sir duke

From the wilted wish hued blue of the sky spilling over the eaves, from the trees that buck and bow as the wind pontificates, from this slow set gaze of this longest light always reaching for a lost horizon I fall in the moment the song’s let loose. I fall along the ley lines, I fall along the faults, the flattened affect of the undeniable earth. Only the bright deployed in lilt and sigh, note and tone so loosed that all you can do is sing. The here and now and the long ago sway hand and hand, everyone dancing it the best they can, the rhythm slipping like silk and gripping tight as a fist out here in the nevermore. 

We are there for the first reasoned moment. We are there until we are turned back to ash. There where we hear it to the binding in the bright, we turn from skin to skin, then we deny it and burn so fast in act. Between the revelation and our composition, between the resignation of stones and the stir of stars in the short singsong night. A smile all teeth for the taking, a matchless smile that just shakes it off, this fast footwork a tango with the truth. We are here waiting on letters and kisses and oaths, the sky a breath and bloom. We are here at the edge of the epilogue, summed up among the they, the erased in a line or two. The gone and the easily replaced.

Everything’s sacred, everything’s profane— like I heard in that Patti Smith song. I may be mistaken but it goes both ways. I might be wrong but I won’t be at it long. I smoke and spit into the dusk at the long toothed end of a day, the altar and the offering as the lights go low, all repartee and singalongs as the shadows sink their roots and the sky overflows with stars. This moment all that is certain, the hook in the horns, the dazzle of sheer dreams. As the sea pummels the shore into sand the moon smiles in a wry sliver and the trestles shake with trains. Heaven at the cross rails wringing with alarm, I keep to the mystery, I sing along to parts of all the songs. God exactly like they said it is, but backwards and inside out.

elegy

The season settles again on the unseasonable, my bones ring with the resonant chill, something’s always missing after a death. The hard shift to past tense, sifting through the remnants as the days dull the sharps down blunt, the different drummer beating out a rhythm of body shots and heart attack threats as the consequences play catch up. Boxed up belongings and cherished mementos with the cherish switched off. The words I would put to work staring towards the horizon as the late sun reaches east. Something to sum up an everyday impossible absence, something to make up for countless failings, to honor a long life cut short by my insufficient best.

Another afternoon painted strangely on the senses, another day of spent dreams and trifling shadows. I clench my jaw, I grit my teeth, so comes the numinous glow of the mortal grind. The passage of the dead always hanging around doorways and gossiping in the halls, whole corridors gape where once were walls, propositions that plead and clout as we give due diligence to our naked druthers. Booze and blossoms and the brutal truth of past tense kissing booths, life and limb on the tab when the payment shows its paws, all efforts to the contrary made evident by the unwinding of time. Scattered seeds and broken oaths, cracked pavement and the troupe in the loop. My love another documented loss.

The days roll out, the days pile on and pass unseen, the days a story and a stone. I cannot speak to the loss whole cloth, the way the world will never recover for a loss it barely faced, the truth of the matter strangling myth after myth. So sharp in the certain, so graven in the grief, the light goes out never to be seen again. Words clot and words choke, no matter how softly spoken, no matter how aptly put. Here past the head and heart of poetry and art, where the world is dimmed never to be brighter again, I wish and want. The final wave on its way we gather on this shore. 

door to nowhere

So it is the scintillance of wind and leaf, abundant boughs swaying in the long last light as the sun sets off and the world falls away. So it is the anticipation of the spill of stars in the bright sky shine between shifting sheaves of greenery and this mottle of light and shadow. The dirty windows, the weary doors. A porch thick with sound and smoke. Some wishes so tired and improbable they are a burning holes in my breath, these afflictions so resolute, the crows coming home to roost. Empty in, empty out, the soul just a whisper when it shouts. Dusk comes, a curtain drawn so slowly it seems still, heaven still photos and plagiarized shine.

Night is here, always written inside the eyes, always sleeping beneath the skin. The awake world a car alarm, a buzzing fly, the old ghost glow of a sitcom laugh track. The ache unswayed by your capacity to assuage, the ache the meat on the mat. This wilt of words across the surface as the senses make a mess. Just curses and revelations and the gruesome highlight reels, patterns in the ceiling that read a room and go with your mood, eyes awake and terribly aware of the ins and outs of the here and now. The skeletons from your closet dragged to the curb, the portal turning with gritted gears the dreams into dust. 

The cracked pavement, the slabs of sun, Gilda gleaming black in the lap of another afternoon. Sore to the bones and seeing stars I am all intent and bellows, puffing clouds and sowing fire, the empty set of a settled bet. Ill from root to crown, I shift with the soil slowly changing tense, this long sentence served awaiting punctuation. The trees wave and bow beneath the fickle wind as another day makes way, this bright hour unto the gloaming. This ruin cast in glowing embers and the gemstones glitter of the roiling swarms. This organ grinder turning the song over in its grave, dancing with the monkey though the monkey’s long gone. 

the empty up ahead

You can bring it to the dirt upon my doorstep. You can leave it melting in the rain. So many motions left unopened, so many stations that only the wind will fill. We fall away and the world keeps going. Little by little or all at once we are a diminishing return. Pass it on while you still have it in your hands. Shout about it while your lungs hold out. Enjoy your once agains before they become no mores. The words are well worn, they circle the block just to say it again, the stories we think we are telling, the characters we want so badly to be. One by one, we go until we’re gone.

I say this as my heart takes tumbles. I say this coughing fits and furies, sputtering away like a dying fire, only with spit and phlegm. The dead just keep on happening. One loose string on the tapestry, soon your context begins to unravel, the world holes and consequences once your framework gives way. Tulip dead on April 19, my mother dead fewer than 24 hours later, the neighbor across the way since 1970 dead two days ago. There’re more, mostly that I didn’t know as well, some I didn’t know at all. Every journey, etcetera and so on.

I wait out the dusk facing east, I endure the sunrise facing west, at home and out of habit spilling smoke and salt. The day is a blur of screens and dreams, the night careless stretches of shadows thick with sorrows and hard truths. Another weak translation of some lofty far off star. Names no use to speak, faces only tricked out light. Another year with nothing to show but the burns of the slippage and the lowing of my bones. Funny how it turns out, this sigh all at once this snuffing of dwindling flames. Oh, bold candle. Oh brief bright. Now it’s only the passing traffic and this ember as I take another drag on all the empty up ahead.

archetype

There a glimmer amongst the salt and ash, a stranded wanderer envious of the stars, a map without a means dragging a path around. Words that fell without thought past the press of tooth tongue and breath, a light left on a reason all its own. The struggle of the bellows, the work of iron and earth, held to the workings of these buried wings. I say so it seems I’m saying, the lift of bough, the plunge of air. This missed kiss, this symbol folded from vapor. Oh this flash, oh this atmosphere. This plummet of consequence and stone. 

We leave our living everywhere, in hauls and heaps and artifacts, these middens of words and waste. Twisted and tangled by ardent attachment and dull habit, we plod and plot and scheme until the last wisp of steam escapes us. Here among the heritable relics, broken clocks and mismatched bar ware, we move with rat and minotaur in the labyrinthine depths of the abandoned. Death scattered like ash, only the tenacity of blunt object and tenured dust. 

So it is I take my station, facing east as the dusk comes running, these gray skies bum rushing the spring in May’s first glimmer. So it is I witness the Black Phoebe feed on the glut of crane flies in the lush green remainders of the last rain. I smoke and drool, spitting embers and evidence on broken masonry and cracked concrete, this restless portion of the vast decline fading with me one more time. It isn’t in earth, it isn’t in ink. A word or two sprinkled upon this dream, a lingering passed along.

the sort of things you’d think you’d say

Beating uneasily my heart slips over the edges of the bowl, a steak plated to impress blood red over bone white, oh the savor, oh the sacrifice. The night is alive with appetites, a wet winter loosing a river of green fiber and stolid chitin, life ever striving to take a slice. This long losing over at long last not meaning there’s not more losing left, the transition from kin to decedent, the curtains drawn and secrets kept. I sit exposed to local gawkers and famished mosquitoes, meant for another round of sharp passes and easy pickings, grave punctuation hazily in wait as the night drags on and the days flee like roaches caught beneath the unforgiving gaze of kitchen light. You’d think the words would’ve worked their way out. You’d think the years would’ve gotten their lesson through.

It’s mostly gone, all the ways the words might have gone better. It’s all done, these ways I would’ve wanted it to go. There’s always a fuse waiting to burn faster, there’s always a tire ready to blow. There’s just rooms full of boxes and stories that no one knows, places to wake and drowse in, moments to shock and to shame. There’s the knowing that the only people you spoke with for years had turned you off ages ago, strangers by birth and association. The flesh turns cold then the ghost is gone, a fury lashing out for hours, a parcel waiting pick up in the full on empty. We all grieve and continue attending to our stations. We all get the comfort we’ve earned, alone in the big cold world.

So much for what I should have done. So much for what I’d do instead. The dead are the dead, well past caring and tenses. The fate we face, the fate we make, the hank of hair that gives us our uncanny powers shorn by way of exposition. Sisyphean years to grind us down to the nothing much we were always taken for, tanking against time for all our never nevers, promised paradise on the other side of a tomorrow that never comes. Burned to the soul, singed through meat and marrow, I fail and fail. My worth among the ruins and relics all sin wages and the exchange rate of ashes. The radio playing from another room, chatter and static from some distant memory of night in this hollowed house. The last light on at last is dowsed without a word or way to settle these hoards and debts. 

opt out

They’re going to have you take a number. They’re going to make you spell it out. The softest gray before the harder colors. The feeling grown into the bones, riding out the last of the light. Only warm around the wounds, the instrument a balloon losing air, the music so much exasperation killing time. The rain comes pacing the swollen moon, smoke always hanging around. The ache breaks like a gasping of atmosphere, like the lungs really laying one on. The offer almost ambushes you before the reflexes kick in, the choices picked over like late day donuts, like opportunity when it catches your dreams sleeping. That knocking that counts down to out.

It is not a want for words, it is not a wish for wings, the same old arc of sentient beings burned through to the least inkling marked across this inference, this name worn inside out. I am taken by the same old waking, the slow blaze of day weighing heavy from the instance of ignition, the push start of cold cognition into the relentless traffic coming at you head on. The claimant to the space, I trod along my limits, offended by the insistence of feeble limb and brittle will. A compass needle pointing along the ley lines of intention, a muttering of the meaningless mingled with oath and curse, I wear worse and worse. I carry my corpse in the middens of my plodding heart, staggering about the borders of this closed set, learning the earth by the way it bruises.

Each night it’s all the same, close walls and sinking ceilings, a blur of words and light with music seeping in and dopplering on. Crumpled up valentines and the stir of dancing ashes, these stars recorded and forgotten in one fell swoop. Weary flesh and the stench of failure foreshadowed in the architecture, the castle built with the tide on the rise, teetering on the brink of the topple. The self left to the elements as it dwindles, something marked by the wind and the rain and the beauty that goes bouncing by. This moment so feeble in the antecedents, so firm in the winnowing will, always just too late to take the wheel. Our best hopes buried before we let them die, this mortal pleading as the cruelty holds course.