sobriquet

There may be smoke, but the fewer mirrors the better. Only so far to go on looking glasses as the road trends rough, some fleeting missive, some bars of broken old code. All the places blur,  the faces a jumble on the time line, the stories only changing hats and swapping spit. Suddenly the conductor is calling out, cities turned to stops, counting aloud the end of the line. It’s the stories trading elbows, jostled onto the wrong stop, the names they were given become the names they earned. Brick by brick our self deceptions grow to devour the possible, to engulf whole civilizations as Babel again tumbles down, the same old tricks sold as the holy and the new. Every corner crowded with coming new ages. 

Lights go on, lights go off, traffic bristles by. The day in remission at last and the mercury taking a dive, a stippling of stars and wanderers, satellites and aircraft glimmerings of uncertain hues as the pass between obscure branches out of view. Remainders left despite the distribution and the math, worn through lenses left to their own devices as the witness winds down. A map of attrition and confusion left to the reckoning of dubious machines. A face that changes with the weather and a name that never took. One for the highlight reel, one for the books.

It could be the story of starlight, it could be the story of wishing upon a star. Details sorted by category, facts presented pleasingly, the art arrived from afar. Description spent upon the shape of the topiary and the shade of the foliage, words spent calling a feeling inward from the atmosphere, consciousness largely autonomic and ambient. The estrangement elongated with every year, and the years swift and nondescript, all the slow time used up on last loves and rainy days, not so much forgotten as remembered all too well. Those nicknames to save time catching up at last, another name that no one means, empty honorifics and beat down crowns. A name bestowed to avoid entanglement, a love letter thrown straight into the trash.

all the same

My steps do falter though not in fear, my hands do tremble but not in awe, the ride having grown rougher and rougher in the vehicle of birth over the latest years of discouragement. The vessel struggles and staggers through the day to day, peals of pain and the quickening deterioration, dread set into the algorithm and the old OS. The plummet into isolation and the scales that don’t wait, a hole burning through my belly, and a soul that can’t be found. Security lights blink on as traffic passes, Christmas lights shimmering, and a moon too true to look at without it hurting. It’s a little lovely, and a little sad, but I’d rather not all the same.

So it’s pretty little rings around the moon, a dance of daisy chains holding hands with the reaching rain, a whisper of the crisp Pacific drawn along the storm. Some song towards the continuity as the collateral does more than its part, that hallowed and gravid moon a tug on the tangle knotted with witness, a trick of smoke mirror and magic in the impact of this gush of night. The rain strings beads through the bare limbed silhouette sprawled above the yard, this rooted reach toward another day, life can take or leave me. The needle passing through the flesh, the burden all mortal stakes and worded purpose. 

The deal is you never quite get it right. The deal is you circle something close and quick, your eye all kinds of prized. The days go by, rubbed wrong raw by the obdurate scour of aimless repetition. The words rise to the surface as we breathe deep and dive down, some bitter linger between heart and tongue, breath not the last thing held. Neither the tumbled tricks of thinking quick, fetish and effigy chasing what purchase the pull of the moon shares with these waves of rain. Brick and board, and the cold settles into the story of meat and bone. Name lost to speech, this terminal spill of the time and its telling, aware at the end of the confession I believed neither in intercessors or sin. Adding to the distraction with the alphabet, the structure left of the conflagration, a smolder or a spark.

below the belt

It’s been like this for such a passage, it’s been like this since the bleed at least, this other aim named aloud. The dusk doing most of the work, so when the night arrives all the stakes are already driven down. Hard to tell the lean of being from the falling stars you trail, cartoon sparkles and chirping birds when the hammer smites. Thoughts jostling with physics and fisticuffs, you hear train wail or dog bark or the savage laughter of imminent children. Flattened fair and square you catch the constellation by its dead give away, the reveal echoing through the realization, on your back below the belt. It’s all how the seasons hit, the settling of the senses. The sutra of hanging the frame.

There’s already a lot I left out; there’s so much more leaving out left to do. You can’t escape the associations. Nothing escapes unscathed, this faith of words surviving outside speech and flesh, a brevity trailing murdered darlings and bottle baby bastards. Pounding the pulpit or folded into a trust fall from the pedestal, every way laden and fated at once, from the improbable to the likely it arrives. I belly up and belt it out and stagger back to the Stygian depths from whence I started counting. The hours as evidenced by the heavens, the firmament emblazoned by the winter hexagon, the hunter whose specifics come and go.

It’s a story though there’s nothing to it. It’s a story because it got told that way. I went outside and watched while the dark caught up the clock. I looked up and thought hey there’s Orion, a muddle of dogs, belts, and cudgel. A smear of plots and archetypes, a becoming that happens again and again, breath and flame and the songs life sings. An experience so true and worn it feels quaint, an afghan strewn across the arms of a rocking chair, a saying worn down to words. I thought of you in ways that were about me, and some that were about you too. The easy depths at once too much, the letters scribbled with ache and panicked appetite, this animal too abrupt and abstract. It’s what I lose when I leave it there, written down as if it happened. 

legion

The clock slipped the count and so I stepped to a little late, the day time sky already set to goodbye, my life left sitting staring down the dusk. It’s the collateral of the calendar, all these days left to boxes, the stars barely stirring as the world turns and turns. All I seem to do is stumble from scene to scene, off script and stranded spitting bars that miss the beat, doing stunts and improvising speeches. The dusk goes dark and the days grow grayer, the old bones telling secrets, the quaint conceits of September Song playing in the well past tense. 

So time marches on, so the franchise makes concessions, trailing parts and pieces. The path is all process and it only goes so far until it’s a thousand other parts, a thousand other journeys through the flesh, the shuffle and the deal unending. All that’s left of the me I favor is empty pockets and percussive words, but there are a lot of mouths and feasts still going strong in the host I heave and haul. The husk bearing progeny and pestilence, partisans without flags all carrying the clock, atop this wave breaking in all directions. Life always falling under spells and curses, and waking up flush in new names and stories. I dance this mess to pieces, I dance until I drop, but the party never stops.

Still I scribble on the signal, still I write my manifesto on the back of receipts. I am a point in passing, a distribution of debris. I am the engine struggling to turn over, the genes left on read spinning circles in the mud. A story between stories, the probable fall of the words, a vague miming of looking at where a watch would be on my wrist if I wore one. The words keep coming in clouds and torrents as the pan boils dry, as if insistence was all the was to persistence. Waking into this want, the sun long gone, the light left on just in case there’s someone left to welcome. Colorblind, I paint by numbers, the night swallowing sight whole.

prometheus

We wake to the world still turning, the business below the proscenium, the sky projected on the scrim. The routine written on the windshields, the secrets scrawled across our faces. The story carries over, some vaguely unsatisfying reminder from an equation we never quite figure out. Ancestors tales skewed hard to modern attention spans, most of identity the operant of intermittent reinforcement. It was once so that it might be again, it wasn’t so it may be yet, and the numbers fall and fall. Somehow the light got left on. The flickering between the frames, the candle always burning.

So you sleep with the windows open. You drowse in your skin while the moon looks in. So you scroll down screens or sort through messages, living in this memory that’s never at rest. Awake to witness shapes full of intention, transgressors made of trousers and trunks, this restless grasping at the strings. The moment always vividly missed, extinguished in the tangle of sense and cognition, the monkey thinking it’s a joke teasing such sharp swift teeth. Dashed against this continuity, the discovery at the borders of being, this name full of dreadful wonder.

It’s there like the weather, the patina on the bronze Buddha in the garden, the rust gathering at the hinges on the gate. These slow fires and sudden conflagrations, the spark before the blaze. Synapses busy ticking away at the plot and the fabric, bellyfuls of hard hungers and happenstance. Here and now again and again, the dull report of the drum machine, the metronome of the missing moment. This light the blazing into atmosphere, every measure a rate of oxidation. Each of us a fire started by a want in the world. 

excavate

It’s like waking from a strange dream

in a strange place, wearing nothing

you ever wore before— how you know

there’s a story whether the world

worked it out, this built in

repetition backwards to ignition,

the mirror therefore it’s me.

No phone, no ID, this sense

that the three-second delay stalls

the signal to the senses, your name

a where, a when, a reasoned reckoning.

Now here comes the marked-up map, 

the dots on the decision tree, 

the presupposed path you spoke aloud.

The crown of stars,

the roots through the rocks—

there you are here we go.

The dogs charge rings around the yard,

flies taste at scratched skin and raw knees,

the radiance of the dusk

another retelling for the recollection.

Oh, the world knows its part

gifting this hollowed here,

scattering labels and receipts.

the wrong birds

Maybe it is the descent 

implicit in the way the symbols

stack, circles turning

inside circles, the wheel at work

as the end in the action eats

away. Something inevitable 

that structure of fitful scripture 

the cadence of water

rain making gutters into falls,

gray skies and dripping eaves,

want laying it on while

the battery runs down. The tree

written so often described unknown

as misnamed passerines,

raptors attached to the explicit 

tithes of divination and 

the divine, owls unseen 

closer than names

come the night. Half allusion 

three quarters vision from within,

the wings that do not pass

world after world, starlight 

and the negative space

a longhand sky leaves,

branch and bird, wind and world

saying everything a little bit off

stirring embers and giving smoke

waiting as the earth comes around.