown crown teaching what it is to warble, all the rest only the education of the guess, the general heft and hue as breath would at once imbue. Oh plea, oh prayer, oh cry in the night—! These are the names and these are the stars, and these are the skies we keep in common. These are the times and these are the trees and there are birds that will remain unseen that know me from sandal to skullcap. Embarrassments abound.

There are bounds, there are markers. The geography lost to the legend, the details missed on the map. Two years dead nearing the dot, the decedent long since flame and scattered ash, long since the labors of the plaited winds and the restless sea. A when to go with the where, this moment that persists in this stir of happenstance and atmosphere, the bone deep steepness of the arc of loss. The sheltered sun scattered through the yard and the imagery, green swaddled branches swaying to the clinging absence as momentum gathers towards more inevitable ends. So it settles, buried beneath the burbling walls of sound and the busy failings of the flesh. Hell forever happy to do its worse, and heaven only as good as your aim. 

the inside is outside too

So the afternoon goes aching on, shoulders heavy from looking at the shape of the sky, some song through the headphones and some song that goes tearing down the block. It’s prop work and physicalizers amid the haze and ash and dirt, sheaves of unruly green tangling around the frame. It’s squirrel biz and bird work and windows that haven’t been washed save by the rain. Roads hedged by mismatched trees down to the last band of bright horizon, until dark clouds lour in bunches against the dense thread count of the gloaming as it weaves. These wants taped to the dithering mirror, these wishes unwinding at the first loose web.

So your breath slips and slides, your body and its wild tides. Earth and water and wildfire, this subtle symphony playing out in the brickwork of the elements, you all caution and chemistry. The night always new, the day finally broken, another scheme fulfilled. The story somehow stalled out in the drive, here we are, still amongst the livid living. We rain down our exclamations and declarative spittle as of this reading, the voyage between moments full of fine print and the unknown. You feel it as it drains away; you feel it come flooding back.

So I kept it inside, out below the night. I kept it clasped tight between heartbeats, down beneath the stars. I left it here where the dust gathers without dust. Where the words return to the dirt of the unspoken, to the furtive nursery inside these bones, the gallery proofs of some dark garden. That seething through the soil, that hint of the myth of self, the stir behind the curtains getting the point. The sun is gone and there’s no tomorrow. The sun returns the same old day. Something someone’s always saying wearing my sworn to skin.

goose eggs

It’s that sort of night, the dusty light hardly trying, and the room ringing out with a seething silence. You left the window and every appetite wide open, an absence comes leaning in, and it looks like a shadow or a screen so you paint it with words and witness. These secrets that will not spill. These secrets that will stay that way. Nothing always short for something as soon as you name it so. A buzz beneath the belabored hush, the meaning right where you put it.

Time stitched to the half lie of gray skies, the thud of prowling music and the strains of vague engines slide along the mind. The glide of headlights briefly barging in, a shuffle among the categories, a haughty reminder of the alphabet quickly slipping out of sight. These secrets inked in balloons of comic strip exclamations, a gleam of abstractions from deep inside the machine lore, the puzzles we put in place from root to bloom. 

There goes the song that seeds it. There’s that sweep of the leaf, the goodbye in the bent of the bough, the sky to flicker cyphers and glim symbols. There’s the recent dint of dreams and the reach of memory when memory has a mission. There’s the length of your boot, the swish of your skirts, the way you warm with the rumors of the rain. The wind adept at the directions past the maps, the light always a little bit too little for arriving so late in the game. There goes the last song leaving, a blessing after all.