Sieve of sky, heap of bones
the words hung on stars
the riddle written in stone
a single thought from furious iron
all the way to petrichor
this reason unfolded like a flower
a thousand lashes of civilization
each flinch a cave in and
a confession, fists by
the handful dragging the ladder
down to heaven through
the night filled with livid winds,
this ache an empty made of dreams.
Now it’s down to what the day can’t give. Now it’s down to what you think in the dark. It doesn’t matter what they’re celebrating, it doesn’t matter what you’ve lost. You’ve gone so far that there’s no one who’ll answer. You’ve gone long past people you can call. It’s not the shadows that want to put their hands all over you. This tension between tense and sense, the blessings of the atmosphere, the strange supplications of strangers with sin up their sleeves. The hollowed out portion of a holiday that they celebrate despite you. Plots and spells and go to hells, extinguishing any threat that gets too close by old rigors and rote reflex, only this stubborn hunger and romances long since murdered and dumped in a bog. You wait while the day lets down its hair. You wait while the pyrotechnics punch themselves out.
And so comes the blaze and bombardment, so go the customary displays of froth and fervor. The dogs tremble a rattle from the shower stall door, cowering as is their custom in the bathroom, hiding from a fusillade that won’t let up. This is the way the world walks right through, flesh steam and bones strung beads for all their mass can manage. The surrender of tongue and tense take hold of the telling, time just one thing after another. A riotous cacophony comes wheeling around the corner, yet the latest barrage in broad daylight. A sound rises almost despite my throat, crow harsh choking, a gasp for something more than breath. Even if it was a prayer, the knowing is going with me to my grave.
I sit still and a song is playing. I am still as the weasel goes pop. The piano keys go trinkle, tinkle the way they want to do. Thrill seekers boom and crash, trashing til they fizzle and tap out, a fire dying in the hearth as heaven gives way to the deep leaning sky. The earth will reach to meet you, the earth will seize you by the salt of your soul. We dawdle in the slow of saying as the flowers read the room, this clench of lies and iron, the shameless gaze of naked motive and brutal truth that permeates the ritual that justifies the thrall. The miracle crawling out from the rubble all frying pan and fire, the words there cutting bait. Braced for the beating, wishing on a kiss.
The slow burn sky fumes blue as the green limb loll and sway, summer here at long last despite the calendar settled seasons, the air glistening with the contentions of the flesh. The breath grows shallow as the conflagration marks the wind, the heavy heart never learning to lift with the legs. The body both the lesson and the learning, the message and the bottle bobbing in the froth and spittle of the unrelenting soliloquy, the ocean a reliquary of the unrequited reachings in the tide of mind. Every telling comes after the epilogue, every lesson shows up at the wrong door or late. These last days spent coiled in the aspect of the animal, the beast always a hair trigger from a raised occasion, a head fake to break the knees of the inevitable and a stutter step into the attack. The branches from the break, the reason from the roots.
These are the downhill days, the little by little adding up to a lot, the same old story suddenly alarming and new because now it’s landed in my lap. Life and its slapstick and its shtick, the mission drift of the tried and true written in stick and stone and black and blue. The script straight from the appendixes of the canon, a warning shot fired off across the brow, the language with its ugliest outfits laid out on the bed. The downward dwindle as our specificity gives up, our portion mostly in the past tense until it isn’t there at all. A correction so coarse that it peels the bark off of me, another wound due to the way the world will walk right through you.
We are the prophesied ash, we are the resignations unto the earth. Either the dire or the dotage, the limits of the mettle, the obduracy of the bone. The mysteries linger as the seasons lap us, slow to warm and vulnerable at more unreasonable extremes, everything worn down but the wishing. Accepting my failings and my fate, I creep and crawl these dull circles, the ritual another intrinsic engine left out in the weather, the path clotted with foxtails and strewn with spider silk. Left with duties to shirk and fights that can’t be avoided, my dreams don’t find me in my sleep. Only ink, so to speak. The story, so you say. The words where they could be left on read. The swelter breaks late in the day, endings come like the providence of sparrows.
It is the cadence of the common
chorus, the bet within
the spread before us, the courses
we are blessed to receive
the transmission of the feast
beast to belly to the earth of our
burdens laid down. It has been gone
so long that most of our bodies have
replaced down to the atom
these entangled selves
an exchange of kisses
uninhibited by time or matter
flavors and orbits all spark
like eye contact with a photo
a pocket cognition, that classic
quintessence of elements
rapt in this bare legged
chemistry, like a fingered pulse,
shadows hushed and
thick with touch.
I am the sound of the engine running, I am the ringing of the room from the lights left on. The hollow hush of the rush of empty through the air, the way the silence is sounded out in the static stippling my skin. This is the body, this is the embodiment, the careless retread pressing through the passage. The inhabitant and the husk left careening down these corridors, the claim and the sign, the fretful incarnation and the vessel of its translation. Here I am, going to and fro, a dull dose of active ambiguity. There I go, staggering out dots and dashes, trailing dues and imbues.
Here in the remnants of the tattered myth of sentience, this listless tapping on the glass, for all the moment that moth beating against the bulb. Eureka unto the punctuation of bashed brains and mistaken moons, perhaps the phrasing a flavor of the metaphor, the mangled magic that drives the mind. The furtive depths of transient antecedents, all these roads bound for Rome, the ‘yes, and’ properties of inheritance evident in broad strokes and slow orbits. An artless strumming of the senses, a melody always playing out of tune. This light left on in a cold locked room.
It’s the sear of the thousand pinpoints that miss your needlework, the ache left where only devastation abides, the want as time takes each space away. In this hereafter only hurt and hunger endure this turn of phrase into flesh, this mistake made of mirrors and ghosts, this tongued and toothed exhalation to the hollow exalted. It’s not what I said it’s the way I said it, a low growl, an atavistic gear of the throat as we sing along wrong to the eternal song. Chains and charms and chemistry, faster and faster as the sky come a tumbling. The stars crash through this sieve of cognition into map and myth and cosmos, threading constellations into the beadwork, dancing heaven back on its heels.
Even the old ways abide
the creed of thermodynamics—
gods and devils forever
scraping the sides, dish and spoon
all the ready runaways,
busting down the doors
bursting through the gates.
So these prayers are set
against the endless stars and
long shot heavens, steam and spark,
breath and spine and expectorate
adding up to atmosphere
counting in thousands from the flash,
mumbled words and grotesque pantomime
the hard want of worship
spat at the wily sky
asked in haste, answered in
drought or drizzle, blessings
all percentages and precipitation
the dew point the altar
overwhelmed by the offering
drop by drop by drop.
This is that moment of warm bright sunlight smack in the kisser, where the heat and glow adorn your flesh with such attendant mention that you feel the shadow pressed from the dead center of your chest, the plaintive tear where the darkness separates your shoulders the way wings would if you gave them any thought. As if the sun sent bullets through this daily drudge and carapace to ink in the long lonesome that spreads wherever your breath abides, instead of this litany of marble and granite, corridors stunted by their breakneck grins and collapsed intentions as the rapid fire repartee riddles the slabs and the timbers. We are the follow up questions left unanswered before the pestilence. We are the answers to all the questions never asked.
There is a riddle in the architecture, a secret sealed within. Like a myth of an angel’s disfiguring touch on an upper lip, the words somehow built occluded to rapt silence, a hush to hold to like an oath. The long decay, the slow collapse, the infinite unwinding of the transitory— some details die off, some facts fade away, some gut clenched truths are taken with us back to dust. Facets held by brick and whisper, plans that seems implicit from the direction of a stairway, a frame that could have held a door. Some buried then, some intuited so, all our motives left to the elements like meat. It’s a further that exceeds almost all of us, from blood and bone to embodied ink.
Your stories will outlive you, at least for generation or so. Or your stories will flutter in your wake for a few moments then settle into the piles of the past. Or there are no stories, there is no you, and the words keep happening anyway— the city of the dead always dreaming in the wide awake. Sleeping on their shelves, wandering your dreams, turning your words over and over and over. Worm and beetle, moth and mouse, the workings of ten thousand mouths making shapes of these stray syllables. Making sense from the saved forms and minted coinage of abstracted minds, shades at rest in the boxes in the backs of brains, ghosts alive at the least glimmer of attention. The empty streets where you and I are all but gone, tomorrow waits for yesterday.
