emeritus

Used to be we’d leaf through the obituaries, surprised and assured by who went when, counting down from the markers we hold when left behind. Used to be we’d split the paper, reading passages aloud. There’s a gravity to a habit halfway to how to be. There’s a something that awaits the work. The eight to the bar or the old one two, we echo out of range. Taught nothing like that’d learn you, wondering when all the accolades went home on their own. The moment traded in an instant for another round of what might have been. 

Now the words come rushing at you as wait with all your yesterdays, graybeard in the bug light, smoking like a tree struck by lightning. You see the stories as their odometers turn over, the mileage that going nowhere gets. You see the spiders work their beats despite the season’s trend. Stillness sews stillness, the once and future lost. The mark missed and the measure forever. The clerk at the liquor store calls you Chief. Indignant you know exactly how you earned it. Waiting like there was something coming, tending embers in the night.

It’s not as if I shed attachments, it’s not as if I picked my peace. The color of duty and the long walk in the dark. The crowd around helps to heap on the all alone. The work in blurbs and least devils. The barking dog at the heels of folly gathers around the carcass past the fall. The open hands, the emptied appetites, the rituals there to hold high the roof as nature takes the lead. I weigh in to the atmosphere on all manner of confident incompetencies, resting on my laurels of pratfall wounds and scattered ashes. I smoke alone as the hour grows ragged, wondering where I went.

method

Lately the words don’t like me. They arrive without a flicker, they set in without the feel. I rack them up again and again, despite being no better for the break. I no longer know who I’m writing to now that I no longer write to you. The same old dire mood, the same old used up man, insight all dried up and inspiration left in the middle of the night. It’s a fecund moon above this rain, and it drags me through the motions on my way down the drain. I sit and smoke as the lights go out, and I play my little tune.

The day fades and beauty visits in its bounty. The tree tops slowly turning into silhouettes, the varietal grays hanging off the clouds all brush strokes and puzzle pieces as the shadows become the street. The lights on down the street shining one lonesome window at a time, traffic in swerves and dashes shushing traction from the tarmac, the great reach of rain a deep breath behind the atmosphere. I scrape the scenery out of my eyes, stippling ersatz scribbles on the screen. There may be art, but there is always madness, the hard scrabble past the reflex into the burbling of the verbiage. This is how I greet the night.

I remember how the days stretched spread between our hands. I remember how the tongue tasted spent between breaths and kisses, the scattered phrases, the nearness of flesh. Somewhere some impulse to stot and soar beneath the umbrage of another cease and desist erupting from the soul diminished as the revelations swelled. Somewhere the machinery slipped a belt or gear, and the engine ain’t run right since. Another ending with the sun still gone. Another chapter on the cheap, the not nearly good enough transcribed word for word. The scene rife with lifted shtick and cartoon gizmos, the words run out as the night grows long. Smoke for the sky, rain for the staging.

traces

Each day I wake to ridiculous images, with the obstinance of ash tugging at the far end of the incense, the memory holding down the ghost. The story that it never was, the way I shape my lack and want. A mistaken meteor for the star of opportunity, a whim that has you by the scruff. Polarized between the shoulders, spin’s two cents against the probability fizzle, less and less to love. Each day the storm drags at my bones, this ghost of lick and spittle, every prayer I ever put you through. Nothing so solid as an absence, nothing so ringing as the rain. A smile that has forgotten where memory is everything, a magnet dragging a trail of sparks.

That’s not the bouquet you’re spitting, the branches shedding blossoms down your throat. All those years and only bruised bones and spilled salt, the passion of the sand, the kiss of the sea. The stacks of schemes and dishes, the grease glistening on your chin, these seances of steam and dusk. The mirror fixes its eyes upon you, and you pin its gaze at the wings. The press of now, the pull of yes, the light before the knowing. Always where the ghost goes, never by the book. Oh the words, but also where you look. 

This is the problem with a trainwreck, it’s coiled through the collateral. This is the trouble with a shipwreck, you’re forever what you were. Fires given and fruit offered, the afterglow of the more you know, the burning bite of wisdom always a slither in out in the weeds. You wait and wait for you want, you move capricious through the life you’re given. Sticking to the myths of the constellations, stirring the embers of the all that’s left, I drag the ghosts by their chains. The spell threaded through the blood, the forests and mountains blinded by sun and snow, eyes robbed of every gem a thousand graves ago. These dreams ripped out by the root, your beauty a lack that grounds me, fixed to the ash heap of an afterglow.

she comes

She comes riding on a raven.

She comes calling like a crow.

The vision in the dishes

soaking in a sink. Steaming

water running out the faucet,

the window half mirror

like dawn or dusk. Her face

bright in the basin of this

unhitched mind, habit taking

off the harness grazing 

through the hills of hazy

memory and half forgotten dream,

eyes too bright and sharp

to leave a sight uncut, 

this new moon whisper

as the moon fills fecund. 

She comes on wings occluded,

she comes on words

spat across the shadows, 

there and gone between the breaths.

dry click

Comes the day past due

flame tongued and kindling boned

passing skins and sparks,

whetted on wild grays and

the too soon blues, settling 

between mirror and razor,

thriving in the bindings of

speech and want, the volume of

the vessel, the swaying of the bridge.

Pine needle brushwork painting

certainty out of silhouettes 

as the word come down goes around

again, the answer inscribed on

mortal punctuation, no more

name, no more traveler, 

no more leaning between 

the reachings of light.

This lost day, this absent bullet,

all out of bangs and bucks.

I pause a moment and 

again it begins to go.

a map of the wind

So all at once the sky goes wild, it drops down through tree and gutter, commanding each swaying limb and reeling leaf. The blue gives way to the laden gray, rain waiting high up in the fly galley, waiting for something to work the ropes. It’s the moment where we nudge the wheel, the moment we put hands on our chains, puppets knowing how to make music from taut strings. The earth grumbling the belly, rain waiting like a held breath, like a deep inhalation before a bout of speech. The last blues vibrating below the firmament now, the resonant bandwidth all bias, the spirit fulminating in every hesitant expression. It’d be a good time to call down the storm, timing and where you stand the better portion of readiness. 

I stumble out a few sloppy circles, I trail smoke and song, I offer up and work the remainders. Soon the sidewalk is dappled and the streets run slick. The rain sweeps gentle down the scenery, just like the ritual and the weather app said. Primate grade guile and gall, taking in the signs, and all that jazz. Now the scent of petrichor from the dry and thirsty earth, some dose of precipitation to measure as it colors in the pavement and darkens all the dirt. The calligraphy known by the brushwork, the way the dice recognize us. The words return jumbled about the geography in the stillness of each breath.

There an element of tail chasing, a bit of chasing after a gust seized hat, the story cleaving close to the form. The wind works the body and fills the lungs, the wind lays waste to the best laid plans. Thieving from the gutters and kicking around the crowns, claimed by demon king and lawless djinn and the boundless emptying of books, each breeze and bluster keeps its own counsel. It inks and erases with one brush, deft and expert in its art. We pace its parameters, we hunker down as best we can to bear its wrath. So we learn to look both ways. So we learn to read the room. We pass around the magic like we’re offering a light. The shapes left between the lines, the stories every morning tells. Each of us a wishing well, every soul and bone a map of the wind.

resound

We arrive in bright collision, we arrive awake and nameless, the stone rolled away and the world open wide. We come in shroud and shift, abruptly under judgement, the dice besides the bet. Here at last this moment under notice. Here at last the brink of long prophesied tomorrow, a catalog of skies and flowers, burning daylight in these dreams of favored flesh. Stitched in pitched algorithms, pooling into every abandoned step, this wash of want and way. We echo in the presence of these rituals we witness, gazing over the shoulder to catch the just missed moment, trailing words that circle back. We skate figure eights across the frozen lake, stack stones upon the beach only visible eagle eyed and mountain tall, speaking to our lost hearts like first gods. 

So we are revealed, revered in the rear view, known by the paths we travel. So we wear out names, these spells of blood and ghost, the listing of the ancestors by name and bone. Our tongues fold and linger, the stories go and go. A turtle or a pomegranate, a rabbit humoring death, the word worn shapes we make of the dark. The muddle of roads left shining stubborn in the tidal pool, every wave a still life spread around the space. The hungered after ripples that are only going away, the iteration hard clockwork and settled elements, prayers and spells and the ringing of bells. Comes the continuity through crack in the gutter, we abide the way of the weed.

From the blooming of the hills to the fallow in the fields, come flowers casting loves spells fairies fucking every forest, every ditch dirt and desert strewn with spirits giving this romance their all. These wheaten golds and honey clusters living in our blood and breath. This feast upon the bones of fallow titans, each appetite leading the world by its belly and its lust, rings of bronze and steel. The words give way as we walk the woods and haunt the forests,  breadcrumbs sprinkled from before the wandering, before we claimed victory being the only animal always lost. Oh, antecedent! Oh, thunder! Let us sound out across broad winter and through the riddle deep sea. Let the moon reflect our glory, humble in the hubris that we reap.