bled

The light dwindles in the way it always does, the sun going down and the sky growing dark. The flesh purges ink and whispers, always speaking to the unyielding past. The word and the way, another mystery extinguished, another flame doused. Dusk unravels beneath your native tongue. Night another forgivable sin melting in your mouth.

You are ever the burning branch, the mission of thistles beneath a given touch. You are that bouquet of bite and bloom, that language waiting unspoken, sleeping at the bottom of the sea. You are the stone's throw and the crow's flight, the song that does not end. You are the wound and the wonder, that soul caught on the wind. You are the scar that reminds me how close far away might end.

If the world worked out, I would watch you as the sun set. If dreams came true, I would see you by the sea. Instead I wake to a world full of shadows. I go to sleep on the edge of knowing too much. The die is cast, the play is in motion. It is always too late somewhere in the world. It's all over always about to begin. The night plods on, certain and aloof. You are my latest thought, the last before all the lights go down.

blur

The sky drains away in a flurry of stars, those blinking hints at distance. Everything sways and springs as the winds sprint through the gauze of green leaf and brittle branch. Tree limbs flay, reaching up in ache or surrender. Eyes blur and water, adding uncertainty to the unknown.

The spent day is measured in smoke and trash. It is measured in breathless hush and disproportionate ache. The countdown and the calendar, recycled digits and no more firsts at last. Sweat slips and trickles, burned skin and a cooling trend. Vision pools in the corners. Vision crusts the edges of the seen. That boulder still keeps rolling. The hill only slopes up.

Time once was I could see past the horizon. Time once was I could see in the dark. Illness and age worry away the old records. The mission that is accomplished is the one I never could attempt. The clock on the mantle grinds away the days. Looking forward all I see is silt.

little shines

You know the features, but you just can't place the face. Somebody you knew or wanted to know. Someone you had forgotten or wanted to forget. The gift of variation, repeated riffs upon the same old theme. She was the one you always wanted, he was the one who wished you dead. A tilt of the head, a lilt of a voice, some story that sticks even now as some familiar stranger grows uncomfortable with your stare. We are all the same in our uniqueness, so special in so many tedious ways. Most of us learn a part, and play some version of it for the rest of our lives.

She reminds me a little of someone from twenty years ago. She reminds me also of someone else from around ten years later, and then again of a movie actress from the thirties. Memories are full of tricks to treat us with, missteps and inversions, backtracks and epiphanies and all the little shines and fevers found. The asymmetry of a smile, and I believe things about a stranger that are not likely to be true. These categorical imperatives, schema and clades and broad archetypes fill in the blanks everywhere I look. I believe things and scoff at others, and so I play the part I learned somewhere back when time rang true.

Truth be told, I was lost so long ago the original drift is hazy and obscure. I have been lost so long, it is hard to remember even thinking I had a path. Different roles, different stories. Each year a little less left over, each day a little further from the source. Bits and pieces, bites and blows. Another unfamiliar face I have seen before, another name that it seems I have just misplaced. I don't hesitate to start the conversation. I hardly pause when again I walk away. Someone always has to leave. The story always leaves someone behind.

slow dance

Suddenly there is music, though it is not the song that the band are hacking after. There is music, though it is not the tune stepped on again and again. They spin together, all touch and sight. They twirl together, though all the world might burn. They dance together, slow and lush. They do not dance because there is music. There is music because they dance.

All the world can tell, just seeing them together. It is a story of time and struggles, a romance of broken rhymes and tear streaked letters. Those movie story moments surviving the meeting with real life. From across a crowded room to the cross-hairs of the day to day, they have endured, scathed but undiminished. Something lovely lives, entangled in their grasp. Something magic endures in their touch.

Some feelings burn, some feelings smolder. Some feelings are extinguished before anyone knows they were there. Words spill, sifted through worn teeth and busy lips. Words dust the world, chasing after idea and object, making claims and slipping wishes. We say forever, we say love. We speak and speak, playing Marco Polo with the whole wild world. They do not shed one single word. They join hands and everything is revealed. They dance, the music playing on and on.

third of July

The night is aloof, though not entirely unkind. The air cools from boil to swelter, the breeze finally then setting in. The wind wicks away the beaded sweat that trickles down exposed flesh and soaks whatever clothes that have yet to be abandoned. Fireworks bang and spark, everyone freed from the weight of the day. Every third block is half a riot.

Garbage cans line the street, awaiting their Monday morning appointments with the truck. A restlessness stalks and huddles, ordinary life held in suspense, held in pieces. The squeal of traction broken, the shouts of drink and smoke, that hole in the world that winds through every belly open wide and howling. We go a little blind from the habit of seeing what we want to. Day or night, search and scavenge as we may, something is missed.

It is still too hot for sleeping. Too hot for thinking or for words that release. The water glass, slick with condensation, has gone from ice tepid. Each swallow allows a little respite while evoking further thirst. Each drink another considered effort against the slow decline. Mosquitoes shine by porch light, floating along the ley lines of their naked appetites. Some blood savored, some blood relinquished. Some blood left to replenish the stock.

a bigger bang

The blue of the sky lingers, suspended above the trees and roofs as the day smolders into dusk. The clinging heat slowly dissipates amid the rising breeze, buffeting the green reaches, casting small benedictions to the stifling streets and dry fields. The tension of an unremitting summer caught in the wind.

I lean back, awash in smoke and indirect light, that severed halo of the horizon still casting spells and long shadows into the road. Sweat and ash and insect repellent mingle on my sun-burned skin. The dusk hovers, prowling the eaves and doorways. The day in retreat and night beginning its hunt, the clear sky fills with swarms and flocks. It is the hour of many feedings and more appetites. I swallow some whiskey, draw long on a good cigar. A satellite makes its way across the dimming firmament, another traveller on the cusp of night.

Fireworks resound in the near distance, the hiss and booms mingling with the rising tide of canine outrage. Another round of candidates for the antecedent for the season's first grass fire. A California summer is always tinged with a little too much smoke. The night bears down with all its indifferent strength, swallowing everything in sight. I finish the cigar and the bourbon, rousing the old dog asleep at my side. The constellations chart their usual courses, adrift amid the consequences of some significantly bigger bang.

spider light

The spider rises, floating on a slip of light. Into the hum above, the sea of fluorescence a-shimmer, the whole of heaven the rules of fluidics on fire. The expanse is not greatest between sight and thing, but hinged upon that distance between seeing and being. Not the realization of the possibility, but the awareness of the odds. It rises into the visible stripe of shapely light, an action in silhouette, a star of unburned sticks. Destiny the scissor-work of the numbers adding up.

How to unlearn then the rigorous tread of history? How to know the dream with the hapless wet-work of all that is? All the stars visible through the ceiling, all the shadows that mouth and maul. Just stretch until the record turns over, reach above those crackling dispatches buried in the spine. Only frayed rope and a flayed grip, flesh torn from holding on so long. The last thread grasped the only strand that matters. The shiny line of silk all the world as witnessed.

There you are, aglow in these dim glimmers. There you are, the only light I find. You hold the horizon line, you dispatch the blind night, hold tight the razor of the ravaged tide. In the pagan stillness your name just brushes my lips, dusts the tip of my tongue. An invocation pressed from the tread of prayer, a grace carved from the timbers of the earth. Even now I clear my throat, I whisper. Your name the only word that is certain.