the late John Garfield blues

Long past sleepless, the blue shadows flicker in the style of early fire and expired dreams. Objects loom and recede swaddled in restless light, the lean of screens, the bones of test patterns and cathode ghosts trailing like ellipses these stretched thin souls. No longer static under glass, hints and suggestions leap and strut along the ceiling and walls, the struggle of the story to remain unformed. The dead air always waiting with tension to draw, everything new and nothing changing no matter whether the postman rings again or how Lana Turner wears a sweater. The habits of the ancients, the customs of the form.

It isn’t always the channel, it isn’t always the cigarettes and Captain Kangaroo of the eternal ruin, that too close to the gutter to rise to the insult. Telephones that are answered on the second ring, letters of ink and paper blur beneath fallen tears and Paris rain. The reconstruction of consciousness, words and pictures and the uncoiling of the mystery as the pull of a voice and a match ignited on a heel. The spin of song, the skin bruised from remembering again and again. The primal compact of the stared down ceiling, the law of forevers made of never. That god revealed in the cracks like in the Dobyns poem, the fearsome stitch of the old oath breaker. 

After the art has ended, after the love has left, just the stubborn husk and the curtains astir. The eyes stay open as sleep goes through the motion, dreams clambering on the rooftops, the night scratching out cyphers with broken nails. Blood gone wrong an open book idling in the backlots of thought, the changing of the station, the whispering of the grease. The movie keeps moving well past the credits, loosed in these fevers of flesh and the cloister of the known. Dawn arrives printed on a broken deck, the last games always played alone. The hand that’s dealt, the corner fought, the script familiar but the casting unfathomable. A wash of color before the fade to black.

I remember California

Even in dreams the roads run dark. Even in memory the lights grow dim, savoring another savior, singing along to that favorite song though you never knew the words. Watching from the hollowed out tree of a heart, wings and their shadows. An inferential intuition of flight. 

The moon fades away into busywork and backdrop, crimes left from scene to scene. Oh, the echo. Oh, the clue dropped in an envelope. The die is cast. The sea in the air far from now and here always there, the crashing tide and sea lions barking, a Ferris wheel unlit and still. Kisses upon cliffs.

It is in the way they write memories, slips and snippets bound with song and scent, a flavor for a moment met. The bright stars, the shadowed woods, the way redwood trees descend from the roots of heaven. The incremental ambiance as details are recovered and reconstructed, taking on the savor of the immediate flesh. 

It is in the way we absorb occulted culture, the myths that wove the primordial tongues, the way these stories grow unacknowledged in these deserts of the telling. The Madonna and the monkey do. Highways dotted with signs and fairy lights, numbers for names and numbers for exits, the ghosts of the Central Pacific haunting the brutal passes where their bones lie exposed. Hollywood and the latticework of irrigation across the old latifundia and the Big One always in the wings. Streets sick with gun culture and serial killer migratory maps, and Bigfoot embarrassed for the lot of us.

The freeways always reaching, white lines in the headlights, white lines fading in the rear view. Faces with disappearing stories, faces etched into the blood, names folded into the forbearance and that feeling where you disappear. The flicker of years cards in bicycle spokes, newspapers flung into the drive, teenagers hurling stones and epithets as the clock ran out. The sky gone red and every breath a burn. Bridges collapsing into the sea. This old ache, this ageless enmity, the roads run and run. 

crosseyed and painless

Maybe the message arrives in the moment as a bird on the wing or a bolt from the blue, something lifted by the wind or moving deep below your feet, a spark to strike a light inside. Maybe it comes as chemistry, a tumble of pheromones feeling their way into the tussle of your blood and atmosphere, the structure a signal running through the ley lines of life. It could be the riddle of physics tickling at entanglement, the spun silk story of particles talking across the distance of some old collision, some ancient introduction in the primordial cauldron boiling over into your being. It could occur in that flicker of cognition, your consciousness a stylus freeing it from vinyl or clay or ink, stricken into the record by your prying mind. Then again, maybe the message is all in your head, Occum’s Razor always cutting it close.

Never mind trying to figure out the signal, too many years wasted between the measure and the map. The means of transmission often obscured by standard bearers and nervous messengers, unknown customs and dangerous strangers, words that move so knife sharp through us that we seldom notice the wounds. Bled out before you know, what a way to want to go. The rhetoric invented to keep tailing the truth, the talk too ready to turn colors, we follow the arguments we can afford. We stare through the frequent fires, the red glare only the occasional rocket, dollar signs where our eyes once were while they follow you around the room. Time will tell, depending on how it spends.

They say you can catch a glimpse around the corner, peak behind the curtains hanging at the bounds, take a look at calamity and beneficence in the days yet to come. Some shuffle a deck and deal, some throw sticks or stones, spill the guts of beasts or birds to earn a glance. Some will parse and piece their dreams, consulting scrolls and oracles, exchanging words for words. You watch the other monkeys, counting on the safety of the numbers,  the power of crowds. Others just crunch the numbers up and give them back as odds, reading you the chances as you gather wits and spine. There is a hole that will stay a hole. The facts are the first to stray. 

misunderstood

Chances are I took it wrong, hanging there outside custom and context, words left unexpectedly on the line. Objects in the mind may be other than they appear, given the labors of the self and the lingering of the smoke. I typically miss the over or the under in good standing, pick a cards and nothings up my sleeves muttered in deference to the form, forever working off cheat sheets and ersatz odds. It’s the problem with levity that gravity doesn’t always allow for ascent, bodies at rest and motion and the serfs of sentience. When looking for the evidence of recorded beneficence the rudiments of my cognizance will often find a slew of hurts don’t its and two for flinchings. As far as navigation goes, it’s not the most utile map to follow.

It’s like the bumping in the night, the creak of floorboards, the indiscreet hinge. Sure, it sounds like murder, but is it really worth all that getting up? The confusion is really more brand building, cosmetic alloys and the slide of misalignment, a flag to unfurl and a smattering of stereotypes. There’s no road sign for how far to go after getting it wrong, everything done to the tune of the dramatic turn and inflamed apostasy. Waking to a world so brutal even the mirror leaves a mark, creased and leavened with mayhem and spilled salt. Scraping footfalls and hushed breathing in the dark halls, the flesh itself a fever.

I saw the moon in passing. I didn’t wave, or say anything. The moon has made it pretty clear it has nothing to say to me, window creeping not withstanding, most of its signals aren’t mixed. All the heavens brush on by, clouds and stars and alibis. Sometimes the reason comes down to the season, sometimes it’s about hats and feathers. The signs are read, the signs turn blue, the signs are for entertainment purposes only. The inkling teeters on the precipice, an imagining of drumrolls and music in the minor key as the mask is removed, another mystery for the mistaking.  I fold fetal, clutching at an ache for comfort, curling into question marks and involuntary exclamations. The knowing comes and goes, as soft and elusive as smoke.

anecdotal

The shadows are reaching east, filling in the desolation in soft grays and cool blues, the spectra spilling swatches in the visible bandwidth and then some. It’s a day of dust and sparrows, a compression of comprehension along bands of beasts and birds, counting cracks and flies. It’s a day of disarray and bad beats, the stuffing coming out the seams. The old blood pauses and pools, the aches flowing unabated from lung to limb, breathing a slow sizzle spittle flickering throughout the forms. The structure is to suffer slings and arrows, the roots always good for a reach around, the words stained with smoke and vapor as they still in their stands. 

It’s like the way the blank page would thirst for even the pressure of the pen point, the dark longing of the ink another invocation moving across the water, the absence identified its own sort of summoning. It’s like a falling leaf sending sparrows dashing into flight, a particular stimuli touching a nerve, the stone rolled away from dire memory the stanza standing there in the paint. The timing of the tide inside dragging its skirts up and down the sand, the traces there saying grace as it erases it. The throat cleared with intemperate smoke, barking and gasping away after incantations. 

Now the hours beneath the painted on sky, glitter and asbestos and dust, a lamp lit firmament. Animals named in their comings and goings, dirt man’s first gig rehashed by association and disinhibition, heaven hale and hearty if only fishes were wishes. Bodies at rest and bodies in motion, first principles and poor rehearsals, no more broken legs mentioned before the current cast. The need to embrace the fade, the feeling a kind of feeding, cards turned and lots cast clinging to the transitory. This stirring, skin scratched and livid, words teeming and uncalled for tumbling over details, picking teeth and bones. Everything a secret until the say so goes.

stars apart

Another boom and the moon is peeking through the part in the curtains, neither cause for the streaming tears, those only the parlance of our times. A breath goes down wrong and it’s all hack and rasp, lungs like the billowing tattered plastic bags flying from a fence like the standard of some long buried battalion. The curtains stir and the moon winks, the world watching every move. Asleep and dreaming with eyes wide open.

Spent ordinance and the refurbishment of the spent narrative, the other caught in creased missives and exposed by the ever expanding nature of consequences. The sky reaches until the day and night touch, the moonlight spills and swells, the sun ablaze in blood and bone shining lies upon every skin and stone. The red queen always a black jack no matter what the eye might say, there’s always some extra legerdemain left in the tell that gives away the identity below the day. 

There’s the weather and there’s these perpetually refitted memories, moments that linger despite every last spark of life of them long since turned to dust. The gone goes on through the observable universe as the heres linger while every there puts more space to its where. The discourse of the everyday quickly becomes fresh omens and old chestnuts, as each and every star departs, leaving little consolation but the still recognizable constellations. We are spent, we are burning, we are temporarily here to stay. Here but for the auspices so far, the worst well assured by the constitution of the fuse.

least

I wake and try to find a way not to face the day. From the first turn of phrase to the rigors of the litanies it quickly slips away, sand to castles, tricks to light. The illness at once sets in, faint salvos and thunderous whispers, words emerge in fusillades and flurries. It’s the way flesh finds me in a heap and drags me to these dragging feet, the stations I pace and the muscle memory residuals, bait cut breath by breath. I succumb to the ritual of any available crutch, the placement of the lighter, the lean of the incense burning the mortal at both ends. The animal gets lost in the apologia, the gods too busy with their acrostics. 

I vie for distraction before the flags unfurl, before further atrocity carried out by the nation state is revealed, before the inevitable revels over the dead. Witness has given way to a narrow ambivalence and a sense of isolation in the decay of old traditions, words set ablaze in gleeful malfeasance at every turn. Ugly and flustered and full of beans. I fix my focus and follow cat and crow, the bolts loosed by wind and bent bough, leaning heavily into any loose chemistry left in the mix. Like a fever the press of stones and sticks arises from the languid brick lined pit where the bound words dwell, dull and drowned until summoned like a fiend stuck in a craft store star. Beneath the heat and tumult, I watch several fledgling crows figure out how peanuts work. 

It’s the rattle upon inhalation, it’s the thud and shutter of the heart, that ill meat between sense and sentience sputtering in sparks and strokes. That first hint of cognition in collision with some shape disappeared in the peripheral or some suddenly met mirror. The swell of shadows as the scenery overflows, unspoken words swarming a heavy tongue. These palpable pitter patters so close to the surface, these names that come craving articulation. Twilight gets stuck in my lungs, all cough and clamber and bees in amber, wheeze and spatter beneath the implicit proscenium as I return to earth. This long fall the slow fade from the world, the least of men and beasts, the passion a scratching at the lid of a coffin.