all souls

Stones take flight and the stars go home to roost. The whispers of unseen wings ride the fickle winds. The sidewalk rings with footfalls, the rustle of awkward costume mingling with the leaves in the gutter. A plastic bag haunts a chain-link fence and the cat is on the roof again. Every hallowed height has its fall.

The bell rings and each home claims its own. Windows battened down and doors shut tight. Pictures crowd the walls and shelves, all these cherished kin and other selves gathering dust. The earth doesn't distinguish between burial and bed, root and worm working their way through the blind insistent soil. Monkey up a tree, monkey finds a mask. Climb high enough, you're sure to show some tail.

Is it ever enough to remember? Is it ever enough to speak all those dates and names? The only life left them in our memories, our hobbled hearts beating hard and quick. The only choices left them only in our imaginings. They shuffle door to door, strange and hungry, wandering between worlds. They clamber through the shadows, only looking for a light.

apostle

Dusk comes and we slip off the edge of the world, sliding into the press of shadows, falling into the crush of night. All the bodies clinging to their particulars, model and mode meet at the intersections. Sweat and pine resin, the bitter draught and the sheen of dusk. The dreams all pool up as light makes its changes, the held breath, the missed drift. The passage all that we may abide.

The bird sweeps the wind, wings being all about the spread. The dog bites each bit, every morsel meant as marrow and bone. Every molecule is in contention, every atom endures these clipped confessions. Matter is at its most exacting when its cost comes due. The rendering by heat and compression. The gossip that the material world whispers about changing states. The glamor of all this collapse and resistance, the glory of the word nearly left upon a still and reverent tongue. We pay in mystery and kind.

Stand still to great the sun. Hold course to meet the evening star. The permutations of flesh and hunger, the teetering glimpse of each open intersection as it slides into the shimmering mirror. We wait in the stammering starlight. We pause before the wash of dawn. We reach and strain, grasp and falter, this changing that is our place in the world.

all the signs

The night stands up to stretch its legs, while the day is balled up to the west. Wings retreat into dreams and silhouette. All the words curls up like smoke. Stare towards all that the day still owes, stare towards the rising tide of night, eyes sparkling like wet rocks. What more proof do they need? Why keep asking when all the signs are there?

The stones spin and the sparks fly. Objects in motion tending towards their given state. The blue mood pooled on the floor by my feet. The artificial light painting stories on the walls. Dust marches on, the endless procession of the rejected and the ground down. Dust marches on, a flicker of shine caught in the edge of my eye. The percentages played upon the forces in contention, the game plays on and on.

The night will bend, the day will break. The glow long ago worn off the skin of this romance, light hangs on the vine, light perches on the wire. If you hear me, it is an accident. If you hear me, it is a mistake. Some stranger slung over my shoulders, some story spirited up from scrap and habit. When you listen you will hear the moon on the mend. The cat on its beat and the dog in its lament will sing. Listen as that light fills the sky, and set your story free.

incarnate

What little is left I give to the sky, slowly flowing from blue to black. What portion abides I offer the day, just as the night encroaches. I skip the details and submerge into the drift. Ants clambering towards the sunlight, fence to vine to peach to pine. Birds embracing the sky, enduring their return to the earth.

If this is beauty, it is the very measure. If this is truth, it is the certain word. You touch at such a great distance. We feel so faraway, pressed against these tethered depths. You teach that chestnut of all things ending, that limit is the one unbound power loosed. You are the turn in the phrase, the split in the road. You are the reach of our knowing abiding loss.

Tell me again to favor the spark. Tell me again to shed this flesh. This sea of ache and rot and woe abandoned to an eternity of love and ghosts. The confluence of the moment and the meat, all philosophy grown entirely from suffering and soil. The tongue pauses between all this dull wonder. The words that thread between these breaths always a little exhausted. The prayers that left us burning brightly into dusk.

all over all over again

There aren't enough arms to comfort, there aren't enough wings to escape the day. The money's long gone, and the fire is burning low. There are no rules to attract, no hole to fear or console. I say your name out loud, like you could hear me. I say your name out loud, like you would ever listen at all.

There are too many pains to pray on, too many days to count. My voice is tattered and riddled with spiders and smoke. I hesitate before I speak, and never sing at all. All the paper cuts and precepts are either in the mail or in the wind. I do not so much disappear as reiterate. I offer up the feeling of love, never contending that I ever knew its meaning.

So much for your unfettered heart. So much for these scratchy valentines. There is the word that never settles, the kiss that won't come home. The empty yard and the street filled with eyes. Night comes as if it was bidden. Night comes as if it was my due. Again I write these letters, asking you for what little there might be. Again I write these letters, wishing you'd come home.

tales we tell

From one world to the next, the stories are all the same. The ladder always runs in both directions. The spell always breaks like the wings of brittle birds. Climb as high, fall as far, sink so fast. Every choice is the closing of a thousand doors. Every road is its only hope.

Stars fall and wishes run their course. Odysseus comes home and Faust repents. The Devil loses every bet with God just like every other chump. Skip your ropes or stones. Brush your teeth and say your prayers. All the pieces were set before there ever was a game. Tell it the way you heard, make up something new, the story will hold its own.

What of the time, what of the ends, what of the ways and the means? The cream rises, the stone sinks. The prodigal feasts upon that fatted calf. The dish and spoon make their usual arrangements. One thing, then another. The plodding, then the epiphany. These strings of incantations. These tales we tell while the clock runs down.

faraway

I wear slow holes in the air around me, the ache of my gaze, the sieve of my breath. Time dries along these static clasps and worn wires, sharp spikes of color tinting the very air. The bones sigh and resign themselves to these days of sullen tasks and vacant labor. A shift upon some guessed at axis, the world unfurls, all tattered and torn.

I stagger back to familiar defects, the pitch and sway of ill will and bad judgement the sea beneath my stride. The tide runs high, the tide bows down. These moods that chase the tail of the moon. Each tree holds both crown and halo, root and reach the only law. Some hunger, some wonder. The leavings of the streetlight, the reticence of the wall.

The uncertain air wears me like ragged armor, the hesitation of a beating heart, the constant plunder found in flesh. The wind spills and dashes, hunting the ghost of inertia. Everything so faraway, clinging to the skin of another story. Everything so split and withered, omelets measured in all those broken eggs. I am close, or growing closer. The clock wound crisp and cold.