relent

It’s 3:30 in the afternoon the way it only can be on a Wednesday, on a clear eyed day in the summer just after a beast of a heatwave at last relents. And leaves stir beneath the spinning winds, coiling hellos and goodbyes from the branches, the vivid scenery through a dirty window shining just so in the only set of eyes I’ve ever known. I start and stop in thick strokes of circles, the brushwork of blood and breath as the signals fire away, like any rooted thing some how turning towards the light. Here I exchange symbols for what I sensed despite my many impediments, magic beans for living beings, the world emptied of all but the incantation. It’s how the love is lost, how the hands are emptied, the sea of all I couldn’t imagine. This day and all I’ll never know or see.

This is one of the received worlds, the framework and the focus. A wording left over from some singalong. Clock and calendar, the black phoebe on the rusty porch swing, the dint of detail and the manipulative lens. This little spat of wonder, these fits of want and hunger, the laborious repetition that spin our habits into ritual. These actions that reveal the moment we were hanged from, the spice we paw for first. I am stuck in the sad and weary, I keep witness to the burn. To use the words until the ink rubs off. To surrender the shell for the seed.

I crack my back and plant my feet. There are always motions in need of going through. Traffic passes in wave and gleaming particulars, the flash of sunlight reflected through the screen. There’s the sort of wind that comes on a Wednesday, a sense of motion to hold my eyes open to the glare of a summer afternoon. This blue that wants so much to be the first blue on your mind, though it knows it will always be those eyes instead, this big spill of sky running late to the day. And you see it there, flashing before me, teetering legs and failing eyes. Seeing it as I never could, this moment where the prize had found me out, this pause before the work of the earth. 

into the black

So the flesh begins its meditations, drifting from the mind’s ministrations into the varying moods of meat. So the ache settles on a direction, so the instrument bites the lip of the allusion, the bearings corrected for wear and tear and spiritual drift. Something to the ardor of the singing, something to the reason of the rhyme. The breeze laps at these perspirations as the heart cries out, the remembered incantation a hound loosed upon the hart breath on the heels of the word. The notation floats between phrasings, the notions held close at the angle of observance, the world ever turning and perturbed. These lyrics the stitching that fixes our stars.

This comes from the tatters I inhabit, this from the very conceit I intend. Headphones and stand alones, a shuffled list of many decks, a forced card from a gaffed deal treated as a covenant. Buyers markets and tactical retreats, this version always returning to the earth, this incarnation another arrow off its mark. These old echoes through conceded strongholds of ego, this eerie ringing through the rock. It’s the most wearisome of combinations, fists without snap or follow through, the mistaken segments of the text. Stuck in stretches, struck by stars, the tongue keeps at it. It’s a process, but particular disasters stand out.

It arrives in answer to unknown anticipations, it takes shape faster than the thought can follow, so abrupt against the perceptions. A swelling of the stir of leaves, a shadow pressed against the sway of limbs, inky feather or sun plummeted wing. The crawling in the dark, something coming up the stair, some 70s melody with a Karen Carpenter hook shuffling in dark. So these metaphors make the most of us, willing spirit and wasted flesh, the words we are buried in as they fill in for the want. We wake following the lead, tracking the dream or filling in the journey. I speak aloud to remain unheard, the radio left on against the night, static crackling into the black.

out of the blue

The trees sway a ruddy green stencil casting in my first glance mind tiny bouquets of sky blue blossoms of blue sky, a brief startle from the spark to the cognition, another moment where my first words go so terribly wrong. Casting away illusion for the next perception in line, the say so of my senses another unreliable narrator, still I try my hand at tuning into the sloppy seconds of the signal. The pieces I pick and choose, the pursuit of lie and line, the slick simplicity of the symbols that ring true. I say it is more story, I say that it’s a poem. But it’s only the smoke of the moment we burn and fuel. The shadow saddened by what the sun has missed. The absent guest, the empty setting.

We worry at the impossible while the ordinary provides plenty of limits to go around. Making proclamations to posterity that won’t ever cross tomorrow’s shores. Declaring our trajectories in arrows fired blindly toward the star specked sky, casualties and consequences freed by our self service, each of us easily so broken on our own and still insisting on the solo. We throw low blows and elbows to get beaten about the map. Sticking to the script of the deceivers, each of us alone responsible for protecting our neck. Legions of us, taken out one by one by the words of kings and gods. We have been shown the world, and have trained in the mystery.

What’ve I got left to say but the same old thing worn thin by ten thousand tongues and endless letters? Every day passes in brutal form, by name and number they tumble by, moon phase and featured constellation another sigh and ache. Sitting outside and dwindling with every breath, less with every lungful of smoke, eventually each of us all consequence as our stories dissolve. Voice and vapor, I sit in perpetual discontentment, the ache of is and the deeper hurt of is not. There are words of every stripe and flavor waiting to be dismembered and transformed. Skins of every description to creep into, all manner of pleasure to promise, every wish imaginable to grant. Tricks to how we long and tick, our fortunes stolen for otherworldly investors and all you grifters grubbing after crowns. The more I witness, the more I ought to keep to myself. Leave you to whatever heaven you would have. 

on swallowing the sea

This is still in the habitable range, though too pronounced of heat and drought to last all that much longer. This is still carried water, though the reservoir doesn’t show it. We move in haste across an estimation of our terrain, thoughts deep beneath the exhibition of turns and signs, threatened and threatening by tradition and design. We are known by knives and appetites, names and shadows always along for the ride. Carried along by tides and currents, dragged lucid and magnetic, the cumbersome storm and the overhead bag. Still you seethe and open wide, wave after endless wave. It was only ever more, despite the grandiosity and the high hatting, beyond all capacity you can claim. So it makes you a liar, and a dead one at that. So it becomes a poem, or at least an epitaph.

There are the ones with a pocketful of rocks. There are the ones drowning drunk on the moon. The stories passed around the fire, the verses added to the song, we stay up late just to keen and long. Tales told to elude confession, tales told to explain the stars, there in the details of the day and the shaping of the stones. The long path up the hill, the road all slope and bend, the structure there yet unseen in the foundation of the forest. The dimming dream, the brimming day, the way a whim becomes a way. The symbols and the stitching, the trail burning as you enter metaphor. The wants and the whereabouts, all the murdered darlings that make up the work of the heart. Nothing to follow but the moon and the shore.

There are the details of the day and the form of the story, Seven Brothers or Billy Goats Gruff, swallowing the ocean or clobbering the boorish troll. There is the prescient power, there is the surrender to the incomprehensible. This work of words, this unending flood, time comes thundering down and we tumble on. The depths and the delving, this cycle of the story, this engine of the moments drumming down. The sky stills below your belly, the earth an urgency in your bones, your heart repeating “the tide, the tide.” The etchings along the shortcut through the happenstance, this tale composed of anticipation and negative space, the restless tongue gently cradling the flavor of saying it aloud. It is more than and I am a morsel trailing salt and grease. The ambivalence of heaven left breathing, leaving words as gravity trails off into the past. Leaving words, waiting for someone to speak. 

dwell

It is here that I sink beneath the horizon. It is here that, like the sun and moon, I dwell below the sea. Lovely pea green across the ocean blue, the journey of the eldest practitioners that we still elaborate, the song in the heart along the lilting waves. Lovers with their paths now parted, the dirt at the notional fork. Ritual a machine language, molecular engines to catch the eyes of existence. A sorting of the so and sos towards this lush ever presence, a few licks of the nursery rhyme, a hammering of the pulse. That sense of sinking, this unpleasant effervescence, the weight of limb and the press of breath. A brief halo of bubbles escape as you sink, flesh among the flood of myths. 

The symbols settle like sediment, sealing off paths and rivers, muddying up the tongue. These skills that pile up as the culture condenses, these certainties set in our own stone. As magic as money, as tragic as any football plucked before the kick, the joke we take at face. Animals that hunger for the words to go so, each impulse devoured and spent as breath and ghost, the synapses rippling with memory and anticipation. We sort through our tastes and shapes and agree at least to be aggrieved, senses rising from the reading of a sentence, the skip rope spell that raises up a reel. The world that we’re done with never quite through. 

This is grief that goes with missing kisses. This is the spinning kicking gravel, stuck bad in some way off track. It is done, but never over. It is gone, but it shows up each day. Maybe sad, maybe pretty, maybe just a formality of the further failure. Broken down to thoughts and habits, to the persistence of this system of words and ways. The lost and the wrong compound until they are a second skin, the first whiff of you anyone gets at a glance goes the story. The story that you learn while you’re taught your place. A whole world where you have no purchase, all these impacts that made a voice out of these lost threads. A style made from my stranded curses and selfish prayers. 

wane

It’s no different now that the word is out, there’s no difference now that the moon remits its luminescence, the sky still too blue to know which wanderers at last align with your precious sentience which shape at last you grant. So strange how these horizons move and apexes hold, the turning of heavens, the tickings of the earth. A shadow pressed like a flower, the arc of the beckoning and the bloom. The sun tips its hat, the stretch of light heralding in the incarnate dusk, this old whisper of synapse and signal. Oh this meat and bone. 

I slept through most of the last unmasking, catching the embodied moon staring through my curtains a few days ago, turning my back to the archetype as if I had a choice. I dream dark and drear, sleeping in self defense. Too much less and less all at once, I say because this is yet another saying. Spells cast from the twitching lips of the flesh in fever, oaths burned into smoke smudged across the dancing winds. Will you go to your window? Will you reach for your pen? I sit in this long drag of last light and hard fall, neither now or again. Hungering depths and tasks unmet, all roll and no bet.

This want of moon, this wish of work towards intention, all the yammering of a heart that knows the number. To attend to the missed moment, to turn the corner of the labyrinth and find the exit sign in neon relief. To step off the carousel with the ride completed, loosed from the pain and ache of the fail and fall. Some slice of wonder witnessed, some sense that there was a moment of intersection, a right shared in the way of things. Instead the wind rises to the spirit of general heckling and ridicule, a sentiment parsed in heaps of numb symbols, hope huddled up in a corner.

apostasy

It’s penetrated the foundation, it’s cracked the bright blue firmament, this smoke hardened heart. The arteries thicken and slow, the mortal blow a fist and a scalpel, a hurled brick and a dull blade permeating this fester of meat and mind. The nerves burn and fizzle, hot sparks and blunt howls. The whole of being turning into fragments and blurts. Words dribbling down my beard as I bury my breath star to star and stone by stone. Words thumbed from touch keys and the lumbering of blood, the continuity will tell you when it’s through with you. The scorched tongue touches the lips so slick and tender you think maybe all your telling is done. Then the mystery begins to contravene your conventions. Again you’re preaching against the tide, waves crashing down, fustigating you faith first.

There’s no pinnacle of abstraction to speak of, though it’s only the ghost that goes. There’s no banner to billow, no flag to proudly unfurl. It is the bones and their burdens, the animal always urging away. I scramble for purchase, I adjust my center and shift my stance, this self of skill wrapped around the empty I embody. Traffic passes, my cigar goes out, I gaze over drugstore cheaters as I feel around for a lighter. I drag at the cheroot, the flame feeling out the fire, this ritual at once this moment and a dozen intersections of the unintended intimate. Habituated to the text and the chemistry, the entity turns over. Burning in words and sparks.

I sit and smoke, so on and so forth, adjusting my breathing and moving my body according to the latest varietal pain. I do the things I have done before, heavy with the thoughts of what I will never do again, just old man war stories and a hunger for the halcyon never was. Still threaded with all manner of want and longing despite all the oblivion and devastation, these micro doses of subsistence hedonism, the paths and tangles of this tumbling down. This press of intention arising out of this litanous return, this poorly incarnated process spitting reasons, setting suns and rising winds. A breeze drawn through the reliquary, these prayers to faraways and long losts, this change of station the offering all along.