sweetheart

You touch the points of the farthest star yet settled, name nestled on the tip of your tongue. You nuzzle the subtle change in the temperature of the air, one step down out the house and into the night. It is this reach, this press I ache after. Each and every day awaits, the last lingering in the company of the pack. Each and every bruise blooms, none of them yours.

This is the false witness, the way the hour lolls and the air shames. That heat of blush, the rushing witness of so much blood. Bare flesh and distant winds. The physical witness of flustered sheets and television light to guide you. That cage tight around your heart, the density of darkness staring back, clasping each instant between breaths. The echo finding its way back to you, the strange weight of your own voice in the night. Alone seethes upon the kitchen tile. Alone the brush of some other myth leaving for good.

You radiate in the quiet of this moment, your image incandescent, that thrill of willing light. You settle beneath the bed of dreaming, you settle beneath the reckless bets of faith. That intimacy of the dearly imagined, that notion just close enough to miss. Your eyes, open in some unlit mendicancy, that weary admission of wait. Thinking I could be so near. Thinking some invention laden with patent ache could be true. That native tense of reach and soar, your hand enfolded in mine.

smoke gets in your eyes

It seems as if autumn finds its balance, blue sky and the lilt of dying leaf. The trees sway, sweeping the clouds, clinging to the indifference of the wind. The skittering litter of the season dancing in the empty street. Traffic passes, rendering the detritus into dust. Hissing tires and weary asphalt. The slow incitement ever gazing upward. Every day finding a new low.

The weather obscures the words. The feel of the chill, the condensings of breath finding flesh, the distinction of color and the puzzle of perspective. Every sense an exclamation, every line stolen from another map of the world. I speak in the immensities that language allows, excesses of will and of time, the deep ache, the enduring flame. It sings of all the shapes passion grants a wanting tongue. The songs unfurl again and again, your skin mingling with this absent aim.

So it sails across farther waters, the secret oblivion that life has endowed our needs. So it crosses frozen waste and lush canopy, so it burrows through earth and stone. I say forever, speaking in antithesis. I say love, speaking from the same page you read aloud before. There are no such symptoms, no evidence found at large in the restless world. Everything dust and everything burning. This shine I can only hope for, crying out loud to you.

obsolescence

I am less than the song stuck in your head, always on the edge of slipping away. I am further than the brickwork beneath the dusty mantle, full of trophies and memories. Written in the gaps, the apertures adjusting for the waning day, the doors locking against the unknown night. I am captured in the flash bulb and the rear view mirror, locked in odd documentation and circumstantial evidence. This map work of bruises, the strange turn gentle must make to wrest the works of the brutal from lost souls. These kisses cleaved from all but the most hopeless dreams of love.

I swallow the fire, I breathe out smoke. The wind has its way with it all. I am the insistence of measurement, the rapture of the prize unclaimed. More than that mixture of ghost and blood, more than the fever dreams and wasteful eyes that stare and stare. Wings clipped, horns ground down to mere longings, I pace and I stagger. I watch my mind make mistakes from the constellations. I watch as all the lights go down.

There is a beauty that is beside us. There is a temper that makes the soul of the autumn reeds stronger than steel. I am a muddle of longing and slipped tongues, the busy work of hands that will not keep to themselves. All these hungers and petty alarms, all the waste of will and want. The night is a tide that is always rising, the day the droll ravenings of the sun stuck beach. There is an ache that comes of the world working fine without. There is a relief bound to becoming obsolete. These wind swept vacancies, these star crowded crowns.

cake

Count the candles, feel the heat. That portion of excess bound to a paper plate. That diligence of wishes given way to smoke and sweetness. A tide of fire extinguished, smoke curling into a haze of fitful tradition. Such a measure, such a moment. Plastic forks lining the trash-can. Blue frosting smearing the sink.

It is the ritual we name, but the sweetness we need. All these muttered grievances, all these longed for treats. The hours of repetition, the blunt language, the idle threats. Time cards signed in pure frustration, checks cashed in needy resentment. These little parties to delay the inevitable. These petty indulgences to make up for lapsed sin.

There are always disappointments. There are always days that will let us down. The calendar marks our dreams for tomorrow. The bright light longed for, the journey at last underway. We take these small offerings, these silly substitutions. We reach for our share of the pie, hoping it will be a piece of cake. Something sweet and easy, a moment we can taste.

brittle

We were translated from lost languages. We were written on brittle fire. The story just goes and goes. It is never clear what was said before the bets were settled. It is never certain just when that hammer fell. Our lives unwind from these strange entanglements. Our souls are only disappearing ink. The words all hiss and spark between.

There are strange engines at work, and far too many moving parts. The light outside dwindles, I turn on the lamp on the wall. I hear the pulse of strangers leavening the street with there shambling exhortations. I hear the song of some other's heart skipping like a stone. A baby squeals, a motor turns over, there are mosquitoes pestering the peelings of the moon. The night slowly fills all the waiting spaces. The song finds a place to roost.

I only know the distance, never the measure. I only know the lifting, never the weight. Clocks scratch away the seconds, forgetting the first time for everything there is. Lights offer us up to the eyes of the night. I can only make out the broad strokes, never the subtleties that lead you there. I can only know how things seem from this end. We were written, now there's no telling. We were meant once, and now are our only means left.

porous

The sun won't stay, and I can't call it back. The night won't still, and I can't keep up. The smoke unfurled from distant fires, the speed of the tire multiplied outward from the hub, the spattered windshield cracked all of the sudden. From gravel in action to the plaintive note from a passing train, it all goes on and on. I steady myself in the doorway. I ease myself down step by step. Wonders truly never cease.

The light isn't any good for reading, and the room is too hot for finding any sleep. The dog dozes just outside the doorway, painted with a single stripe of light. The cat in the closet is all thistle and growl. My feet ache, bare on the worn out floor. My shoes air, settling with the spiders on the porch. The leaves are falling, the lawn is dying, I never seem to finish with these lists of failings. Bones crackle, a different kindling, awaiting some other kind of fire.

Pretty is for people while beauty stalks the earth. It is bright and ragged, sharp and swift. It is a feeling that wanders while all the mirrors run dry. It is a knowing that drops angels from flight like cutlery clattering to the floor. The world and its hordes and swarms, designed by mystery or by chance. Working at these puzzles, lapping at these ruins. Such a sweet tooth for cinders, such a drizzling of sweat. I lean into this long weary, stunned by this careless beauty that is always just out of reach.

featherbed

The lullaby arrives at unseemly moments, amid the freeway glare at 75 miles per hour, as you wait in the parking lot feeling that hot wind seep through the open window. It sings along to the sound of tires dissolving against tarmac, it sings with the air conditioning rattle, with the hum of bass-swept glass. You long just to close your eyes and listen, but you aren't free to fall. You long to lay down your head just for a few short moments, but this time is not your own. You would slip into sleep, into those sweet dismal sacrifices where the world is lost as you mingle with dreams. You would sleep deeply, and disappear at last.

You awake to the shock of dreams lost at once, without trace or remembrance, the whole world rushing in. There is no slow roll, no subtle exposition. The change is more lift than tense. The change is more exorcism than operation. The sky still dark, the stars still bright, the litter of leaf and twig half hiding the morning paper. Lost gods and revealed constellations, no consolation for the life that is missing pieces, that life that is mostly the spaces where the revel ought to fit. Another day of drying tears and the tide of traffic. Coffee in a paper cup, the cut out feeling of the suspended weight of the moon.

The freeway was painted in taillights and gusts of dust and litter. The whole world just swayed on a wire. The whole world went out of its way to never say your name. There aren't surprises, just the familiar things you had never before witnessed. There aren't miracles, just the mirror in your head bending the light just so. You couldn't find the rhyme even if you ever had a reason. You couldn't read the signs even if any one ever asked the way. You will sleep and you will wake. The road is the only border you can know.