aperture

I have reached the age of unreliable instruments and staggered sense, staring over the foxtail swallowed yard, gaze fixed hard on the figment blazing in the residue of my thinking. Thoughts burned into the meat, icons and myths and the complications adjacent to abstraction, wheels that spin some ancient spark as my engines turn over. It is the persistence of absent objects and names we never speak out loud. The things the senses learn to anticipate, this endless urge to simulate these bricks and blurs passing while I sit and smoke, words to skew the witness tugging on the fabric. Words to weave and echo, the math best left to the afterburn. 

The world bites down on my vestigial stare, slapdash shadows and motion mottled light. The worrisome turn of fantasy holding my every attention, a separation from sight and sense, this modicum of meat and machinery bristling with unbirthed worlds wanting the purchase of words. An incantation awaiting invitations, the words always there in swarms, free at a moment to burrow deep or take flight. The dappled asphalt and cracked concrete spilling weeds, chain link geometry threading the perspective, this smoke in my heart and throat obscured from the motive as the code takes over. This art an illness overflowing, an aesthetic of the weight of the great unseen held in the pressures of the flesh. So want begets want, and ache begets ache, but the work of the world needs no witness or word.

It is this patch on laughter, this plodding tread that becomes the path, this harness that you learn to pull whatever wagon or plow they hitch you to. The wide open limits of the roads you know, the sight unseen of the other side of the pass, the moon and what it obliterates. The rough touch and the gentle, the busted knuckle and the folded crane, objects now nothing but fetishes to burn the soul bright enough to shine unfathomed distances. These flashing fragments, this blinkered vision, these laden graves carried over from the equation: the shutter speed, the focus, and the aperture. These frailties falling harder than the flesh into earth, the reaching that remained a stranger, these reasons always arriving late. The want inhabited left just words left to sift and scatter. Every star so far away as to have always been gone.

incidental

It’s not the sparrows in the feeder, it’s not the doves on the wing, it’s not the blue blazes sky and the wind woven pines casting some cool with their shadows, some respite for a sinner come a sunny day. It isn’t the tremble in the telling, or the foretold dogging its day, cracked pavement and each shadow soft to the touch. The words work the stretch of tense and the scope of scale, hand me downs and ne’er do wells, heavily laid in the stir and the steer. The drag of wish the straying breath, the whisper as a touch, so attuned to the trip and turn of the arc of the slow burn. The heft of the memory as I think it back alive. The spark of that kiss the moment it is mentioned. Here among the begrudged gods and the hapless magic, we arrive.

So it goes, this rigmarole. So it goes, the warmth lingering on the lips. A wild hare, a pursuit of prophecy pronounced off the cuff, the countdown to this hungry arrival. All the days of bleak ache and resonant empty, the terms of mitigation and emergence somewhere stirring in the shallow earth, root and rot and fungal emoting. The heart now knows, the head at last irrelevant, the gut ringing out its riotous assembly. The reasons lost, the spell unspoken, only the drawl of the dreaming between our struts and seams. A shape drawn, sand upon sand with the only tomorrow the return of the sea. Knowing of this fall, this frailty, and the drag of this covenant with the tongue. Hoping to share a taste.

Shards of pots and broken bottles, puzzle parts and context clues to add to the heap. Rusted swords and hidden bones, ancient sanctities observed in the barrow beneath the fertile fields. These golden hills once occupied, the witnessed struggle and strife surrendered to the turning earth. All this gilt once coveted, all these rites now rocks and names never said aloud. Not to be the declaration, lost in the ubiquity of creation, I return to ash and loam. Want and lack, the fool fumbling each loss. The long star sprawled empty, the symbol spattered page. All these inferences and apostasies feeding some fertile other, this bespoke flesh at last a worthy dirt. I return the words as they come, invisible down to the incidental.

align

The day leaves without saying, the sky astir, the earth in ruins. The day is gone without a single glance, the signal of at least glancing back never received or sent. Just foundlings in the fundaments, the same old feelings dashed into the ground, a change in the air as the skin finds out. Something dead and something dear, a reach through the blue and past the sway, roots and crowns and right of ways. Scratching at some surface of the world that didn’t show, the imagination burning bright, perception goes another way. Now the time and the insistence of the husk, slowly this dance from want to quintessence, pared down by the path.

This dusk and the ways left wanting, the cool hue of shade upon the pavement, the constant proffer of used smoke. Adrift in the drawling traffic, a fixture of inconsequential transience, the proffer and the appetite. Knowing the streets by the corner and curbs, signs parked at the intersection, sigils in paint and glass. The winds lean wild and the empty opens up, a car or two then graven pavement. Cool and futile flesh pressed against the sharp end of the moment, a direction to heel to and lament. 

Mostly it is in the scraps of sky and haunts of moon, the weight of the proposition, the drag of the thought. The waiting it out while the once was or the wished for tries to have its say, the hot in the atmosphere, the slow throat of incense trickling into heaven. Clay and ache and relic bones, the words that never leave you alone, remembering the deception revealed before the final slight. The duration this seething heap of woe and sorrow, the sharpness leading each feel, the here and now only so much thanks but no thanks. This shelter, this animal, this switched on circuit. Another compass joining the pointing at the earth. 

zero

It lines up along the impulses, ought or naught unto eternity, the utility of the dance of opposites. It is the tongue of flesh and the tongue of fire, these analogs of hunger, these waves of want and wish. The twinkling of machine inklings pitching woo with the entanglement of language, thoughts like stars dancing upon the midnight tides. Perception directed with intimacy and audacity as the wheel turns and turns. This life a fuse offered up to one blazing now, the missed moment always seen by the spark of its immediate extinction. The pride of punctuation, phrase taking and homespun idolatries. The wisdom leaning witless into the halted existence, wantonly pawing at null sets and snuffed singularities.

It is there in the cold in my fingers, the dwindling there in my grasp, the blood slowly gives up the fight. The tattered ends of the tapestry, our resplendent escapes into the sea of genes cut short for the organism, those missed connections and social deficits adding up to a map of eternity. Life lives to fight another day, those fated to end up smashed upon the grill not missed one but. I smoke these heavy metaphors, full of despair and attrition as my number comes up.

Another strange rain, the climate changing spots as it goes. A crow explores a plastic bag abandoned on the curb. Traffic passes shushing home on slickened streets. My hands burn to their aching bones, the animal frailty of my day to day ferocious and unyielding. Under whatever sky suffices, beneath any looming brunt, the countdown never relents. The beauty of black wings and street side appetites, the toil of mind and time, the magic of never knowing and never being enough. The mystery means to keep you missing, rapt and ecstatic staring holes through the waxing moon. The number of the loosed breath, the number of the journey’s end, wedded with hungry belly and empty hands to a symbol you can only not know.

circle jerk

Another wasted year, another circle around the circuit. Another wished for ending that never came near enough. Fifty six years, thirty of them well after I should have been planted in the past tense. This sick turn around the mulberry bush, waiting on the weasel to go pop. Years of bedtime wishes never to awake, as the body atrophies and the mind fragments, words and images and conversations sealed in this dull and fragile skull. Damned if you do, damned if you’re done, this life is wasted on me. You wake up, old and alone, aching for the end.

A lifetime of life unworthy of the word, nothing but a reliquary for hatred and mockery, a pariah plumed with expletives and contempt. Holding tight to what little seemed reciprocal, cleaving to the way the winds seemed to blow, ending up with the receipts of the imagination. The won love, the returned affections, all the stories you keep hoping come true. But I don’t know how to be a person that is worth it. I don’t know how to hold onto any value where all that I cherish is worthless. The liars and hustlers and thieves thrive, in this, the shittiest of all possible worlds.

I had hoped not to make it to this birthday the way I had hoped to perish before my last. Of course, it looks like I’ll have to handle this on my own. I am trash awaiting disposal, and hopefully I will achieve my end before the year is through. It isn’t just me that needs to be done, but if you think you have a reason to hang around, that’s reason enough. As for me, I can’t keep being miserable just so I can lighten someone else’s load. I am through with dissemblers and deceivers, and take no comfort in your long standing lies. I’ve only ever been a fool, useless and ugly and nothing worth the effort it takes to circle the drain. 

obstacle

Sometimes an instrument, sometimes an obstacle, I take shape late and give up easy. The sun has too much gumption; I let the typo have its way: I hit my bumps and potholes at speed. I blow a tire, I break an axle, I drag these chains throwing sparks. It’s the show that goes on, the proof of life gone to seed, the spectacle after the look away. It’s there— right there! But I can’t reach it. It’s there, and at most I am a ghost. The remainder of so much meat and miserable. The enduring afterthought.

The days pass fast, but the ghost goes slow. The carcass littered with curses and flashing lights, all manner of foreboding warnings and prophecies rotting within. I mix my carcinogens, I read my fortune in bones and gutters, the world pulling away with its lights off kicking gravel. I worked out my worth in words, and it wasn’t a figure I wanted to find. The flesh is weak, but the spirit goes first, the soul another joke on me. I smoke the latest charity, my body keening for redemption. Another flight I’m not fancy enough for.

There’s a point past bounce back, the energy finally insufficient to overcome the inertia. The local ache of bone and being clear in their testament, while the devastation of abstraction and expired intimacy dither in their poignant protests, their common complaint that green eyed devil me. Outsider and obstruction, incomplete in astonishing detail, an affliction to exile and shun. This long lonesome in decrepitude and constant grumbling, the earth alone to hold. A want for words on repeat as decades turn to dust.

short form

There was never a want for words, filling in the margins, making up for time. The far side of this elicited ache, the heavy haul of flesh grasping at the atmosphere, a glut of abstractions meant to justify all this breath and blood. Conversations caught mid cadence, my voice aloud elaborating my bias, sorting ghosts and ephemera. Would that I did, would that it were, these beasts of want and dream. Nothing but the wait for the space to say, the will to choose a way. The medium and the tools at hand having their way with the supply and demand.

There’s the light despite the fading sky, the blue as it is beset with gray, the sun still having its say. There is the throat of smoke and the wisps of the wind. The song as it moves along, music taking to the gutter, the singing clinging to the trees. It has come a long way to know the dull attentions of this much alone, where my limits slough into fragments, sound and sight and this kiss goodnight. You stroll across my mind, but do not settle. The gone suits you now that you’re gone for good.

Not that it amounts to much, once loosed into the language. Not that there’s much of a market for what I do, mouth the sacred shapes of fetishes, paw at gaudy baubles and greasy mementos muttering hyperbole and sacrilege into the night. The wait and the want, the all fall down. Down to the ache, down to the burn, hard bit by the never learn I trace these few scant words. Here at the high point as tomorrow comes barging in, the lowdown ever lower, just wished after kisses grabbing after the dusk. Just the words and the once were, and the never will again.