all these moons and stars

Play it sad and slow, let the words emerge in familiar phrasings, the light upon drawn curtains and the shadow up the stairs. Entrance each beat by the bar, open up the melody, and make the music pay. Such sweet repetition, the stitching that holds in all the names. Blessings and lessons and bittersweet longings, forever spilling from your heart. The wild grasping passions that leaves us bruised and low. The solemn ardor of love in spring. Dashed passions leavening crystal wits. All these moons and stars.

Like the story goes I got the message wrong. Like they always say it happens sometimes. It’s the turns I seem to take, whenever the mood lets loose. The same damn song drafting on the learning curve. I never make my point but I use up every last nerve. Distant darlings and stolen moments. The sudden crush of summer rain. This train is all but gone.

The close retort and the lonely sustain. The keys on the counter, the dog by the door. The light on low and the music swinging off the shadows. Someone missing someone, singing sharp and bright. So ordinary it is every story. So odd and lovely it is you and only you.

smoke

It starts, the first fire deep into the night, a spark held over from the fall. The folded smolder of this immolation. A breath of the incantation. This dose to dull and numb, to lull the very senses. Another rushed ignition. This ransomed incandescence. This poor translation from dream to being.

This is where the magic happens. This great drift unto dreaming. This urgent search, this misplaced word. Hidden in the temporary, blurred about the light. The fade into indistinction. The place where words won’t go.

I always burn the midnight oil. My candle lit at both ends. Some compulsion or mortal curse knowing just where to find me. Smudge my name from the awnings. Chase my memory from the eaves. At once again this burning. At once again some scant light.

empty set

The stars replaced with ceilings, the moon with some screen. I moved inside to to do my ailing, box up my affect and let the tears run loose. Now the sun is all but gone, and I have tagged along, fading into flesh and bone and isolation. Alone without the words, and now the night has come.

I am the waning moon, I am the empty set. Some string of words to trawl through the heart, some resonant fragment to express my lack. The words hold more, and so are less and less. Fungible and inconstant, while we mock the precision of the carcass. The flesh, bereft of our eloquence, contains our evidence. I am the path of steep declines. The mark of certain burden.

I am done beating the drum. There’s no gong for me to bang away on. No star I’ll follow, no flag I’ll fly. Still, the world will always be served. I’m one of millions all a stir from this kicked down hive. Less a choice than a direction. Less a leaf than the river run. Awake though only dreaming.

nullify

The soundtrack is there to tell you how you feel about what you’re seeing. If you don’t listen, who knows who you were. Sometimes you hum along, as if the tune isn’t you. Sometimes you let the others do all the singing. Eventually it all costs the same. Mostly you pay in little pieces. Sometimes you pay it all up front. As the moment leaves, you are mementos and souvenirs. Little gewgaws and brittle slivers. Dwindling images and memories by rote.

This is why the story lets you down. This is how the singing gets you sore. All these self help holies and layaway heavens. The rounds there for the turn, not the take home test. Eternity is full of a lot of not you. You only go as far as what you carry. No one saves your place.

I sit and listen to the sound of sprinklers, the scent of treated water caught on the wind. The room fraught with dust and scattered mammals. The porch light washing the night bleary and blind. The stir below just so much wan moonlight and cutout stars. Now just words spilling away from the turning. Now just the erasure left in the tense.

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.