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.