invocation

This is how your letter finds me, as beaten and bowed as nature allows. This is how your letter finds me, a little lighter on the metaphor. The yellowed, the deft hand fading with the ink, the parsed telling of art and tender. The name a shine, a shell, a weight pressed against its absence in the air. Icon and invocation, fetish and ember, the kindling living makes of memory. An act like all acts inspired and unsustainable, faith and ache and bone and regret, a face fitted into the framework of my mind. Time keeps counting after you’re counted out.

A sea of blue, a sea of green, the ink dark moon and the owl and the pussycat in the flood of echo and allusion. The rhetoric in pitch and key, the bag of tricks lousy with allegory and apostrophe, taking on the meter of smoke and the skin of the sky. Staring at up at the puzzle pieces cut by the reach and riot of bud and branch, the cold wind scolding deep within the fundamental forces of breath and perspective, the drumming of the body beneath the cacophony of its business answering away without question. I think I spoke aloud. I think the words weren’t mine.

So the sky sways, so the earth departs. The ancient masonry shifts and sheds, the fortress of strength built upon shifting sands take Ozymandias and labyrinth alike, the song left without singers. The predictable jolt of the odds catching up, the drawn out dwindle having limits nonetheless. The name fades with the ones who knew who it meant, dust and mementos, tchotchkes and drizzles of workaday words. The name is left with the ones that changed it on the way, the details of how this who from that other lost in the weary distance, the attrition of so much lost while traveling alone.

skyward

Weeds spill from the eaves and the puddles ripple concentric on the picture printed surface, rain changing the reflection as the day runs thin. The rain either a remainder of the storms that’ve passed or a reminder of the forecast prophesied by the local news. It’s blues and grays and scattered droplets out here in the sticks and stones, a call and response from the all alone, crows and gulls and turkey vultures all these silhouetted wings spread through the on high. I am weary in the spirit, I am worn down in the flesh, I am a curse carved in spark and steel, hewn into the blackened bones of the once was world. I scratch and smoke and stir, a few muttered words, a few shameful claims. Almost down to where the names can’t go, almost down to the flight of that last swallow, the sweet song that never touched my lips. The fire and the fortune, this mortal portion, spilled salt and spent breath.

The setting sun casts its gaze east, a bank of clouds stacked up like a screen for the last beams as the light subsides, drip and drizzle as the frayed senses sizzle in the cull of dusk. Sick with dreams and marked by consequences the habitual husk wavers, knowing there is only so many left, only so much more. Low enough it feels like I’m down to the counting, from the West End Blues to Saint James infirmary. I scan the scene from over my spectacles, slick curbs and muttering gutters as the suburb changes phases. The returns from work and daycare, groceries and diaper bags and all the shake and slag left of the shaping of days. Ambivalent traffic and whispering neighbors the tide of strangers through this threadbare alienation. 

Once it was the weight of the moon and the dragged along blood, the ache towards meaning, the longing for love. Now it is circles worn through trampled prayer rugs as I spend my time tending to extinguished candles, the repetition of worn out rituals, the marking of moments given to staring at the clock. Remembered peaks and the rainbow’s end, the durable words dwindling into ruins and catacombs, myths folded into letters and syllables with the haste of the hidden stealing mystery as the mind starts to turn. The urgency all that’s left of the words that once walked in flesh, leaving prints and casting shadows. The light once spoke, the surface of the sea. What is left for me to say? The winter greens, the blues gone gray.

hey day

Each day some half down arrival, each day a hapless waving goodbye, the day because, the day despite. The slow spun sun and the long stretch of shadow, the greet and meet of leaves in the gutter, the promenade of parked cars awaiting the next set of actions as the light walks its beat. The ache towards and the ache until, the ghost at the gutter, the gaze upon the windowsill. The magic in the witness so quickly gives way to the goodbye in the twilight’s glow.

Welcome what we may, it comes in nights and days. Memory eventually stretches us too thin on the receiving side, hope gliding astride the fabulous and the apocryphal, cue ball to pool hall felt. Lately the breaks don’t favor, the shots don’t go as called. The cold arrives without breaking stride, wave after wave, the tables of the tide. Falling east and fading west, the words without end.

The words are there, but the poems won’t play, looking at their hands and fiddling with their phones. It’s the age of attrition as the body fails in systems and singles, some longings only the empty left keening on, with your whole heavy heart like a grieving dog on the grave of living. Head hung and bell wrung, I hunch beneath untold wonders, blessings shaking me awake on cold nights as I try in vain to shake off these dreams. The crystal constellations and the moon high in the pines. A table of huddled intimates, a clinking of dishes and a lilt of laughter, waking to forget the words. Every love and greeting with winter all that’s left.

garbage apostle

It’s not like the words were waiting, the sheen of rain, the falling sky. The grinding down of girder and slab and fragile lives, the flattened affect gray dusted face of genocide. The hurtling of empathy and epithet, gnashed teeth and curses while even the pleas for mercy are criminal, the clampdown naked and seething in its appetites. It’s not like the words are coming, blow Gabriel or cavalry call. The passion only another apostasy, the suffering served in heaps and hells, the respite only rhetoric as the evil is so shamelessly revealed. We listen in as leaden tongues turn the words on end, the hastily slapped bow on the violation.

It is still the rote patter of the daily ache, the listless shadow, the sought out stars. It is still the way that beauty still bends the light, the fury that what you feel is just words to loose for most, justice just the bruisers at the door despite every paradise you storm. No longer the grace in the desolation, no longer up on the sunny side, just these low life lows beating down. I rage and I sputter, I smoke and I steam. These idle paths, these unyielding oaths, the brick by brick, the bird by bird. All stunk up and aglow with the flicker of rebirth in this deathbed dull repose, this turn against the tide.

The body count, the cry for blood, grinding children down as their daily task. Death worshippers and dissembling flunkies gibbering from their corrupted pulpits as the world is punished at every turn. The poisoned preaching has hollowed out the rhetoric, words left rattling in their shells with wishes chambered in a smoking gun. The lonesome cat crawl dying of the everyday witnessing the heyday of the witless and worthless cashing out and taking everything that isn’t nailed down is an after market insult added just for show. The harm is intended. It is cruelty and greed and too much to allow unanswered. We who turn with the tides of the ocean, earth and atmosphere, we who hold to the old and the wild, we who shield the young and defenseless by instinct and ethos— we all recognize the calling. We will not be silenced.

ghost wiring

Comes to the lay of the day I declaim the decline smack in the countenance, the sun leaning hard against the west, eyes crinkled with age and smoke and shine as I trail symbols on ley line minds. The drowse and the drift, mercilessly incarnate within the relentless mechanisms that keep time, the countdown and the alarm work their teeth like charms. I slouch and I spit and I smoke, I sit out amid the discord taking the season at its pace. Dogs bark and geese retort on the wing, dopplering along their character arcs. The busy sound of a lonesome law laid down hard enough to jar the bones, this life all lit wrong and epigenitically askew. Writing wrong about all I do.

That’s just it. Somewhere, some song, some cryptic inference or skip rope rhyme. Maybe a devil’s worth of details, the albedo from passing traffic, the fleeting glimpse of a passing profile recalling a flood of avaricious touch. A procedural of grand conceits and farcical predictability, customary idioms and the faint press of the familiar, some odd knot of bewilderment and playing to the cheap seats. The revelation always some inevitable unraveling, all roads leading every which way but loose. Clinton Eastwood and an orangutan and Eddie Rabbit there as if invoked, ghosts of the unwinding clock, until all that was is glimmers and gibberish. Irrelevant ramblings drooled down the beard of some dead end old man, fragments of tablets and graffito hieroglyphics, yesterday’s long twilight in what’s been done with a rundown tongue. 

I suppose this is the trailing off, the long ellipsis, that last expletive left to the imagination. Dashes and interrobangs and the pretty little bows of these drawn out epilogues. The wait and the witness, the Achilles heel need to see the forest in each tree, the blunt dumb fisticuffs of the struggle to say what you meant. The limitations everyone knows that casts me as fool and heretic, the brick walls I won’t take at their word have shaped me to the worlds hard passes, the convolutions that are my gospel alone. One day the words that will serve as my epitaph will pass onto this page and into these inconceivable seas of legions, more power drawn and carbon vomited into posterity for some bottle thrown into the vast last indifference. Some primate charge among the branches, a beating of the chest, the aftermath of the enemy I could never best. 

9 mile cigarette

There’s not much to do once the sinking sets in, once you feel the collapse throughout the collateral, the drag of the earth’s core gripping at your depths. Even the loosed sigh holds on as it descends, the inevitable pull, the winged fall. It’s going and going and then it’s gone. This likely isn’t news to more than a few of you. You fly, you fight, you sit tight and smoke in the corner. Down to me and the dreams I don’t remember, down to me and the mystery unresolvably irreconcilable. Then ashes and dirt and the long look away.

The repetitions and the echoes, the memories etched into the dreaming and the husk, the tapping of happenstance upon this fated skull long enough for a pin drop, a name around this who and here and now. Even with this hole worn through the world coming out the wound in the bottom of my right foot I act as though I can maybe still walk it off. Living is another set of superstitions knotted up in the continuity, stories despite all the missteps and the mysteries, each path inevitable while you’re on it. Not as bad, but plenty worse I began to pace the statuary. Out of initiative and means of egress. 

Curled up here with my stubborn wounds and worn mementos, I take another moment to fill in the blanks. There’s no lore I hold from the unseen shore, no power I am beholding to, no faith to rub my nose in. No stake in heavens or hells, no deadworlds to awake to, no cigarette to smoke that’s 9 miles long. Holed up to tell what doesn’t show, I wait and set down a verse or two, knowing mostly futility. Here I go, empty handed before apathy and enmity, leaving words in my wake. Only time going by and the implacable fist of gravity, pacing the boards by the glow of the ghost light, anxious for the end.

snips, snails

The words circle, the words spin, the words become and begin. There’s really no excuse. Just padding out the package, just filling out the forms, these the go through motions we have gone through before. These bone picked prayers, these prefabricated miracles, all popped pills and burst bubbles. Another sort of pang, a twitch, a spasm. An impulse of trumped up synapses and short circuits. Memory and fantasy, the anecdotal gussying up of the facts. The soul soaked in song and story, this eternal scene of the crime as in art and not unclad diatribe. The ephemera the essence, I engage in this rifling through the pockets and summoning the same old same old.

These months have been lost to ghosts and grief, the sticky blood, the waxy remnant touching me long after the incidents. That and my frailty and decay overtaking my ability to stay bipedal have stole all but the spark from me. Days and days of pain and fever tinged with the taste of earned hell and everyday enmity have dulled what few distinctions I can manage to the drag and draw of the capricious winds of fate. Languishing like an ingenue over an insufficiency of suitors and hunkered down like a wounded bear waiting to make its last stand, lost in my own illnesses and the dewy dreams of others, I am without warrant or worth. The words don’t need my damage.

The mortal portion dulls and diminishes, it offers the sharp assessments of the environment and the elements, and the alarming onslaught of decrepitude in body and mind. I am beset with hard facts and bitter truths, and some sort of intrinsic urge to keep working that dead horse. This is the ritual, this is the rhythm, this is the something all this nothing pursues. Out of clever, out of craft, I try to turn the engine over. The process there along with the snails and puppy dog tails, a burden of the build, the shards of the insulted ancestors and shattered antecedents make a tradecraft from tricks and tics. Lack and want and the poem that’s nearly now.