definition

To see you is always a revelation, even when my eyes are mistaken. That mimicry every distant glimpse seems to cling to, when I raise my eyelids and stare. That shine that calls me, a bare shoulder, a hip sway, that vision more persuasive than the world. Called to bear witness of my own corners and alleys, all this wandering to find out the way. Knowing even my missing finds its way your truth.

The night slows, trickling its delicate fingers through the remnants of light, clinging to the trees, coloring around the moon. Each branch and limb dancing with the wind, leaf clotting the earth bellow. Are you asleep or are you singing? I think that is always the song. No more radio poets, crackling beneath the sheets of your youth. No more recitations, spells and recipes always so much clamor just to miss the point.

It seems more a dream than a definition, this wavering touch, this fleeting certainty. Some scraping of the sky, some trembling in hope. Some lighting of fires that will never warm, lights that will not give sight or release. I can only watch and listen. I can only trust that my eyes will find you, however dark the stars. I can only hope that when I call you, you will turn without a doubt.

ecstatic pessimism

You once knew me the way a weapon knows its war. The way a cigar knows its fire, the way the light always shivers and the night always endures. Or maybe I have it the wrong way around. The news always busiest once the world is ruined. The longing always only the measuring of the map. It loses me either way. The moon leans in and asks for a kiss.

The deal is done. The word is out. I am written down as far as it goes. I am where ever my tongue would free me. I am as much as a book, bound to these leavings. The earnest sacrifice of the ash. The whispering that makes listening so precarious. The reason that is always made into alibi.

The possible is only there long enough to clear up the nagging differences, the limits that let us find out our way back home. It is the convincing litany, the innocence of the forbidden fruit devoured for just hunger. The clarity of separation of doubt from need. You are that furthest of wishes, lit only so I can find how far want is. Distant only as a word wants from feeling, pressed like a delicate kiss barely breathed upon your throat. Known only in how the road went wrong.

dervish

The rain hesitates, and the gray descends, thick with brush work, streaked with light. The roads rewind as expected, brakes and gas, fluid stillness and unchecked feeling. It is all about where color leaves. It is always beginning in these furtive breaths and dismal stretches. Words scribbled on the back of my hand. Rain spattering the view, glass and metal and hours left of light.

I seem invisible in the well lit places, shambling between elbows and ignored bounds. Every eye I meet is locked in some distant permutation. Every face I see is seeing something else. I ease and sweep, avoiding the most intent of collisions. I wonder at the vacancies I carry, at all the space I somehow fail to fill. Lines of ill-mannered strangers all talking towards invisible ends.

The first lush sprinkles touch down in the parking lot, where people plod and bolt. I slow at that first fresh mist, that dense collusion of air and water. I stride through that delicate grace, that ordinary blessing of weather. I watch people rush and crows glide, I watch the traffic and my step. Every story I tell comes out in knots and circles. I ghost through the details, elaborate and mistaken. I lose each belief as everything grinds down into prayer.

closer still

I meant it all, as if I was adrift upon some midnight ocean, feeling as if I was falling into the stars. I meant it all, as I the words finally failed at leading me astray. The bare perspective of so much water, the rain that falls so soft, the light that only barely brushes past. In how that shine would seem to pool and gather, caught tense between so much sky and flesh. The least of touch, forever dissembling.

Then the air that cling about you, that slipped poetry of perfume and evidence. The breath and all that breathing shaping the guess. Cards folded before the dealing was done. Every sense gaffed and marked, the want of it always leading the way. That wind swept bereft that holds you close, the scent of a memory melting away. Sweat and chemicals and friction, the perfect composition of heavy and forget.

If it would help, I would lean into it. Put my shoulder to these fleeting notions, put my back to these ardent designs. I would push past this hesitance, pull down the decorations and the signs. The meat and bone insistence of these sweet deceptions. The radio waves and the tuner crackling together, generalizing out a signal. The work of the world wrenched from its procrastinations, life and thought at last on the mend. I check my grip and inspect the losses. I keep it closer still. I keep hold.

glass houses

There is a look tethered to a blush, a whispering of blood, a lingering of heat. Eyes fixed on the transience of skin, bright and unyielding. A gaze always falling into that remembered edge, that certain light that finds you, awake and aware. With the speed of a shadow, with the sentiments of every shark, there you are shining at the means of each eye. It is the world's work to find you you tell me. It is the burning buried inside of every flame.

I wrote it down too long after. I realized it just as every name had changed. Something about the least misfeasance only either charm or scheme. The way the rules always want so badly to write themselves. That furtive dusk, that star by rote. The poem in it always lifted by your lips, shaping every breath to exhaustion.

It is sad the way you can always tell my fortune, knowing my sins by the era of their commission. Knowing my meaning besides the mistakes. I wait for your expense accounting, I wait for your syllabary of empty boots. The longing left in all your discarded paraphernalia, those sheer disguises, that plainest of looks. You can read me in scraps and remnants. So much effort demolished as afterthought. So much anguish left in knowing how far I could miss.

the difference

The empty sky is suddenly at capacity, a single distant bird sailing, black across so much blue. Sun is exchanged for silhouette, matter swapped for shadow. We move and toil, pretending that such things are not so. How to take the work of the world when we are so close to the edges. How to start again and again each day when we are buried in the tailings, treading these bitter ends. You are near, then you are gone. I reach out to find the answer. Every equation is tinged with want.

I can feel the bones shift in the mechanics of my stride. I can see cup half empty and the clock on the wall. Something shifts, subtle and without mercy. Something shifts, and the rest is anticlimax. The story can't be the story until it finds its bounds. The trouble is the telling, the mistakes made when we make up placeholders for our own beginnings and ends. It is the shape of prayer, that cold slap in the face feeling of revealed truth. The sun pushes a shadow out from my cumbersome obsolescence. The earth is painted in the light I slow.

There is the story that began with the sea. There is the story that ends in the stones and waves. Traces filling, indifferent to the sky or water. Notions changing with the boundaries of the world. Wings glide by, so far, so wide, so free. Always that reaching one thing that changes places with another. Always this thinking that can only perform acts of subtraction as addition in reverse. I can only see you in imagined light, keeping company with a candle or the moon. I can only see you after I am taken away, far from the frame of remembrance. A trick of focus, knowledge gained from the application of books and maps to the ragged awful geography of the heart. Something too beautiful to catch up close. Something too precious to ever be real at all.

containment

I get home, and I might as well have driven into a ditch. I make the drive home, the right bracket hung on an empty set. It is the breadth of repetition, the enduring retention of human behavior. It is the grooves worn into souls, tethers tied to other times in knotted barbed wire. Every movement is perilous. Every feeling is in danger of being drowned in blood.

Last Friday I took the slow road home, idling in parking lots, browsing in the aisles of crowded stores. The last length crawled, stop and go for half an hour, until we reached the fire engine in the fast lane, dealing with the smoky fire in the middle of the freeway median. I listened to songs I had heard dozens of times, singing along. I had nowhere to be, no-one waiting. Late didn't have a definition outside of my expectations. I could loiter almost anywhere I was.

A kid kicks the bathroom door off the hinges, wanders the grounds in furious tears. I tag along, trailing his wake. I talk a little, watching to see where to contain all this angry feeling. He talks down slow, too lit on adrenaline to hear or speak. I lay out the hard facts, guiding him towards where he needs to be. He pays the price for what he has done, and pays more for those hard lessons he learned from the failings of others. He agrees to be safe, to work on his program, to think about the world past these spats and frustrations. I wonder a little as I leave what my failings will teach him. I wonder what anyone will learn.