pins and needles

The light turns on

a blessing and a curse,

eyes pitted in alarm

between days and dreams, 

this bell brought down by 

a face beaming out

our uncertainties so sure to

me, this image sticking to my sight

through the dead weight of this 

burned up world, pins and needles 

smiling in the dark of this life alone.

Dawn and dusk, kitten paws and

unmarked graves, the long 

slide downhill, dirt and gravel and

the unfulfilled promise the mind 

makes of pretty pictures, foolish

mistakes, the breathlessness 

breaking thinking’s forth wall,

bed empty save for stories 

crashing on the shores,

a moment run clean through.

nonentity

The mountains too will melt and crumble

tumbling into the sea, and every castle

ends up made from sand. The list

ticked down from one thing to 

the next meant to put the world to order

or at least make some sort of map

contriving all these whos and whys 

painting a description of the dervishing down

the drain. A face, a name, some defensive

inscription to sum up this strange

continuity— a toddler excitedly 

offering and then after and then. 

You look both ways, there’s no

there there. The caption below 

a photo you know, the freshly unearthed 

lede. The mirror always gets it backwards,

the self sugar glistening 

slick on a stranger’s tongue.

new

There’re days where it’s down to the charge on your phone or the cat in your lap, waking startled to wake again, this shadow steeped ceiling, this eternal alarm. Some stone rolled, no longer there, now risen. There’s days where you’re drunk on your porch and someone fires nine rounds in the yard next door, fireworks showering sparks showing above every roof. It’s just the soot smeared remnants, Rome everywhere in the render. Every day a fresh onslaught, caught in the crosshairs of duty and contempt. Surrounded and there’s no one coming. Alone with what there is it arrives. Oh brand new year, oh fusillade.

And so the day goes by, sunlit and wrung out, the rain taking a breather as it waits for a re-up. Every moment smoke and embers burning at both ends. The whole neighborhood a bit hungover, treetops reaching for the fruit of moon, core sore and drenched in leaden light. There’s a song now and then, maybe you sing along. I could be singing from the sounds in my throat. Folding each cool breath in the depths of my belly, firecracker and fuse, bellows and flame. The rules keep changing but it’s the same old game.

All is not lost as long as the moon is dragging at your billowing shadow, all is not lost whether falling down flights of stairs or still a-stagger after some iconic fancy. The venerable day and the nascent night in turn come tumbling, only as old as the observer, only as old as your transitory bones. Brick after brick crumbled to dust as the construction slows, an amble of expired masonry and poorly rendered cement, an uphill climb on dwindling limbs. Spewing steam and heat and hyperbole into the continuity as the odometer turns over, the cold night piled upon the unboxed date, the resolution blurred as the credits threaten to tell us all we already know.

circumspecial

A flinch of eyes

a gust of rain

this picture painted 

so dutifully dumb with love

hanged crooked and touched

gently with drowses of dust, 

intimate pledges of flesh and 

bardo, sage and bobby-pins bound

tight in rubber bands, light

drowned in blunt weather

the incandescent halos 

secreted away, tenders 

slipped in between 

beloved pages, 

dear traveler, 

fixed star. 

shiny things

I look up not knowing 

what to expect of the sky or 

where the moon would show, 

not to say expecting nothing—

that’s just not how the world goes,

my fingers cold and houses throwing 

bright Christmas colors across

the blinking distraction of

my periphery, headlights sweeping 

the old eyeballs briefly blind,

words working to find 

focus, while the mind gazes

power mad in its pick and choose

solving the mystery by starting 

at the end and writing backwards,

first quarter becoming moon

Jupiter to one side, the atmosphere 

gaining ghosts as the clouds 

barely hesitate before 

the facts blur, obscured 

by inevitable weather

and shiny things that glint and 

glimmer as sight glides on

the skin of memories, 

the seasons of how we thought

we were saying who we

are in these nested givens.

Our lives as bright as ice

as our winters bite down 

into our glistening bones.

incant

I can’t speak much for where I am, it’s only where I seem to be. Willing spirit and wanting flesh, left outside the fold for a few common apostasies until it is the mark of the mechanism, this penchant for ritual and automation. There is a fog in the prescience, a blur between motive and causality, the road followed for the writing. There’s a glamour of holiday lights, a slamming of the doors of cars and houses, the push and pull of headlights straining down the way. I’m sharing scant breath with a small troublesome cigar, bright ember and heaven headed smoke astir in the eaves. Saying it like it makes it so when it only makes it said. The spark, the bolts of incandescence happens somewhere else. The words there, the work another stanza hewn in available stone.

The hours plod and malinger, speaking in dust and remorse, eyes emptied of agency staring at prefabricated dreams. The drift of agency, the smudge of witness, this burned down world still riddled with nights too cold. Three in the morning, curling plumes of smoke by the back porch light, the scooped out moon oblivious to such obdurate prostrations. The animals figure something’s up and have launched hectic patrols in ones and twos in pursuit of this obvious truth. I leave them to their investigations, sitting still outside as the freeze sets in search  something even more ephemeral than my motives. Reaching for reasons that aren’t there as if summoned by the winter in the wind.

The years go on and the husk it hollows. Somehow the chemical exchange rates are adjusted and our ams change to wases, something perturbed in the mix as things begin to lag system wide. No longer serving whatever god or purpose or words there were, knowing the ring won’t come around again. The day’s gray slopes gathering west, the dogs rooting around the yard, the street strewn with dead leaves and offerings. I write it down as smoke and breath dance a reel with this dizzy witless blood, low obdurate will stirring through the consequences, to want and linger useless as a prayer. The ritual itself turning over and over, this interminable engine of ink and symbol, the spell of ought and naught. The words this want of magic, the waves moving on.

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.