testament

There are these fevers

I cannot speak through

these fires I can’t contain—

livid beneath the thickness of

the tongue, these dashed and

scattered whims dancing

calamities around this conundrum,

the cross carried up these rates of change,

gravity conveyed in trudged hills

and bruise-boned shoulders, 

matter always meaning it more

no matter who wants it most.

The days don’t look, they cross

the street without breaking 

sweat or stride, all sugar and smoke

as the dust dictates the etiquette and

the hat gets passed around.

I keep preaching while the pulpit 

blazes and the steeple is seized by flames,

full throated and choking

on the secret I could never say,

all ashes falling down

the empty altar

the litany unspoken.

skin deep

It is a matter of depth, of resonance, remembering the color of your eyes. Not the hue they heel  to in still pictures, but the brushwork of your sight shining on me in that brief and bygone time when you were near and I was seen. The attitude of your architecture, the wellspring of so many trembles and sighs. The ease of your amplitude when the signal’s still strong and sharp. The reverence of your flesh when posed in prayer, the teeth that showed whether or not you smiled. I forget everything, trailing dusk and fugue. 

That’s not to say that memory is a refuge— I remember enough to wish I remembered less. The look of disgust as the words walked the line, the roll of the eyes at the very thought of me, the standard exasperation and the assurance of the opposite. Contempt on your breath and the weighted phrase, the lie repeated once the lie was revealed. Little more than a filler for a plot point, nothing much but a number and some stage directions. A pallid, aging pantomime. All the accessories out of style and the lapels too thick or too narrow, a comic caricature to emphasize some personal low.

It doesn’t matter that this is not your story. It doesn’t matter if this isn’t who you are. Millions of lives end every day in the pot or in the jaws, never squeezing out that last not me. The numbers buzz on past, and each day we are each of us winnowed away. The heartbreak in the everyday, the humdrum of our answered prayers. The fire offered, the altar calling to your bones. These kingdoms of once and future kisses, old lovers just over the horizon, your blood clutching at its breath. 

hot foot hearts

The night always has us harder put, the night always over the rubicon. The day does its part, the ill lit precipices and the brutality of eye candy. It calls us by our mirrors and shades, knowing the sausage to make lemonade. Lanky and bright and callow, the day pushes buttons and dots and dashes, lays it in deep with the lashes. But the night starts with loose curses, the names and numbers scribbled in the margins of its grimoire, the hammered grammar of every regretted sin thick upon your tongue. The art imbued through sleepless writhing and taking stock, the weight this lonesome makes of the missing moon. 

I am backlit with cobwebs and moths cutting silhouettes. Draped in tattered vestments, my beard crisped by smoke, my fingers always smelling of fire. I abandon old altars to fresh gods, let the mud and the masonry call out to vagabond devils and limber spirits, let the wasps take the hen house and the swifts glut the dusk. Let the bricks crumble as my flesh dissolves, let the ending pay off just once. All the sick and whispers running listless through the dark, all the dreams gathered for black medicine cantrips, all the sacred carved up for souvenirs. The machine coughs and grinds, clouted with ghosts and oxidation.

There’s always someone creeping beneath the windows. There’s always someone checking all the doors. There’s a legion waiting to fulfill every sneaking suspicion, a gang to wear the colors of your every foolish fear. We are witness to the war of attrition of our existence, heads full of bullets abandoned to madness dancing to our hot foot hearts. Spent spells and spat out incantations loop through life and limb, one breath racing through us like Santa around the globe, dusty libraries and brooding mausoleums spilling from our wounds. Stuck in the words, forever rounding the corner, always left in the empty tense. I linger in the cruel invective and wicked epithets that serve as my amens and seal the moment unspoken. The angel holding in the secret with a finger to your lips, the clearing in the forest lit by stars and the beckoning flame. 

as the days go

It gets me smack in the vernacular, the rings straight through those grinning idioms, the genre depending upon the part I play and the particulars of the blocking. Nothing more deadly tragic than a person in a farce, complications heaped upon them as they clamber with over corrections, slapstick always about the way they land the blow. Forever running for a life that’s all punchline as the sands slip away underfoot. The pause before I work in my act, cycle through a few routines before a short show stopper and a return to the choir. I pause to wake to the dreamed routine, tumbling through the days.

I fill the margins of unwritten texts, clocking in the commentary, scratching in the itch. We plant Atlantis in mouthed off about and claimed by unoffered maps, the wingings of the ancients recorded like their laws, the mistake of the persona for the act. I am buffeted by the dopplered thump of passing bass lines, the compressed air and the tag backs dragging its roil and rattle along. I am forgotten as I am forgetting the way the plot works out. From chance to word to bye bye bird sampled and skinned and taken as word. Foundering in the calendar as I’m kicked on down the curb.

Where is it that we linger when we lay out in the passages, waiting in these corridors where want and word collide? What is it that we wait for when we wait to want? These long desperate stretches, these sentences always seeming life. Something to wash up in the wake of this wonder. Something to bloom now that the dream has gone to seed. Whole tomorrows lost to the pause in the passion, the loss of the reason as the words are coveted, the story ever so it goes. A service paid to solace, a practice of the prayer. 

me too, Horatio

Here I go again, so fervent among the figments. Here I go again, pressing pictures against the glass. The chagrin factored into to every action, these alternate universes of spilled milk and cursed to the touch, weary of the play by play but bound to it by oath and altar. I sift through the dust and the literature while everyone wants to throw me their ghosts, muddying the water with the flapping of their lips, soaked as we are to the bone in the rime of the mind. By each station we are beyonded. By each angle occulted to some sight. Forever feeling around unseeing, always a few steps away from lost.

So we are adequately refracted, pupils contracted and aperture pronounced. We fill the mirrors as we part the waters and bullets fly astray. The galloping heart still trotting along, forgetting every path. Every sense imbued with a whim or two, tinging the light of this dream stitched and lust licked world, trailing twists of plot and turns of phrase behind. Some prayer, some song, the punch landed line or the ride along. Where else to linger than at the intersection of the little details and the big picture as the self accumulates? The moment, where it’s going, and where you’d have it go. I pace the foundation and witness the grim regent, spirit or revenant. Other than to say what seems and say what’s so, what is there that won’t give way, what is there that won’t let go?

There is nothing left of poetry, philosophy another of faith’s long cons. There is nothing to hang a hat upon, no shoulders left to cloak. The plodding observations, the worn gears of the machine stuck on repeat. The impulse first and foremost, bowling over book, spook and beast. This is how the sausage gets made, this is where the magic happens. The ache of resignation, the appetite so resigned. We say it is so, we say it aloud, rent garments and raw knees. Eyes closed tight around unseen horizons, glory coming if it knows what’s good for it.

turnover

The day comes down to the color of the shadow of an unseen wing, some lovely lilt of speed and virtuosity, dried flowers foundering in the dust. A lounging in the liturgy at the easing into sin. The achy breaky breath and the bitter to the bones. The long haul all hosannas and are we there yets, the take away something about how every stranger looks the same. The clerk resigned to their midnight counter, the driver across the gas station isle that pays at the pump and never looks your way. So down the dark hall or swinging from the family tree we go, saying names and taking notes. The smoke seeping through the firmament, the gone there trembling still reaching from back when. 

There’s the joke and there’s the way you land it. There’s the crash footage as the narrative marches on. Some flame in the wilderness, some saying about the way things go. The cast that are killed off, the cast that are written out, the parts other players replace, the roles abandoned after the irreplaceable got lost. I am slow to learn new roles, and insist on first refusal. All my craft is absent or outdated, and I am resistant to giving up my shtick. Sometimes the punchline gets you square in the chops.

Heaven help the meek and mild. Heaven help us grumblers crushed beneath the heel. A chill in the wind sends a shiver through the shins, a scarecrow propped up on brittle pins, the vulnerable right on top of it. Slumped shouldered and earthward eyed, I tumble clumsily from step to step. Spilling down the shoulders of the the moment as it arrives, falling into so much untangled dust. The waver of the bandwidth, the uncertain purchase of the words. Come the lonesome, come the hunger. Come lust, come slumber as the meter turns over. Wander away with the world. 

ecclusiastics

Oh to live out these weird oratories! Oh to leave the plum stone upon the board! Always abound upon some phenomenal hyphenation, this secret star, this savored hyperbole. Always interrupting with my mouth full the peace of the repast. Taken in by art and the lonesome dusk. This risen veil, this cat’s dash clarity when the moment comes to pounce. Cold skin and lost heart, the prayer and the salutation.

Some hunger, some drift of mission mouth. The wind bequeathed smoke and the breeze sotted breath. The bardo bending the bars of the vamp, a scatting around the scales. Reneged light and negative space, from bird wing to astronomy in the time it takes to turn the tide. Living in the grays and low throat growls of the spent rigors of romance, the empty an instant eminence right there in the chair by the bed. Boxed up letters and tattered souvenirs, from this constant inarticulation to the gravitas of dust. 

I rattled around the big box store, I raged upon the roads. I sang a song from long ago unless you reckon in memory or argue the motive of time. I spat expletives and called out to raptor and crow. Here is where the story takes its salt, somewhere between the afternoon and this prescient night. The altar shifted and the feast lambed it’s long ago, between oh yeahs and the preaching of the bass, the taken chance and this vestigial juvenilia. The night here and there, you and me and these enthusiasms that itch to take the wheel.