five swords

The first one is drawn with your breath, that first gasp before wailing your way into the world. The second one you meet early, sharp or hot or dark or strange, wielded against you always by the waiting world. The third one comes from comfort, the safety of house and home, the stability that allows for your dreams. The forth one is the one that fails you, the blade that breaks when you need it most. The last one you wield from the inside out, the weight that you carry in the place where you wear your name, the one that is only lost when you are dead. Even when your hands are empty, even when your eyes are closed. These swords are never sheathed.

It isn't that the world is at war. It isn't that day is lost. The streets wander and turn, rivers of tarmac covering every breath. We spread cement and we weave the wires and we seed our cities with words without roots or veins. We are always knots and ropes. We are always either caught or released. The world is always turning, changing faces and shedding skin. The fight is always there, inside and out. Every moment is the one that is last.

It feels as if I just stopped falling. My limbs and spine feel like bricks have been battering my bones. The haunted halls and empty rooms whisper and growl, the sickness loosed and brutal. Sleep howls and the wind blows through me. Traffic crawls along the streets, and the sky just slipped away. The day is gone and the night is distant. Eyes wide open, hands leaden and empty, a coldness crawls through me. I keep counting as the numbers run down. I keep counting in blackened blades and birds on the line.

entanglement

The light that was left clung to the walls, slipping from each open eye, sticking in all this blood and shadow. Each skin and every flesh, each breath and notion, tide to tide, river to sea. The bent shine of these extinct stars, the albedo of your slippery smile, this confluence of atom atop atom. You cast these spells with each inkling. You change the roads with every whim and turn.

There is a hint of motion blurred against the background. There is a glimmer of spider silk, some lithe suspension, some ancient whispered filaments lit in periphery. The armies crushed beneath careless feet, the multitudes expressed lush in gut and dust. The flesh grays, the bones surrender. I lean against the doorway, lingering between the in and the out. I lean into the empty mirror and the dark window, all tomorrows turning into glass.

There is light resting just outside your window. There are moths battering at your door. The moon dissolves as the sky turns into memory. The air nests close, awaiting your next breath. The magic knits cell after cell, the only known quantity cling and part. In between stone and earth, stitched into every fiber and flesh, something claimed and beckoned abides. These scribbled incantations written on the inside of your heart.

paint

First you trouble the rushes, first you bend the reeds, then you leave this world with painted wings. Then you rise into the seeping blue sky and fly away. We chase you our thoughts and wishes, we nettle you with our names and words. It seems that you are always just around the corner. It seems as if you are always almost home.

Ink and stitching, wind and sky. None of this seems probable. Here gravel and thistle, here asphalt and paint. The road gives out, though it unwinds forever. The stars are lost, though they flirt with the eternal. Blood seeps and eyes water, scratched and torn from all this missing. We weep and ail, mortal coil and earnest portion. We reach and reach, never touching long enough to hold.

You come to us in fever colors, you come to us along the lonesome borders of dreams. You were there before knowing, you were there before the dawn. Bare flesh beneath a naked sky, old wounds that never heal, the scars where eyes once were. The wires bundle and tangle, the least current chattering like teeth, the power left on though the house is long since empty. There is a promise to you, never spoken aloud. There is a promise to you that you never said you'd keep. You leave to follow whatever fortunes call you. We are left believing there must be something left to see.

the auld triangle

The town just lays there, beneath the impositions of sun and wind, baking and wasting away. The maze of shabby streets winds and wanders, trash strewn gutters and abandoned homes telling stories that no one bothers to hear. Road after road offering a diminishing sense of nowhere, lane after lane of luckless desolation. Shopping carts shipwrecked in the shrubbery, fences and sidewalks tagged with embarrassing earnestness. The whole map should be labeled with a warning. Everything either drab or destroyed.

The dogs and me see enough of it. We travel through the mornings and the afternoons, streets both empty and settled, these hours bleeding out in florid torrents and brash exaggeration. The old dog now largely deaf and suffering cheerfully through his canine dementia with new and concerted efforts to attack any other dog he sees; the younger dog a one-eyed terrier, bundling her anxiety into a live-wire excitement that frightens most dogs twice her size or smaller, and attacks the determined interest of pit-bulls, shepherds, and any generally large and assertive breed. We meet lots of other travelers. We meet even more pretenders to whatever crown is imagined by the varied would-be kings of whatever heap or hill is there to be claimed.

Out here in the dregs of the commuter held bedroom suburbs the desperation settles like the ash of some vast inferno. Vacant lots where businesses once stood, parking-lots given up to weeds and heat, crows sorting out the acres of refuse laden cement and the fields abandoned to ache and neglect. Little stores where the very conceit of entry sets the owners into bouts of seething suspicion. The weary pavement, the dull witless menace of reflected heat, the brittle toothless meth pirates patrolling their endless beats. I take my time, I go through my empty motions. I make my mark, knowing no end of sentences to serve.

unsung

The dreams they reach long after their reach is squandered, the sails they set bound for the bottom of the ocean, the stars they follow just the fizzle of ice and breached atmosphere. The wings they spread not yet ready to steady them in flight, they take to the sky and fall just a little slower. The broken fall a first flight, the tide of sleep long since lost to the dusk. Ants clambering to the task of the dead bird in the gutter. The fledgling crying out from the low part of the fence.

The bite set into the bitter, the smile broken, caught in the tall weeds of this enduring sickness. The day battered by gust and breeze, wheezing on its hinges, banging into the building. Hunger and thirst lost in fields of anise and thistle, of ragweed and burr clover. Bee and blossom, thorn and wound, everything lost and counted. The tinny inscription, the untuned guitar. Every piece, a party to the grand conspiracy. Every part a cleaving towards the whole.

I am that last message sealed in a bottle. The djinni shed of everything but the containment. The magic sawed clean through. My back bends, my shoulders sag, the bones all chant their lamentations. The fallen star, the baby bird, the reckoning of nest and hive. Chained to the turning and the tithe, that price claimed by tribe and clan, the pirate booty and third law recanted by the backwash of gravity's tepid onslaught. The air above is bowed and blue, startled looking as the last light leaves. I am entombed in these unsettling claims, the distant voices, the slivered moon.

epitaph

The prophecy isn't so much in the reveal but in the preparation. The tuning of the language until almost everything suggests the outcome. Shoving that sword into the stone. Play your cards just right, leave enough between the lines and just out of the shot, and your genius will continue to sing through the ages. Play your cards right, and two thousand years from now someone will be using some off-hand remark you recorded as evidence against the marriages of couples you don't even know.

The sky that tumbles, the savage turn the weather brings. We can blame it on the gays, we can blame it on the unbelievers. We can say that the devil bade it done. Count it as proof of the changing climate, count it as proof of the end of the world. The heavens boil and the very air is made of wrath and ruin. Never mind the wounds, never mind the mortal cost. Someone somewhere has to say "I told you so."

There are worlds that end in fire, there are worlds that end in ice. Some worlds end without that tell-tale bang, whimpering all the way to oblivion. We lean upon our poets and our prophets to tell us just how bad tomorrow will be. Science can tell us that our world will be engulfed by the swellings of our sun, spent of fuel in four or five billion years. Whether the Andromeda Galaxy will collide with the Milky Way before this happened depends on who you ask, but I would venture that either way, human beings will have long since past from the earth. Our stories long since lost to some set of horrors or conflagrations, our future long since buried in the past.

decoherence

Someday I will disavow all mirrors and shun all well lit places. Someday I will abandon the razor and the writ. The words I left gone before me. The lights left on burning down to smoke. The things misplaced will have their own monument, listing their enemies and pariahs, all the forgotten rendered with a single line. The flesh will dissolve and manifest, a single sigil painted upon the wall. Every moment spurs further multitudes.

The world itself is legion. The world itself is ten thousand paths branching ten thousand times, the snapping of shutters, the greasing of palms. The choice births a thousand choices, the lines of force slipped with one thought, the chains of evidence always broken. The eleventh length the one measure that makes sense of each ancestor. The lucky star burning a hole clean through.

Somehow I lost hold of these stars and reflections. Somehow I fell off of the earth. Out of pace, out of time, healing slower by the day. Aches and wounds compound, nesting in all the holes punched through me. Every word written feels like a little more line fed to a kite already bent deep into the firmament. The thing drawing me out grow farther and farther from sight. The one I was is now someone else, the one I am now only another case of mistaken identity. They crowd and cull, the disinterred and the misbegotten, all pressed between these lines I am reading. A way is taken, the wave collapses, and all the angels multiply. Even the hidden paths are trampled, even the moths shun this last shine.