follow

The day burns down slow, awash in these low winds and atmospheric blues. A swell of wilted leaves, a shimmer in the greens, a flash of passing chrome. Overwrought about the head and heart, a pin point and a ripple, always following the arc of some story. Traffic stutters by, the music lays it on thick. The date you celebrate.

There in the heartbeats and breath by breaths, the draw onward to keep on sliding down the fire. How our eyes ache as we take in the empty, the measure of this twilight against the dream, these distances that are the measure of our days. Season late or season early. A word to butt in on everything everything under the sun. This breeze brushing the knees. The calendar reasons.

What am I but these same mismeasures? These past tenses and abridged regrets. Fragments flickering against unnamed actors. The slack and slander of flesh over time. The first suggested searches. I sit out as we all fall down. I sink with the spin, the naming and the nothing. I follow the rising night.

moths

It’s the cup of coffee to carry you over. It’s the cup of coffee to the other side of the night. The remorseful dose to hold you to the harrow. The barbed hardships and the going it alones. A whetstone for dulled attentions, a little edge against the deep blue tides. Focus on far horizons and a few choice exhortations. A chance to turn off the inside eyes.

The day each day weighs me down. The night all night gnaws at my tethers. All flaws and harrows. All painted in corners and clattering locks. Knowing the alone is only gaining momentum, and the woe isn’t even up to speed. Nothing to do but turn it into words. Nothing much to do at all.

It’s the sort of love that needs to step on your toes. It’s the sort of love that is bound to steal your sheets. It’s a crowd you in the kitchen, leave the room a wreck love. Only it lives where you never are, and it can’t find what it doesn’t know. It’s there with the lights on, worrying the floorboards in soliloquy. It’s there, wholeheartedly keeping company with the love left on. But for the moths, alone.

breadcrumbs

Unburdened by the weight of words, we carry a hard fall as we write our way out of the covenant of flesh to go ghosting off into untold tomorrows. The sentences we settle the sentences we serve, disembodied and in exact. Hopeful and grasping and every bit a construct. The parings left from such unruly vines. The strange and facile artifact of symbols strung on lightning. A coatrack full of borrowed garments and empty gestures.

This is our faith. Straw dry words left in the woods. Breadcrumbs left for the bugs and birds. Following the pointer finger. This constant litany of let’s sees. The deep night around the fire. This self proclaimed in plural.

Hash marks and hieroglyphs. This stippled semaphore. Alone with our urgencies and appetites, we work the telegraph, we sweat the bellows. Remaindered and left to hold our posts, here in this furthest station of the remedy. Waiting out forever at the tip of a stranger’s tongue. Unspoken and misunderstood. A light left on somewhere.

the ribbon and the road

The words wait, whether hue or tongue. The words swarm in, condense upon the objects, split up every sense. They fill in and gloss over. Each of them sad cavalcade and secret survivor. A sheepskin and a begging bowl. A ribbon and a road. A bin big enough for every secret. A djinn bound to be bidden.

It’s all been said, and it can never be said enough. The saying makes or breaks us, the way we whet our breath. The stars that have lit the first hard syllables still fixed in the transom of telling, long lonesome roads into reflection. The lies of the ancients that have lasted this long, to shape your mouth and set your heart to stumble and sprint. These stolen kisses and forbidden morsels. These mouthings and moans.

I speak them all, and think some more, and add your name to them. The long promenade, the omniscient gaze, the store of spells and enticements. This is where the long walk leaves me, limping through the wilderness, palming all that blooms and beckons. The weight of the play upon the players, but the words flying free. All these prayers and songs and poems trailing from root to roost. All the ways of saying so I can say your name and miss you.

meaningful attachments

They don’t think of you when the world grows quiet. They don’t remember you in their self conscious prayers. All the mementos left have been bagged, boxed, and added to the trash heap. The photos have been torn, burned, or deleted. History hasn’t registered you yet. The controversial monuments to your memory still unplanned, remain untoppled. Tomorrow is dust begotten.

You can’t trust the waveform you fit not to collapse. There is no urgency within to override. What you are certain is certain, all the rest of this guess work. There’s no marker for that mess. There’s no do over for that magnitude of meshugas. It’s not you, it’s the observable universe. Only the stories carry over.

Leave it for the ever after. Save it for the epilogue. Cold corners and lonesome outposts. A losing race to the more relentless of pursuits. Frame it with your culture heroes. This last prophecy, this time served. I saw it coming, but I believed it least.

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.