eyes open

Sometimes the day trails off and you’re left there staring. Sometimes the hours go witnessed with little worth, the moment sitting there, waiting to see you what you say. Scratching at skins and thoughts within, watching the words run down the clock. Looking up to see a number, thinking the number you see. Little ways to abide the listless infinities passing unattended between the hours, lack and want the tide of your ocean, crowded rooms and crashing waves and the vast expanses stretching sleep to sleep. Uncouth operators and the sound of the drier tumbling bedding in the dark. Grease and gristle, and the razor always waiting to cut in.

Some still wait for answers, some want you to draw them a map. It’s the ceiling, it’s the spider, it’s the singing on a tv show. It’s waiting to pass out candy, it’s waiting on the time to change. You watch it as it washes over you. You watch it while it passes you by. Out of love, no glory, just a reliquary full of wounds and a couple pieces of brief love stories. I leave out a lot because most of it I miss, living on memories and words spoken only once. I leave out a lot, because a lot goes into a lifelong lonesome. 

How we should have sung with the windows open, salt in the air and eyes on the road. How we should have kissed in those long cold moments mistaken. It’s all soapbox and spellbinders, preposterous sagas in the wake of someone growing bored, at last over the nonsense and already out the door. The ubiquity of the blind spot when soothed with claims and kisses, the role you seem fated to play. Spilled milk and done deals, used to Minotaur and labyrinth and haunting with intent, the litany in perpetuity. Dark streets and lit windows, the shave and the shower. Eyes open, seeing nothing near, as regrets and memories mercilessly “yes and” me. Eyes open, and the night’s just getting started.

bookmark

The light leans in late in the day, a cathedral of clouds and bandwidth, the sky within a glimpse of your eyes. This is the instant that engages, this is a mouth fumbling between answers and a kiss, the heavy handed fates or the slow roll ritual mitigation. We of treadmills and turnstiles, we of bit and tack, doing the works of heaven and earth. The smoke coils out enough rope, stitched together by vestigial wants and threadbare repetitions, anchored to the dance of ashes. Worn smooth and small by this insistent beauty, worn down by ancient fustigations and worldly curses. The plying of the grays and greens, the crows at last headed home.

Why bother to proclaim, why bother to believe. The will finds a way. Words to tow a ruthless truth like a vice to take a tooth. Words to stir the grease and gristle, words to sop the well licked plate. Over and over they fold under the rigors of your tongue, the flame as it flatters the ash. Traveling through the tangle of lung and blood, passed through taste and touch. We are the weave, both web and tapestry, both swaddling and the sack. The words are always working their way into the world. Let them fill in the colors, let them bear the beating of these black wings and hungry flashing dragonflies, the thought trailed unformed into ellipsis….

The sun says adios and the appetites all take aim. The hungers keen a little in the gathering dusk. Leaves dance reels and tarantellas, the wind alway ready to whet some waiting ghost, a shape of things taken and violence left speaking. We step slow, we keep our eyes soft, the changes unchastened by our wit and gravitas. Gone and gone, on and on we go, trailing sparks and steam. Our embouchure fitted clever to our engines and instruments, we turn the time and light into song and symbol. This turn of the earth, this stack of stones. The words that will replace our blood and bones.

the juggler

Here is the soft burn of daylight. Here are the brass bleatings of the night. Twilight always in some dull sense, some half reflex half demand, separating the schema with the usual swapping shells. What is left to significate but the order of occurrence, what is left to incarnate but the ease of the sap and the grain of green wood? Inquisite as the magician or frolic as the fool, what is left to arcane but the course of these collisions, or to shape them with empty hands and physical intention. Find a pattern for the pieces, line them up like days or ducks, the turning wheel or the cascade of instances. There’s something to good footwork, there’s a bonus to knowing what to do with your hands.

It goes without saying that the deck is stacked. The puzzle is begotten by the jig, the building begins at the brick. The order of suite and arcana, the naming and the sigil, the symbols in our clay. The spirit will not hold still, it’s stitching has no end. The agent and the entity move through the mindset, they keep the vahana at a cantor, they call cadence and embody all the kata at hand. The weave is awake with the dreaming never sleeping. The juggler gets a handle on the happenstance, they go with the flow that fits.

We live with the weight of all this falling, gravity and inertia always taking their cut. Still the world is full of flight. Wings and whims and meteor wishes. The candles on the altar, the candles on the cake. We work the wheel and burn and feel, devouring time and life. The direction of the reading depending on the sojourn of the hand. The fickle moment, hanging upon the feathers of the swallow. This magic, this faith, this sustainable creation. The breath and blood of the open stance, we build trust out of thin air and the objects available. The only freedom, acknowledging every force and form as one, the revealed path another slight of hand.

bemused

For a while there I thought you found me, the shambles in the brambles, the shadow casting words into the fire. For a while there I touched the world you left trembling in your wake. There were sharings, there were stories, there were parking lots dappled in rain and grays. Whole days lost to love and water, sticking to the spine of your medicine shine. You put a glorious crown on pity and mild curiosity, shared some salt and smoke, offered up a bite. It’s the return to the remainders I begrudge the most, but there’s not much left to me but regrets. It is in the dusty sun, with some gibbered notion that I can not share, I feel your absence most.

So goes the slipping of the seasons, so goes the burning of the years. Deadfall accumulates, wounds accrue. Waves of mutilation and sets of nested curses, the dissolution of the heart and the backyard body count. The documentation of dour days rife with squander and oblivion. The bewildering ways that life moves on and the transience of intimacy. Fingers stiffen as the world slips through them, attending to the service, surrendering to the burn. 

I wake with a start past sunset, the room around me lit by television. The days blur, the days stagger, the stillness and the static grow. Notebooks spill over, unfinished poems and letters never sent. Fragments of addresses, phone numbers flaunting their cryptic digits, phrases laden with mystery where the meaning was once. Something that I meant to say when the words were working, something that I could have said when the words worked both ways. That ghost of a laugh there behind your eyes, seeing the joke as it played out. That Mona Lisa smile, the promise thick with irony, your heart almost off the clock. The blank of a page proving something.

the habitual

I could go the way of smoke, tobacco for the broad strokes, cannabis when I want to swing it from the rafters. I could billow and plume depending on the direction of the breath, rising as I disappeared into sky and wind. Any little something to pin on the season, any little ritual to help shape the day. There is the dread of time, and the dread of self. That lamp that won’t be extinguished, that fire that will not be doused. Someplace to hang the numbers from, somewhere to put the needle.

The mind ties its knots with coiled proteins and the revealed bandwidths, making strata and cutting puzzles from the sky. The muse sticks their fortuned fingers in and stirs the pot. The animal scents it out while the entity licks the spoon. So what if I am all wish and swoon? Better beings than me have left lesser fragments hanging, embraced by gravity and the shameless pawings of the wind. Better angels than mine have trudged on for less. 

Again I write as the light runs down. Again I smoke with the flow of the east, the face first fall into starlight. Nothing much but a notch on the long toothed post. Nothing but a box of ink blocked off on a calendar, all the subtle incantations forgotten, all the supple tongues folding in languid obscurity. Dogs bark and children play, traffic at its turn, the twilight doubles its portion. The same old words make another walk on, spilling towards the gray horizon, my heart another habit gone to ground. 

surface tension

It’s poetry to pay attention.

It’s poetry to dig a hole—

don’t take it from me—

ask any poet you know.

For me it’s crows in the morning,

motorcycles passing with dreams

blowing smoke in my eyes,

so says the day, so goes

the dreaming spilling over—

a cigarette, a cup of coffee,

a face you’ve never seen.

Of course you follow premonitions.

Of course you practice some

small auguries, tea leaves and 

glistening guts, feathers plucked 

from some station of the sky.

It’s poetry to stay off topic

while belaboring the point,

sticking to the skins of things

when gravity runs aground.

open

 The crows break formation, their flight stretched across the sky, silhouettes flickering through the web of tree in player piano notation. Reading is a steady gig, remembering what it looks like when it means a thing, knowing what to look for in the scrawl. I like to think my book is open. I like to think I look like the little I seem. So I smoke beside the door. So I sleep with the window always open. This passing through and through.

You know it like there’s no one coming. You know it like the wound wet and fresh. The glistening beneath the fading sky. The weight of all this failing light. You know the way these words are going. You know enough to get the gist. It’s a letter between unlikelies. It’s the folly before the fall.

I can’t see I really see the season. The clock and the twilight, the cars with their headlights on. It’s not that I don’t believe them. It’s not that I resist. It is another artifact of culture, another set of etiquettes. The assumption that someone’s watching both hubris and acknowledging unseen eyes. I pass along these vague translations, a schoolboy mimicking the grammar of the spells. It relies on illumination and scant bandwidth, a story carried within your skin, the unwitnessed and yet known. It is the wings tilted towards the updraft, the time between the fire and the smoke.