the curve

 Don’t believe everything you hear— the crazy can know they’re crazy. Don’t believe everything you read— sometimes a fool knows that they’re a fool. I’m always a few dollars short, I’m always a couple steps behind. You tell me straight out, but I might not follow. You read me the riot act, all you get is the riot. It isn’t like it’s a competition, everybody can be wrong at once. It isn’t really a contest, I’m just pointed in the same direction as the doom. Entropy spilling from my fingers, devastation dripping off my tongue. Neither a name or a number, I’m just a beggar that won’t do the asking. The aspect and the animal, the sooth that goes unsaid. Cast me out or tag me in, the gutters run red whither way I turn. Mostly I do the bleeding, but who knows when the flesh will relent? Mostly I am way behind, but you can never tell until you measure the curve. 

The day is so thin at both ends it begins to buckle in the middle. The day is so overworked, it can’t help but to fall apart. Beaten from the cement, pried from the grip of root and earth, dug out from under the waning moon and wasted stars. The night rises from the grave of the day, the rot from my wounds sunken into my stuttering heart, the steady already leeched from my spindly limbs. Time gallops past with me grabbing after its tail, time rattles down the tracks as futilely grasp and stumble. My back bends and my bones bleat, fading from their labors. All the blanks already filled out, despite my never having read them. Fate falls fast upon your crown once every possibility has been cut loose. The turn of phrase, the loud report, the reckoning of the arrow. 

It rises and falls, the shape of the data. It rises and falls as the probabilities spread. Ahead or behind or in the heavy handed middlings, we all take our places. Sooner or later we all meet our match. We race to our reckoning or fall to our means. It begins with time as thick as honey, it ends with the years thin and slick, barely speaking before the breath gives out. Barely living before too late is at the gates. I have been nothing but a waste and a curse, a blight before my ancestors, the antecedent of a thousand pains and ruins. Missing the mark with every aim, losing the point before I even get the drift. I know I’m done, I know I’m finished. These pointless words going nowhere, this wasted tale only wheels spinning in the mud. Making it all worse while waiting for a place to put the end.

senescence

There’s always a separation to that old feeling, and feeling old. The longing for the lost versus the complaining of the bones. The descent of night into the deep forest against the wounds that now heal so slow. Loosing spirals of smoke toward the heavens while the last dragonfly of the day darts and gleams while the dusk settles in. All the old grievances to take arms against as the new order within me show me where it hurts. Separated from the solace, dwindling in a dodder beneath the waning moon. Watching the children work the world as they play, unaware of all our unforgivable betrayals. There is no end to this dissolution, there is no doing enough.

I stick to the travels of shadows, I carry the fire and harbor the flame. The green leaves sway and bow as the night brings out the givens. The wind does as it pleases. The predictable passions and the sorry complaints of age as my beard grows back not salt and pepper, but maybe sugar and cinnamon, the reds gone brown as the flesh trends blue. The flies that try to make a meal of me give way to the mosquitoes that take me for a snack. A young man walks two young dogs, headphone oblivious to their course. The Monk Quintet swing Locomotive somewhere from the long ago as the night comes calling like a shroud.

It’s a sad transition, from the vital limbs to the contrition of the flesh. It’s a sorrowful passing from are to was. Tense beyond the past or present, spitting flecks of tobacco and blistering invective while she mends the world, one hand in the earth and one on the moon. The star stippled night a blur beneath the cloud of streets and rooftops while she stitches the stars and salts the oceans. Tires break traction, spinning donuts in the intersections as the junkies and the tweaks plot their fixes and capers while the woods flourish in the very beating of her heart. The magic doesn’t miss me, the feeling isn’t mutual, I decay with the crumbling ramparts all around. The weakness underscored by the labors left, the end always in sight. A shell released from the barrel, a rope reaching down from the rafters. A story always over, the night always near.

mistaken

It won’t do to make believe, it won’t do to want and wonder. It was never what you thought. No one ever told you otherwise, mistaken from stone to star, the difference between the dreaming and who you really are. A lap full of ashes and holes scorched through the sheets, the knowledge imparted again and again, the same old record played from end to end. The tried and true dies in you day by day. The one you want doesn’t want you. This will fill your nights and curse your days, walking in your skin, the ghost in your own haunting. The warning label on a discarded box.

The music is negligible and the coffee a disgrace. Nothing to celebrate, just the lines you’re used to coloring in, just the way you make it fit. You’re not enough to go around so you play it tight and close. You never were much of a sender, never a sight to soothe sore eyes. Just a puttering about the edges of the day, a scraping at the sides of dawn and dusk. You know the habits of the birds and beasts, you ken the placing of the stars. There goes Saturn, there goes Mars, the Great Bear and the leaking moon. You reach the bridge and sing the chorus, faking all the rest.

The night lands hard upon shaky legs and slumped shoulders. Old wounds have opened again. The fan drones on battering the air about, mingling breath and dust. You want it one way, but it is only ever the other. The words move through you, and they only move one way, time tripping over its heavy feet as the day slips away. Eyes weighted with unspent sleep, the gears shift and grind. Bones complain under the fat on the frame, muscles grumble under unfamiliar efforts, the window gapes and the cats yowl. You wish without thinking, the same old wish for the same gone one. You keep on, mistaken and undone, the day spent save for the dreaming.

the collateral

It’s the beating wings of the butterfly that dreamed it was a poet, it’s the one crushed flower right outside the time machine, the incident and its attendant ripples reaching out through the world. These plumes of smoke, this tide of sky spilling down, the dopplered song of the unyielding train washing over brick and asphalt. The heat that lingers in the tarmac, the albedo bouncing the wavelength back to the stars. You move one piece, every piece feels it. One person falls, the world is lessened in ways both obvious and unnoticed. Everything covered in fingerprints, everything spewing consequence. The ice cream truck plays itself off, everyone singing along.

Star stricken I stir it around, the moon full in abundant beauty. From the day before to this last let down, I descend again. The dust and grime in double time, silverfish scatter as ants reform their ranks, where there once were structures now space and debris. The wounds grow worse as the hours grow shorter, the night wanders on without. Here today, gone tomorrow. Life’s like that goes the recipe. Oh, impoverishment amid all this plenty. The fallow fields, the fecund moon.

So it’s another cup of coffee. So it’s one more sunset as it comes undone. The winds on high, the stars out of focus. This flung stone unskipped, forgotten but for the ripples. Mementos and tenders, letters folded with the dust. Bit and cut and full of splinters, nothing certain but more and worse to come, I sing and hum along. The night is full of stolen voices, car doors slam and race away. The chimes chatter and the houses blink and stare, the rats in the attic and the cat on the roof. My heart gets broke one last time, and all these empty words are the collateral. The price always paid twice, never for the better. 

demolition

We move along among the skies, waning from wound to wound. The earth shows in stone and bloom, the night goes full on moon. The catch in your voice, the rudiments that fail the truth, the world from end to end and turn by turn leaving behind these overwrought ruins. The madness catches like a fire, it spreads through these unhinged hearts and microwave emissions. The game of telephone in transition, while wood and aluminum continue to teach the merits of the flesh. Scuff and scrape, glue and tape, splinters and gravel as it all unravels around. 

It is the nature of the beast, the dust to dust volition. The ramparts all in disrepair, the damage suggests the fixing. The dream of needles pulled from feet, the tetanus cuts come running. It’s the repertoire of accidents to go wide for the collateral. A kid picks the wrong angle on a motorcycle, I’m suddenly on the job. Shifting the debris, disassembling the wreckage, while the 

labor keeps time in blood and bone. Moving from pile to pile, putting a crowbar to my departed father’s work as the day and the deed double team my gumption. Taking my resolve out in flesh and pain, the world wins again and again.

There’s more to do that is yet undone, more undoing to get to before construction can begin. I am already a tattered banner, litter slapped around by the wind. It isn’t only the demolition, but the demolition is by far the worst of it, wrong man with the wrong tools what could go wrong. Another one more thing, a question from Columbo, a date on the farewell tour. It’s not the sort of thing I had in mind with my endless asking for more. More grave than gravy, and the chains keep on coming. From stunt work to stagecraft like I was even in the union. Each day taken to task, each day a little worse for wear. Hoping for the curtain as the whole thing comes down.

sleep

The day wanders as it will, all hot and bothered, graceless and aimless and littered with glass and shrapnel. I sit and smoke with my insignificance, thinking about all the things I don’t want to think about, full of want and lack. It isn’t the day’s fault, I’ve always been like this, maybe more so now that the manic doesn’t happen so often. It isn’t as if the night has my back. The drift to drowse and dream a toss of the dice. The moon either a blue sky scar or a gravid taunt of lost love and babies exed out of existence. Flies light upon my head and hands, creep along my blood sugar wounds and my open sores. They are way ahead of the game, as the elders tend to be. 

The moon was little less than rapturous as I woke last night, my attempt as sleeping off this dismal blue only a nap to wake to the big black dog heavy on my heart. Shining bright with Jupiter and Saturn in august attendance, the remainder of my reminders of the last abandonment, the consort of her heart of bloom and stone. My own coterie of anhedonia and ideation keeping me company through the rat gnawed night. A little toss and turn, some tobacco to burn, while the symptoms get worse and the way out seems just the big one way. The moon crowned the scrubby pines and stoic cypress, as lovely and unconcerned as the last heartbreaker that left me in her wake.

Sleep eludes me still, and when it comes, it never lasts long enough. There’s always some alarm on its way, some bell beaten with a bar, some clanging to rouse me from my corner towards the next cheap shot to my chops. I doze in the early morning, I nap in the afternoon, I get a few winks in some nights only to wake in the darkened affect of my consequences. Dreams rarely bring delights or respite, just the wandering through imagined trails, or shuffling through the crowded hallways of the dead. The occasional nightmare that threatens death, but doesn’t deliver, or the return of a lost love to hate my guts and liver. Too poor for the insurance that supplied the antipsychotic that allowed me to get a solid four hours, to broke to manage the magnitude of self medication that will drop me like a brick. I would stay in my lane if there was a direction, stick to my strengths if I had any. Instead I am swarmed by words that do me no favors, left to idle on empty, waiting for an end to dead. 

at first there was nothing

The planet would not recognize a pure hearted man. The universe is always up to something. You matter, in the sense that every ant and bee matter. In the way that every bacterium and virus matters, as part of the squirming, seething, motion of the whole. You look to nature, you find no kings. You look to nature, you see the way creation plays out without all the extras. The hats and gloves and guns that we claim makes us special, even as our hierarchy and specialization makes us less, on an organism to organism level. The cosmos burns at ten thousand hells a second. Our species is due a brushback, and we have achieved the distinction of having one hell of a reckoning in the chamber, our collective itchy trigger finger firing at everything at once.

I’m out here smoking all my consequences. I’m out here watching the workings of the world without. The crows fly west, the geese fly east, none of them checking out my theories as to all the where and whys. A bumblebee briefly checking out the sorry agapanthus before speeding off to better blooms doesn’t bother with an explanation. I sit with all the in the way words, the aphorisms and platitudes that keep spilling from our yaps. I sit amid the aggregate art and music inside the lines of this negligible architecture, an iteration of the species that somehow fails both the biological and the cultural continuity. Not so much an aberration, but the outcome of the numbers at play.

The swallows do their Shakespeare bit, swooping and startling their way through the sky. The measure of the probable in the possible, the song written before there were songs. We spin upon the cooling sphere as we keep adding carbon into the gathered atmosphere, listening to the idiot, useless thieves that we seem to think deserve a say about our common resources. Word stupid and acclimated to our own hollow agency, we mistake all sorts of made up things for reality, reality disinterested in our opinions. So we die and starve and are beaten because of some spells cast by priests and wizards, claiming freedom with every stolen opportunity, claiming cleverness and courage for the cowards who keep us around to beat upon and steal from while we pull their plows. Hubris in our own individuality, pretending that we make the world out of the ether. Gulled by those with only the short game in mind, we play out our betrayal. The sun sets and the stars we look to couldn’t tell the difference, our distance the only thing we know.