thorns

I don’t quite know how to navigate above or below, however I am unfolded I do not reach the sun. The day is not my element and the night is not my friend, the words strung from end to end without blood or breath to carry them. Scratches on the asylum walls, petitions from prisons left awaiting dust, the tracks left before the magma made them stay. Some puzzle to encumber a scholar’s notes, a heap of unsent signals and letters left in the tablet. A flower pressed in a Bible, a painting of a rose. Just bones left in the wilderness, a headstone tripped upon in the depths of the woods. Fragments that will not fit, and do not serve this life. When you stop to smell the roses, the thorns that remind you where you are.

Neither satisfaction or survival, the words a slow leak and a desperate tether, they spin and spit  and circle the pit. They creep and the crumble, ever overreaching, always a little too blue and askew. The same song on shuffle, bridge and chorus, bar after bar always too little too far. Sentenced to repetition unto senescence, the dereliction until the dereliction becomes the duty, the animal in its run. The blackberry brambles gone reckless, raking skin and tearing cloth, clinging to the right of way and the road, every course the insistence to reach the sun. Something to the common striving, the reluctance to retreat. The press of the moon upon this heft of meat and inkling. The call of the absent kiss.

There is no love in the dreaming, just the wounds from where it lost its wings. There is no future I see for me that I would want. The world turns, the old fights are going concerns and age old campaigns. There is blood hunger and blood burning, skin in the game down to the smoldering bones. The skill sets that speak in close, the drive to go out good a blinker wired hard into the ideation, a hunk of seething nothing sicced at the vulnerable and the vital. An SUV takes a T turn up my driveway, crushing weeds and sticks as it goes. These words both gut and ghost, the hard calls all made for me. All the touches left draw blood. 

the burn

The sun comes out though the heart’s occluded, it shines and blazes and barely touches the mouldering bones and the desiccated flesh that it beats so readily and burns so quickly. Breath labors while the hammer beats out despite the failings of the revenant, the swaying of the tree tops, the sweep of the brushed out blue. The yard ebbs and flows, cats and dogs, birds and squirrels, disparate sets scattered across debris and flora. The ever present exchange of tire squeals and children screaming keeps its own schedule, the entity and the organism in pitched disagreement as the wind sweeps the world away. The sun cycles down some, the lingering feel of the burn speaking clearly clean through.

I’m played out. I’ve tapped out, surrendered, left the building and all. There only pull besides a couple of cute little duties left me is the burdensome blood and bones, this ever errant meat flopping around on the pavement, this sea of scabs and appetites unconcerned with gods and philosophies. The name diminishes with the fallen body, words like the stitch work in steam, lost before read or spoken. Yet the entity won’t let it lie. The unbound wings and the boundless depth of this startled sky. The winds run through and reach into the onslaught of night, the shadows dozing in my lap. I can’t go, the animal won’t let loose. The night sits beside me. 

I smoke some more, I sit and spin, out on the twilight porch watching the traffic pass and idle. The line of last light rises, the swallows swoop and spire, children dismayingly play in the righteous weft of the wind. The heft of the wore down heart still hitting hard, I shift like the sky, uneasily from day to night favoring a hip. The crows call out from some winged distance, ever the race to the roost. I give way to the feasts and the rituals, the families flush from the unburdening moon. I give way to the light that is leaving, and the day when all will end. Until then I keep up with the continuity. The way a fire might take notes. 

embodied

Empty me of these etiquettes, these ring a round rosies I play along to, like the laws I follow when they go my way, the dead dreams turned to labyrinth and rabbit rings. Slow me of these jumbles and intersections, the mind spinning out this rough cut cloth, the so thens and what ifs. Shit out the jingles set deep in framework, hardwired from the way to the weld, the songs of the never breathed wind. Let me breathe through this direction, let the weave of blood and breath walk with me for a ways. Let the moon wash on through this current. The light to be and abide.

The wind frets and struts, it’s got moves like Jagger, it spins like the devil in your dreams. A crow caws from a neighboring tree, and a neighbor words some pneumatic tool to death. I’m imbued with blossoms, I am bathed in smoke and dust, kitted up for the sudden cool. From laid low by the oven of the atmosphere, to get grandpa a sweater never the longed for transformation. Black crow circles overhead like it knows I’m talking on it, my tongue bitter with black, cooling coffee, the leaves running their greenery through the down bound sun. My fingers cold, I stop to smoke, and consider the positions. 

The winds are all wreck and rumpus, the sky has that goodbye last chance cast to it, a tip of the hat and a wink kind of shine where once you see it you start to feel the gone. The witness washed away in the sheer volume of transitioning majesty, all these breathless beauties and wished on stars and kisses, the sun climbing up the trees to the tippy top. The gloaming at once a go, traffic speeds and staggers, home and fun and night shift intentions. I cough and start and mitigate the mix, the weight of the change between there and strange. The entity so seldom embodied, the animal always ahead on points. A train wails as a child shouts, and my place is put. The sky behaves like a savage.

lavage

The hot black coffee lolls upon the tongue between deep dive breezes and the scraped clean blue of the scorching sky. We live amid the wounds, every molecule seeking the easiest state, washed clean by breath and ablution. We steam and fume, melt and plume, struggle and dust all at once. Our labors and our creeds cull our strength and spirit, serving a set of tangled words and ways that came along after all our gods were dead. Plunder our last remaining honor, with brutality alway quick on its heels. We spit poison and invect the depths of known hells and doom harbingers alike, our cause so short and sharp. We spread sin with every verse,   every sura a sickness older than the gods invoked. Dealer’s choice or go for broke. The spell is as simple as any empty sentence. This is the flow you can only go with. 

The heat spreads in asphalt and engine, in sunbeam and albedo, in thirst and burn and swelter. I sit on the front porch as the dogs shift from shade to shade, wasp and dragonfly flitting across the dead weed lawn and the green sweep of leaves, slices of color dragging on my sight. The neighbors go about their lives of hard work and lawn maintenance, careful to keep their first line of defense intact. The appearances and such. The mind on the mask, losing sight of one’s eyes. The flies light upon my flesh, a taste for blood and sweat. I watch as you change your origin story yet again. 

The old wounds still fester, left unattended and unmentioned, the open shame we inherit along with the loot or the beatings. The direction the game tilts toward, the burdens deferred to the other. Look away or feast upon the bounty granted you by the power of punching down. The skin you cannot peel away you can at least get in the game. The elder wounds must be cleansed, an offering of back and brick and blood. The lessons must be forever taught, the stories forever turned into breath and bloom. The gardens again tended, the wicked returned to the rich and precious loam. The sins always soaking through, washed clean in blue and blues, learning to tell the truth that doesn’t favor you. The sun heads west without an answer or regret. Come out, calling down the blessings of the mindful moon. 

beyond

The wind in the leaves strums the sweltering sun, a laden shimmer and a blinding flash, all that a star might leave spinning in its wake. The thick air stirs enough to bump shoulders and stand too close, staring heavy too near your face, that feeling that it would all be tolerable if you just had a little more room to breathe. The aging day lit is stark contrast, bright skins and deepening shadows, chirrups and the knocking of a woodpecker somewhere very near, the wind abrupt and indecisive. One moment as fleet as any demon, the next sulking like mighty Achilles in his perfumed tent. The earth churns in the deep beneath, the livid core purses its lips. Hush, hush children— be patient for your fresh hell. The sun heads west as I would in a perfect world. But the world’s imperfect, so I watch beyond it. 

A fly alights upon my thigh, the blind dog pants and pants. A cautious squirrel forages through the remnants of today’s offerings, slow with the scene and the heat. Alone is the burden of proof of the waiting in the wings. The empty almost on top of everything, then the impudence of offense after offense filling the old skin with its native state of righteous rage. The back fence aglow with these sunset strips, the ever incandescent foreshadowed tomorrow beaming until it breaks, the stars stippled next night and the begetting moon. The black coffee burns a little going down. Even the flame almost smiles. 

Things are ablaze, things are boiling over, much of it outside of our influence and some the very symbol of our skin. The fear is awake, and always aimed at those that don’t think it’s all that. This is as it is, to be awake in the world of what may be. Our power together only reinforced by those who would beat us down. We walk in the field of death and pain and sorrow. We take our sin wages each day on the chin. Our bonds are deeper than blood, our kinship stronger than words. We live as the sacred oath to the other, to abide and strive for everyone’s best. The struggle is a wisdom tradition, we lead as we follow, knowing the danger, singing as we march into the storm. 

fustigate

The dream breaks out past the dress up, the costumes and offices and all the naked emperor jazz that goes along with it. You wake all meat and bone, bound by the same old bonds, caught up in the same old cages. The whole ball of wax, all the monkeys by the barrel, the stacks for stacks and stacks— all breath and spittle, from the know how to whistle to heaven’s furthest outpost. The stick figures we whittle from equal parts ink, mystery, and mumbo jumbo charged with ominous portents, as deadly as their witness might wrought. It’s only magic that makes them stick, a magic that is subject to boot and brick. Work the numbers, the physics does the rest.

It’s as real as your cup of coffee. It’s as real as that sandwich the other day. The words and the ways loose and easily slipped. If the numbers aren’t favorable, change the math. Every army is a set of plus ones. The street gets in everything, every observation is a tell. Weird these wars with only one side throwing shots. Impunity is a pretty big Achilles Heel. There’s an awful lot of lead with chins to be checked. Bad days will come back to bite.

When they tell you to submit or they’ll hurt you, believe them. They speak in their fears, lashing out with their weakness, trying to be the pain. When they speak with glee of murder and assault people with idiot mayhem, they are the enemy. They have come to chain you or worse. You owe them no mercy, whatever any king or priest declares. Fuck them up, fustigate them, however close suits. You will teach them to mind their  Ps and Qs. You will teach them their myths and maths. They will show their evil for all to witness. You will teach them they’re history. 

the clampdown

Comes a time the times are the trouble. Comes a day that there’s not so much a choice as the countdown of some suspect package, left all wires and spinning digits, waiting to unleash some unknown quantity as the minutes peel away. Burning cars and shooting stars, the professional goons and their rabid compliments of evil nitwits and other craven unfuckables upon the streets making their untested claims. Always en masse upon a peaceful protester or hapless straggler to poison or pummel as they may, it occurs that they aren’t expecting to be met with resistance, certainty not prepared for ordinance or an incoming nature. It’s the sort of hubris that has burned many a greasy bones cracked black. For every fool, an errand.

No words to mull, no love to mourn, no wished for woman or poem with a bad alternator dying in the drive. The de facto foreign op idiot crime boss racist in chief has declared war on America, grossly mistaking the mettle of the poor and downtrodden, and the wisdom of his shit stain master. Things will burn and centrists will urge the ballot box as bullets riddle our children and gloating villains prate and bleat. Folks like me will rail and fume and be removed in quiet lapses or tragic crimes. Me? There’s nothing left of me that’ll leave much of a mark. I guess I’m just a pair of cheap shoes looking for the right machine. Until then I’ll roll around in these words a little longer.

Still I work the increments. I am wide awake at the bottom of the well. The blue flame, the black candle. The older of the elder goats, a song about the alphabet, the mountain always on the way. The work of awakening is a tall order in the late game, the shift of senses and the limits of the animal. It’s in the way we draw our lines, and the way we hold them once they’re dear. This bewitched bandwidth, the static at the border and the bead on the seam. We speak as one from well worn ways, the absence of justice forever bereft of peace. Our hearts ablaze with fiery wings, our hands heavy and as matchless as the moon. The breath our inheritance as we sing out in Guthrie country. The rescued message in a bottle opens as a djinni.