inside aches, outside voices

There’s a sound out there you can almost hear, a voice caught in the throat of the wind, an animal lowing beneath the stars you never see. How’s that suit you honey bee, waiting on the weather, ever seeking the newest bloom? Rats in the proving drawer, raccoons on the roof— hardly how one greets the hoi polloi. There’s always points on the license and a party down the block. There’s something in the night you can almost sense that can see right through you.

The window is open to the air. The walls are there to bounce the noise around. The doors are locked to mark the hour. The ceiling is there as a stand in for the savior. The floor is there to soak up all the blood. The closets are for remembering skeletons. The mirrors await glares and gazes. The lights could go either way.

We grieve in place, rolling that rock uphill as the world moves and moves. We mind our Ps and Qs while everyone bows to partners and dosidos, dancing square against the ambient dance macabre. We bear the empty in busy limbs and hollow husks, hauling ghost and gristle over obdurate foundations and below the sly firmament.  Monsters and murderers gibber gleefully as we endure our grim certainties. Embroidered red letters stitched to every dream, the world slowly ripped apart at the seams.

reoutcarnation

You get a feel for the wheel, if only the repetition of the spin, and the counting of the spokes. You’re never still but the sameness becomes the suchness. You run out of words because they’re never quite there and they’re never quite enough. It’s a shrug, it’s a sigh, it’s rain from a clear blue sky. Pennies from heaven pounding in the nails, death the great croupier.

We are born into this world, we pass into the next, at least according to popular slogans and pamphlets. We plod along amongst the many peoples and the hosts, late comers to the continuity, killers and conquerors and halfwit clowns. We name our progeny for gods and gurus and culture heroes in hopes of ascendancy or extinction, hapless in our hubris. Blow out the candles, cut the cake, let the good times roll and do it again the next turn around the sun.

I can’t count the number, I don’t count in the reckoning, I just keep the cascade going. Busy hands both too clumsy and too clever, leaving the devil to their own devices, only sure of the next catch and toss. I limp along, wounds weeping through their pitiful prophylaxis, dead blood soaked sock and shoe the measure of every step. Father of abortion and miscarriage, I have no offspring to fall short of the arc of my own aspirations, no sequels to love and worry after. All the stories disappoint equal to their source, the heritable war come home to my door, lies all that’s left to lean on.