true sky

We have settled a few miles
up the shore, bent on
meeting the sea at its level,
crane and egret sweeping
between marsh and estuary,
a Peregrine falcon plucking
some luckless passerine,
littering the yard and sidewalks,
spreading feather, gristle and bone
the glistening reminders that
the world is not our world.

A curl of uncivil smoke rises
amid the cypress, palms and pines
that sway above the school field
riddled with flock and scream, some
stubborn fire within legacy brick and
boards beneath the true sky blue,
fire trucks sirens sounding their
daily report of the unseen forces
bearing down and rumbling through
this landscape strewn with
the consequences of killing gods,

asphalt painted with gasoline and
sacrifice, fevered hands full of
death and pleasures shuffling our
last fresh deck. The world braced and
abutted by our monkey barrel insolence,
crows unfolded as the traffic meets
the abandoned offering, all souls
signed away with the mineral rights,
mountains rising blind to our flags and
statues as the sea keeps the beat,
heaven beset with fire and flailing wings.

punctuate

It wasn’t just the odds against, it was the shot that there never was. The all in I’d rain down to the little I ask, there wasn’t any there to be had. The fiction that I am ever in on the fix, they only ask you in to feed the empty. All the big hopes died off early in the anthropocene, all the little ones murdered one by one, the gray of the day through the dark of the imminent dawn. Wishes all these bullets that never grant me peace. A place to keep your creases.

screen time

I was a name, I was
a hand, I was a night
lit with candles and
braided by the rain—
now a chair, now a lamp,
now a number circled
on a calendar, a number
on the face of a clock—
there’s no point in asking
what comes next.
Things never are better

for long. The truth is
there and that’s a fact,
the drawn card, the eventual
settle of the tumbling dice,
the number that tells you
your number’s up.
The test results or
the unyielding tree
you’re wrapped around,
the tenses eventually stuck
in reverse, life another love

that left, now an old man
smoking on the porch as
the train wails by, now
the worn through soles
years of slow circles,
grinding out the ghost
given up so long ago
the words aren’t left and
the music got lost in
transcription. The night
another stranger closing in.

finite

There’s no question that I’ve made mistakes. Falling in love with a riddle is questionable to say the least. Knowing that, and the soul of wit, I tend to go on and on. It’s the mountains that we make, how we add to the heap, all our belabored myths and molehills. The trick of the pyramids, the gimmicks in the real estate. Plaques and names and epitaphs, the genius revealed long after the artist bit the dust. The promise of perpetuity always selling something. The web clotted porch light and the careless kiss of the wind. Heaven can’t wait to make you guess.

Bug bit and screen lit, I smoke in the hollow hunger of an unsettled night sky, swathes of bright cloud and boundless black reveal star and helicopter while I curse constellation and wanderer alike. The wail and ruckus of a train rattling through town stirs each chirp and echo with the dispatch of its there and gone. Such relentless momentum, such blundering certain thunder so fills the air, then this hush that rushes in as the atmosphere settles in. Like love, too big and loud to take a measured measure of. It’s absence, the world at once without. I cough and cough, spattering the unfathomable empty left.

If I had my druthers, I’d favor the faint praise sort of damnation. As it is, I take my lumps. The brutal years and aching days, the inevitable spiral down spinning ever faster, the world speeding past and slipping away. The worst sort of hackneyed vaudeville act, the prelude to a ghost, the engine spins the organism. The clockwork yoke of some fool god’s doubled down abomination, these thrift store motions, this roadshow full of adepts and relics. This worthless witness, a way with not one damn thing.

onto the inevitable

If tomorrow’s coming, I sure can’t see it from where I sit and smoke. The setting sun tangled in the shrubbery as it goes all westward and wagons ho, the day does its little dance. Dogs bark and crows call, and the beating of helicopter blades slips between the fence boards and each sentence. The yard is all canines, cats, and deadfall, winter mud and California sun. A wind slips in, more west than northerly, and it sets a small chill upon my shoulders. For now, the only future I see involves maybe putting on a hoodie if this wind really means it. Eternity hasn’t made it out here yet.

The sun sets slow, and I watch it, just in case it tries something funny. I stare at sky and treetop, watching what the wind stars to swaying. Some plug church, some clipped idiom, and yet the west is somehow always you. Your old tricks and the tricks of my mind, the dusk engulfs and the counter keeps turning over. All this wishing on words and special teams, the night comes slow, bone blue horizon and the pounding hours’ cold bite. All alone despite the directions.

The body knows it’s over before the spirit gets the gist. The mind alone won’t know, the wheel drawing all the water that it’s got. The cold sits in my lap, playing with my beard, kissing at my face and fingers. I stare in your direction despite its lack of your inhabitance, as you weave the world anew, and I bear this flame. I shiver and dwindle as the night presses on, cold concessions and failings on repeat. A receding memory of a world that never was, mumbling its litany while you get to the job at hand.

automatic for no people

Sometimes the writing on the wall is so clear and bold that it doesn’t need to be written at all. It makes the voyage from hunch to grudge, crosses the hinterlands between the big wild world and the mayhem of the map in your mind. All it once it joins the story that you carry. It becomes part of the passed along. Everyone reads it though it isn’t really there. This is how the story goes, when it goes like that.

The night rolls right off the rails, the stars still so impossibly far, the racket as the moon retreats. The words accumulate as the entity burns, this unfathomable candle, this flame adjacent abundance. It spits and gibbers these disgorged coordinates, the ten thousand expirations and the exaltations of the flesh. I have played my hand and had my shot. Now I’m left with time and the misbegot. Now I’m the sound of the stylus at the end of the disc. Wires cross, I throw sparks and crackle static. The story keeps going even after it’s over.

We are lost in the shine of the lonely lamp. We are weeping orphans drowned out by the drone of the bathroom fan. I hack and heave until the spirit leaves. Each breath a rasp, a wound in the tide, the clutch of the blood slipping a little looser every day. The sky and earth as their children tumble down the pit. The words left as evidence to this terrible conflagration, a too long life wasted writing on the walls of this endless maze. All our pretty pictures painted looking to escape the cage.

past tense

Your long and labored days, your slow impassioned nights,  your set tos and work arounds and heart’s true and fondest all fall into the unbeknownst. The pause before a mirror, the sigh that shakes your shoulders, the fleeting smile or tear remain the refrains of habitual fictions. The dollhouse reverse engineered from words and lore and living, the irresistible fantasies that fill in the gaps. Detective work and first impressions, the unlovable forever vulnerable to the far fetched yarns of improbable romance. The things I have to tell myself. The things I never do.

The art left long ago, it ran away with my anima. Now I root around with my homemade thorny crown and my breath bitter and sharp. I beat the bandstand with my pots and pans, I paint the sky with grim curse and blasphemous epitaph. I scrape and stumble and call the clouds. I am adrift upon a tide of smoke and indolence, still fixated upon your flesh. The sort of gaze that won’t relent. The sort of love best left.

I think about you as the night fills the window. I think of you as I turn and tangle in the dark. Words whispered to my pillow. Dreams spoken aloud to the room. The days turn and glare, I go nowhere, dark altar prayers shudder and gasp. A rubber band, an earring, the necklace with the broken clasp. Afternoons adrift and the past on pause. The heart a horror, these limbs restless and lonesome, I spill spells and weave wonders. Your name, your name, into the silence.  Your path occluded and unknowable. My part all past tense.