post lament

A swathe of crows sweeps across the dusk. The cat dashes across the yard. Snarls and snips and columns of dust. Clouds trail messages after the wind. Root to branch and back again. Memory slowly dries along these lines. Soon the telling is all the time that is left. Soon the measure might as well be a million miles. There are no soldiers left out here. Everything gets left behind.

Solace comes in with the tide, comfort riding on the unsettled sky, gull and crow arrive to untie the dawn. The cool breeze a set of loosed bones, dancing across these unladen skins. Another day, and then another. The whole deal set out like funhouse mirrors. The whole deal made so long ago everything is bound by law. The cause and the reflection. The litany of labels, the ziggurat of stacked chairs and crowded shelves.

The world wakes up to another sleepless night. The sun lingers on reserve while the sky bucks and rollicks. Children make their way back to school, always saddened by the exodus from the heart of summer. All those bright hopes hung from pegs in the coat room. All those true loves stuck basking golden in the sun. The rest of it work and circumstance, the tree limbs swaying out above the bandstand. The rest of it the flavor of a shed lament, long and gray and ashen upon the tongue. A tale told, believing always in the bounty of further tomorrows. A tale told to the flocks and swarms, after the masses already lost. Yet another, all I say. Yet another is enough.

digging a hole

I can't tell if it is smoke in the air, I can't tell if it is dust in my eyes. The day is a blur, the winds are changing. It isn't what the cat left buried. It isn't what the dog dug up. There's always some season to explain it all. Always some theory here to sacrifice. I take it in while the fields are burning. I write that the world burns yet again.

Somehow I am still that sword once broken, somehow always the secret lost. You live the story long enough see how you get sorted out. A glimmer in some telling, a question forgotten long ago. Ancient claims of worth and wonder, battles taken and loves unbound. Receipts and maladies, scars and stitches. Kisses that  linger while the fire burns on. The prophet at long last at a loss.

I hem and haw, I shuck and jive. Always hard at work going nowhere. Always changing channels, searching for just one song. Time only ever tells us what it wants. We weary our way throughout these skins of oblivion. We trod our way into a whole other world. The abrupt discoveries, the slick incantations, all this evoking air. Every layer another scripture. Every bit deeper the unyielding hosts. The firmament always astir, however steady the course. The moment always burnt down to the bones.

a cat is not a clock

Midnights come, midnights go, the stars glaze over, connecting dots all across the sky. The ghost trawls the blood, coiling through smoke thick and whisper deft.  It asks its questions and is given riddles. It asks for grace and is given words. The shift in the material always a measure of some recording played before the court. A burnt brow glowing in a sheen of sweat, the heat another index of every change to come. The clay pressed and pushed, the work witnessed once it has finished, the sentence given once it is served. Call and call, it will never come running. Time is spent, time is burned. A cat is not a clock.

Even so, I have seen some shipwrecks. Even so, I have been known to wager true. No second guess ever gets counted if the first one comes out wrong. Once it get broke bad enough, every horse could be a king. The rest are these island wishes. The bottle unstoppered, the thoughts all get let loose. The question spills out, and it will never be unasked. Why not tempt fate when every arrow shot must fall? Why not bet again when the swallow will certainly fly? Nothing ever so certain as faith.

The night crawls on, all heat and hunger and breath like prayer. The easy pitch of unseen wings, hints left itching their way into flesh. Hands reach and fold, clinging to these ancient labors in the dark. That folded flower, that insistent ink. The touch that feels like a sudden light. The kiss that clings to the slow dissolve. Memories and the movies, poems and unearthed shards of pottery. I can read the numbers, but I can not tell the time. Call and call, I remain unbidden. If it is there, I can only claim it. If I was witness, I still can do nothing except say.

satisfy

By now you know the story, always a little sad, always a little the same. Something then about the sky, something about the spelling. An old romance, the spark and stumble. For some reason here are fireworks, never mind the season. For some reason it leaves you like a song, after pawing at your attentions. Always really that thing you mean I seem to be missing. The tradition of the open stance shaping every stanza.

Even so I was never one to get anywhere. The one seems the same as the other, the kaleidoscope of faction and philosophy never too vivid or shiny enough to hold my eye. I plod on and on, passed by hare and rat and snail. Every line like Achilles struggling with the infinite. I allude to evidence unseen, fact and faith the same in the absence of any proof. The words dissemble and rearrange, the same old crows before a storm. The same old sturm and drag, and still the road awaits.

If you stopped reading here, you'd be done by now. The point no more than punctuation. The wind in the sky and the longing of the star, a weary sort of wonder. No surprise but still a party. No discovery but still some time was killed. Nothing but this certain stillness. Nothing but the feel of promise brushing against your flesh. A whole lot of words scratching at some lost limb. Every arrival that forgets to satisfy. Still I drive it until the wheels come off. Still I tell it until every ear is gone.

the wrestler

The day is shot, this dusk a struggle. The weight of beauty dissolving into time, you stretch and grasp. Clinging to each stilled moment, holding dearly every laden breath.  That hushed and sultry beauty, the sun leaving some autumn sky, a woman seeking something off at sea. Use them like they're lucky charms, use them like they staked you to your prayers. Every touch and fumble, every spell of sheer romance. They love so much the way you bleed. They love how well you have learned to fall.

I'd be the first to spell it out, though somehow it seems like cheating. Naming names and taking numbers. Tumbling at the first hint of distress. The world is the work without you. The world is just tangle, tooth, and ache. I tire of these eked out kisses. I tire of these worn-out plots. The dream delights once you take it apart. Anything makes sense when you've torn it into pieces. The trouble whether with faith or fact. The part plays you once you've got it down.

All the stars ignite, all the greens go out. The dust scuffed steps of each vague inducement. Work is a wish in the world. Direction somehow always this labor of love. This aimless act of passion, this hackneyed bit of make-believe. These sticky reasons, these slippery slopes. You always start with the rough and tumble, get your licks in in the clinch. You only follow because you know where I'm going to go. The only struggle left is letting go.

Hamlet out to sea

What of all these winds and whispers? The drift of the song, the spill of the moon. The pieces of mislabeled prayer still sharp in the white hot sands. The mirror of heat and atmosphere distracting from the notable absences. The words still slavering from every mouth, strange and indelicate, as if the point of speech was too polish teeth. Dumb gods leaving dumb holes in every heart. The song just won't shut up.

Always my dead poets, forever my lost love. Moments measured in the depth of shadows cast. Out here where I become part of the problem, this endless cycle of bluff and crash. Fragments doppler out from their ghostly sources. Rippling like the attentions of some spell, washing through in waves and impacts. Dense belts of tethered air bruising every soul they sweep. The proclamations claimed of flesh and bone. I spit out a mouthful of grit and promise, rumbled to the core. I peel back the translucent skins of each syllable, blind to all my crimes.

I don't know how I got here, I don't even know where I went wrong. The gusts and gales and usual suspects. The pomp and threat and every damned day. The steady ache of atrophy echoing from my bones, the easy blues of the grifter, the henhouse always either roostered or foxed. Burnt pictures and tattered letters. The cold wind lapping the pale moonlight. Every witness either lost roads or dead stars. The song splitting fences and gnawing bone.

briar rose

Would that a kiss would wake you. Would that your dreams weren't a drowning all their own. The sickness slipped into your pierced flesh, a tickle from a thorn, mad whisperings in the blood. Then this enduring stillness, a breath held forever inside a heart of smoke and glass.  Then this twilight always just when the sun is about to go out. These endless ages, this obdurate idea of being. Far away however much I wander. Only ever touched by thought and light. Surely a kiss could not hurt.

I have watched the walls fall down. I have seen the sky collide with the sea. The bullets fall blameless, the symptom of a riven soul. The facts all suddenly contention, nothing melting so slowly as a notion. Words cling and gush, every cause and claim has changed. The hours stretch and the year eludes. One day all skies will be gray. Now the sun is setting, blue shadows stick and push. Now this time is ending, stilled to a beat of your heart.

Always another season lays waiting. Always the blood stalks this dream. The threat of sleep unending in these strangely wakened days. It isn't the spell so much as the odd conviction that we were all here before. A beauty so unyielding it bruises the mind, clinging as the sparks grow dim. A mistake so utter that I never could learn I was wrong. Endurance itself the proof, counting on and on. That kiss becomes the poison it longed to overcome.