touchscreen

All the hours pass, a blur and a drag. The eyes spent on screens, thumb smudged and unproofed. This gaze unto, this longing on. These whispered anthems to bridled senses. The shine of particular skins. Fingers losing their facility to feel. Numb from following only want.

The loss sets in as the days slip past. All our slaughtered darlings, the markers orphaned of the map. It grieves us to learn and lose, love sticking to the edges of the passage into translation. It grieves us to be so small that our whole world can be swept away by the least breeze. Everything gone without a word.

All these buttoned-down fingers. All these remainders we rechristen in our image. The stories to warm us as we worm our way through the flesh of the world. To grace creation with our insistence, to place each flower in its tell-tale just so. What we say what we see, until we think of what we’d rather be. 

the crack in the ceiling

You make do with the ghost you’re given, the crack in the ceiling, the face on the moon. The story only grows as tall as it’s told. The weight you’re owed and the water you carry. The reel around the circle, the stars across the sky. You see something. You say something. The tide of night comes crashing down.

You wake up wet with dreaming. You wake up with the touch in tow. Glorious lights and pressing shadows, the ecstatic charge of flight still skipping through your blood. You breathe slow, these dreams still crisp and vivid. Your breath slows, this night still far from done.

I think of you through the drifts and the dreaming. I think of you while the myths march on. The cusp of the calling. The architecture of the lexicon. The star I fix with all my wishing. The stare unto certainty.The names we fix to clouds.

the distance people

We are born to words and signs. We watch out the windows, we wait by the phone. Sitting so still, the sky sweeps past us. Smears of stars and clouds. The blue hued harrow of every breath. The tightness unspoken in the chest, a burst of color always almost there. These hard turns and crabbed hands, letters moldering away. Alone, alone, alone.

Lock me up with ink and flowers. Send me to the remaindered places, the ones you’ve left for good. The stories that we tell ourselves to hold the days together. The stories we remember as we stare into the sky. The stars striking and the wheel a spin. The paths of the ancients and the parable calendar. The clock on the wall and the picture in a frame.

I would have words, but you’re always sleeping. I would have hope, but I never remember my dreams. I have grown old staring at screens. I have grown old watching the fall of years. Some strange case, some odd leanings. A heart choking lonesome and the scrolling of smoke. Tripping on my injuries and mumbling verse and curses. Stones in my pockets and the search for a cause. The light that finds me too bright and tactless, I turn into the myth of night.

open casket

The time has passed, the deed’s been done. Reddened eyes and tear slick faces, the empty husk and the hollow ritual. All that was given long gone. Dusty shelves of books unmoved, tchotchkes and orphaned keys, the laden name dead on the tongue. Love just another word laid waste.

This is an exercise in the futile, the banality of the choices still left. Check the figures, fill in the forms, what is there to keep you warm? Wind and wishes and the spider striped ceiling. Heartaches and mementos and the rats in the walls.

Write it down to keep the record. Write it down to work it out. It all comes down to the bent of the reader. It all comes down to the work and the pain. The crowds with all their gods and ghosts, fool’s prayers and loaded fragments. Weep away, we are always leaving. Weep away, we were always lost. The name never spoken, a life like footprints taken by the tide.

traction

Painted green in patience, the world skews vaguely towards the clock. The placment of the causeways, the reach of the flora. Each skin wears a countdown, each name earns a notch. Between arrivals and departues, we are our dispatch due. Glass and plastic, carpet and tarmac, every surface bears this wait. The sky is graced with clouds and planes. These abrupt disagreements with gravity.

I wait like all the others, in contention and dismay. The aches all settle in as the plans continually change. The words stack like cordwood, the words stack like bricks. The plane evades all prayers and numbers. The plane is a story that changes as it goes. My mumbling heart can ken its kin, even as the blood starts to burn.

It doesn't take too long for the tale to take. A few scattered words, a quick slip of the tongue, and all the crows have settled on their plates. We sidle past our purpose, we outlive our truth. The sky once so full of heaven now stippled with brittle light. Buoyancy built of vast engines and startled carbon, lift left to the bitter tills of our trampled hearts. Only left with this world so full of falling.

convalesce

The days arrive wrapped in words-- the good, the bad, the blue. Know the sky by the birds alight, know your bones by the ache. The things we say just slip away. The bare intentions linger. The needs they have you'll never know. They certainly aren't you. Faces slowly start to stray until you're the stranger they once knew. 

I creep along these dusty halls, these dog swept corridors. Quiet in this shuffling skin, the flesh my only heir. Waiting as if in faith, moving as if in chains. I am daunted and I am dire, removed once from this world, never to find my way back. Interred in these jagged hurtful thoughts for all around to witness, each step straying further from sense. There are never words enough for the sort of waste I am.

Return at once to that pristine path, the beloved self, the hidden choir. Let your voice ring out above the fray, let the losses lie. Pretend along some chosen path, sanctify your crimes. Believe in the light that loves you, obey the court where your heart holds sway. Sing out to the unseen heavens, never mindful of the souls you burn for warmth. 

reckoning

The rain returns, settling bets and breaking fasts. The rooftop sluices gravel, and the river of sky spills over, wedding waterfalls with gutter streams, turning the wheel yet again. Green weeds and lovely mud scatter like markers on a map. The landscape squirms beneath the slovenly pavement, freeing aging rumors from shallow graves. All the ghosts in motion, the storm beckons and bends the mind askew. 

We place our labels, we hold our breath, we wait and wander through word and skin. The story steals our reason. The story clouds each sense. The world walks one way, and we go another, shouting slogans and singing anthems. The world moves on, and we do not even know its name.

I wait under the awning. I pace the muddy porch. Footprints on slick pavement. A figure in need of distance. A face that wears like a mask. I watch the flood swell and subside, never looking at the rain. The storm holds court in my heart, my dreams all born drowned. The reckoning all that's left me.