rainmaker

I was born made of the dust, always thinking like fire. The matter so foreboding, the nature so restrained. Seeing the world only as fuel and what I had to burn. Forgetting everything but the means. Learning that making it weather is never the same as having it made. The rain falling so insistently on my own flushed flesh. Just that weight of breath. Just every story ever told wrong before.

The times I feel I finished, the draw of punctuation in slick syllable, the changing of once to was. The times I keep trying to find the end of this sentence, favoring the coin toss of warden to jailed. That flavor just failing to find its saving, the mind so hopelessly remote. The lights are on only to heat the building. The lights burn bright just to show they can.

I thought that I could explain the change. Today, beneath the rain and crows, watching the confusion of release coil and dissipate into the glittering sky. Each word just a thirst rising before the flesh is awake, the shuffled half-dreamt emotions fleeing like curtains wanting each encore. I would spell it out, down to the last letter. Another post as law waits down the corner. Another word, as the fire goes out.

the rejection of the rind

I settle for that little satisfaction, these horn-rimmed koans that I wish I could dismiss. The weight of light, the curl of smoke, the way the shadows always get so tangled in your hair. The secret signal, that urge of the future to find its way here. Stilted repetitions of dull virtuosity, the inevitable bitterness of the rejection of the rind.

It is breath by breath, this late, this far away. Your hip close to my shoulder so many slippery hours ago. Your voice so like the beginning of something never known before. That unfettered burning, that one thought worn clean through. Now electric incandescence. Now the blues singing and the restless pets. Only walls and words await.

This is where I find my midnight. This is where my new day begins. The petty business of false accounting and weathered standards. The troubled certainty that I was next to right. I was very nearly there, you beside me, abiding that uncertain spin. The action adrift right there between us, right as all opportunity recedes.

the phrasing of the moon

I often mistake my feelings for someone else's. This happens all the time. I bleed out into the world around me, and the mirror lingers in every detail. The lonesome streets, the bitter moon. These episodes are always cliffhangers. Each mistake means more to follow.

This is the trouble with navigation. This is the problem with leaving the gleanings of the native tongue. The sneeze needs a blessing, the tree needs an axe. We are so habituated to our own certainties that we forget we navigate through a fog of everyone else's. We think we know because we forget ourselves, all broad words and convenient overlookings. We paint landscape after landscape, staring into our own eyes.

It is true I stain the world with my feelings. It is true most of the sagas I endure are all my steam and fume. I have so long been the bull in the china shop, I can tell what I have broken just by the feel of that twitch of tail. I fill out the forms, draw pretty pictures in the margins. I detail the draw of ache I paint through my day, and seed a thousand unruly errors. It is the moon in the lake longing for embrace, that particular familiar phrasing. That blues that always follows, trailing smoke and flame.

that space between

I had already stared too long. Eyes weary, past closing, past sleep. Not so much tears as the feeling of crying. Not so much witness as the end of looking away. That sun that hides and seeks. The air full of flocks and spider silk, that distance between today and the rain to come.

I was done before, and am finished now. Strange how it still seems to continue, the failings and the dread. Strange how it just won't stop, not until that last expected breath. My hands cracked, my pockets empty. The porch cluttered with toys and leaves. Everything left is about the weather. Everything left is about fleeing the static down the dial.

When it goes, it happens in a flash. The wrenched orchestra of metal meeting its limitations. That slap stick blow to the head suddenly less funny and further bled. The shot you never hear, the bolt out of the blue. Nothing left, so you move in circles. Nothing left, so you leave the compass out to rust. The song ends, the stylus left sweeping the streets. I had to close my eyes.

analogy

The heart's busy chambers fill and empty, the weather always coming on. Dazzling wings and lingering strangers. The touch that is always aching to brush by, the sky full of borrowed breaths. I could leave it all to that calendar reasoning. I could leave it all in moldering witness to God's departure, these days that clutter up a past. The kisses so profound they never really happened. They appear there one moment, to vanish into debt and bravado the next. The blood always rushing towards the sky.

The travel comes in gaps and erratum, notes jotted in the margins of the morning paper, scars earned in the darkest depths of childhood. All these aches and measures, salt on the lips, a flag on the moon. That brilliant ocean, those rising departures. You write it down in haste and pity. You write it down until the telling itself is the reason for all these lesions. Far only mattering until you get there, that place where every meaning shifts.

There once was a bird, there once were wings in flight. The rain rolled in, the sky thick and gray. The rain came down, beating down the webs. Stuck in the storm, weighed down and hollowed by hunger, it waited in the sweeping of tall trees. It sleeps just before sleep's rude awakening. It waits for the day that will dream. I would say something, but that might wake it. I still myself, life shivering in the open air.

fizzle

You tire of trying to find a way, tire of it long before the road winds down. Tire of it long after the map is folded away wrong, creased and crumpled, lost to the tide of seeking and the crawling clock. It isn't as if you can't see the path. It isn't as if you don't know the way. Eventually all this wander wears thin, and there are no endings available worth wanting. Too many clues, and just a few missing pieces. You wind up strung up on a pole. You end up hanging from a tree, asking why.

So my work is the land of damaged children, nestling horror stories behind child's eyes, carrying tiny hells within their hearts. You get the shards and a name, some hints and whispers written in dry clinical hands. You get the idea in short hand, are handed a life, and told to try to keep each shard together. Keep them safe, teach them well. Take their tears and their furies, mitigate what damage you may. Every day I show up and fail someone in some small way. Every day I show up and resist the tide that will not slow.

There is no limit to human frailty. Every individual struggle may only end one way. Life plays out in the bigger picture, it plays out in the percentages. Life makes millions of omelettes, but it breaks trillions of eggs. A few of us are bound to be on the losing end ahead of schedule. Some of us have used up what little luck we had left. I was done years ago, and still I linger. There are countless wonders just out of reach, marvels wept for and witnessed in glee. But there is another bleeding gash in my leg, put there by a child for little reason at all. There is no wonder in sight, save that tomorrow I will show up and endure another thankless day without any way in sight.

epitaph

There is the leaving of the flocks, the stunning glaze of that last light burning. There is the staggered traffic, wanton and intent. There is the radio static, every voice a little crisp around the edges. There is the drive and the distance, and hours lost filling in the empty space around someone else's life. There is that fleeting fire, some stranger lit from within. Steady is the gap, change is the flow.

Nothing comes of it. The work and the time and the lives that just get bruised and worn. The voices that rise through the midnight walls, that bitter distinction between here and there. The ebbing moon so soon descending, the calendar a blur in the air. Piled leaves and buried feathers. The letters never written to be lost. The words no-one wanted to say.

I stay the course where no-one wants me, need and fear winning the day. I endure the blunt, abide the sharp. I bear vitriol and abuse, waiting out the stupid brutal facts. The day that burns, the day that dwindles. I am a shadow cast on the skin of the moment. I am the smoke of a fire that has long since burnt to ash. I am words over words, the slip of the tongue. I am the weather that passes gently as you dream. I am the bruises left buried in your bones.