ritual

Whatever way you fold the pillow, however you may pay the night, the clockwork keeps its count. The moon comes along spilling over, busying the shadows, ruffling the periphery. You are the cogwheel of this enchantment, you are the teeth of the tide. Words to pin back the wings of wonder. The instrument that lets the magic loose. You work the circle, you take your turn. The craft plus time served.

The moon makes with the glory. The moon heaps on the grace. The moon tells a story only you can know. You do the work, you count your blessed steps, you seal the deal by breath and blood. Each day a grinding away. The night filled by the sky.

The tense flesh, the rapt abandon. The step by step you set to. The rote descent of syllables, the spiral downward due with every step. There where you said you would be, waiting for the word.

places

Somewhere on the other side of the words, somewhere waiting behind the blanks, we are placed. This flesh, these wishes come unbidden, the magic that always wants us on our knees. Our role in the caper, the lines that are ours to drop, the world as viewed from the wings. The stage awaits, bright and unattended. The stage awaits, loosed by the cue. The world as turned and worn.

The stars strike their dwindling light, washed out by the looming of the moon. I’m locked in a room without windows. Boxed in by the insistent walls. Dusty light and crowds of shadow. A dirty mirror for company. All your lovers long since gone. All these years and still not off book. All these years and no lines to speak of to learn.

The mask is there to hold it all together. The mask is their to keep it going. The place held, the part taken. The words we are  wearing out. These lyric phrasings only go so far. We say our parts and find our marks. Our places only the start of the problem.

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.