roots and branches

The dry pine leans hard into the hot blue sky, severed roots and broken branches. A stifling wind seeps between the fence boards, giving the feeling of a crawling motion to the stripes of sunlight painted in the dust. Sweat holds its convention on my flesh, trickling down my dirty face like unearned tears. It is a sad song rising, thirst and hunger and clinging heat. It is the still air stirring, dancing upon the grave of all tomorrows. The world in an uproar, and I only ever talk about the weather.

It isn't the ache of existence, it isn't the hurt in heart. The sickness endures every fact and intervention when it arises from the hole in my soul. Good days and bad days hardly change stances. The fight is the same, however bright the stars or blue the moon. The difference ends up only in degrees, frying pan pr fire. The world moves on whether you are ready to ride. The world doesn't worry on those that it leaves behind. It tumbles through the heavens, riding what rails it may. It spins and speeds and collides with the debris of creation, any god there is one of cosmic desolation and abrupt extinction. All the pieces might fit, but no horse or soldier can fix them together once they are so sundered.

The wind shifts, stirring leaf and needle. The sky is a fever, the day a feud. Somehow the lack of evidence still incriminates. Somehow pretending hard enough makes it so. All these fits and seizures, the speeches paused to wait on imagined applause. The dull weight presses inside my skull, the words falter while the blood ignites. I creep through the indifference and the trash, bruised and beaten and as comical as can be. The silly onslaught of this relentless poverty, an infection culled by design and neglect. Sorrow only so much shifting sand. Roots dig and branches reach though the tree is already dead. The calendar fills with contradictions, each prediction a mouth full of dust.

crickets

There is a rustle in the deadfall, there is motion riffling the leaves. The birds on high vie for the tender underbelly. The dogs down here dig up treasures by the trove. We make our marks, we check for signs. Foot prints on the middle path, commotion amid the stars. I take my share of ink and scarring. I shed my shell and make my claims. It is a wonder that anyone is watching. It is a miracle that anyone can see at all.

The work is always there, the vast collapse unfinished. The work is always there, if money is no object. The idea of reward, the scant fact of compensation, rattling the windows and banging on the door. Waiting for that lucky moment, thinking the timing must be just so. I collect ache and incomprehension. I only ever gather what I sow. Lost cities and storm warnings. The labor of recall footsteps upon the hot and shifting sands.

Time has its reasons, time has its say. The clock translates the message, the countdown bound to the writing on its face. The stage is set, the audience if it's out there always in the dark. I pace the boards, practice my craft. I spell it out in blunt letters and dull tricks. The world tumbles, the sky falls. The earth can not stop shaking. Messages come by the bottle, missives stitched onto the skin of the wind. The light burns low, the day runs down. I speak my peace in brittle little pieces. The curtain comes down, and the rest is crickets.

invisible hands

So the shovel splits the earth. So the absence of the ghost leaves us with nothing but dirt, the soil sweet with the mumblings of decay. The lights go out, and bright flies begin their shift. Busy wings and pale maggots, the crawling tide of life abides. From dust to dust, these slow circles all spinning away the world. Over there and back again, the wheels turn and turn. Standing still, and still standing. Each distinction a shade of sameness. Every word spilled upon the ravenous ground.

Dig a hole, make it deep, fill it up with reasons. The air hangs there, hot and dense and slowly seeping. Heat and brevity and the soul of discretion. Something comes from splitting the surface with hands full of grief. The salt of sweat, the salt of sadness, these fields full of rocks and bones. Nothing slumbers beneath this labor. Nothing comes along to take away the empty. Every grave dug is a kind of surrender. Each grave filled with a measure of your sacrifice. Pieces of your head mingled with pieces of your heart. Each loss leaving its stitches and scars. You always bury who you were.

The hours dwindle, the sky an afterthought. The ground is littered with cool dust and crisp dead leaves. Tree limbs reach to catch what sun still lingers, the last green and golden aspirations before the season casts its spell. The work of the world grinds on. We idle in our sentiments while the sediment endures. These hopes and wishes that once swarmed our every motion now stuck in the firmament along with all those absent stars. Pinning wings where shoulders were, flying and falling all the same until the end.

prognosis

You imagine it as a passage, the hour turning untrue in your thinking, the numerals tumbling up the slow ladder on down. The slippery periphery, the halo and the sunspot, these words endure the vacuum. The thoughtless compartments amid the void, the residue of all the places dreams touch your skin. The avatar and the intercessor, the invalid transitions that happen just the same. Oh earth and everafter. Oh the songs of stone and sleeping giants. Oh claim and caution, oh covenant and cross. The dark recess of this thrifty midnight. The dull remnants of this reverent end.

The flower dissected still hides its mystery. Shredded petals and severed stems. This brittle bouquet of tooth and bone withering on the mantle. The slow decay sinks into the sugary water, the bees give way to flies. The shadows remain where the sun laid too long, the impressions left by melted flesh and rotted vegetation, all form surrendered to these fossilized thoughts. Peel away the pretty, the skull still glistens. Carve away the promise, the secret still is kept. The earth below a dream you haven't had yet. The sky above an abyss in your heart.

It is still the clock, it is still the wreckage. The morning star floating on the restless tide, the waves crashing somewhere behind your eyes. The hours pass as salt and shimmer. The hours fold into this ache. Another sundered moon, another shattered cup. The carnival arcade that bangs on and on. This is the place where language leaves you. This is the place where the stories stop. The backlit x-ray like some TV show. The prognosis you know is waiting in the next room. The closed door only there for the next entrance. You sit there, waiting for the curtain call.

float

It would ease my mind a little to see you as we spoke, the light easing into your eyes, your fingers flicking your hair away from your face. It would make it a little easier to know you were you, not only words lingering in the dark. I scan the line, I read alone, I turn the loud music down low. Your voice rises and falls, clinging to the cobwebs in the corners, walking these hallways like yet another ghost. I get lost as the words drift by, imagining them leaving your lips.

I have gone so wrong that even blessings are a burden. I have gone so wrong that even a kiss would cut me through. The dry green season losing its hue as the rhythm section reaches the bridge, a lovely tune held aloft in a language I do not know. The melody all the meaning I can find as the winds rise and night falls. Scolded by scrub jays and mockingbirds, wounded by my will and the mirror, I tread the thread of reason. One thing, and then another. These wishes, then the world.

Leaf and needle, stone and dirt. The season does all the work. When daylight is left the gutters skitter and hiss. When the night is upon us all bets are off. I listen to the subtext, deluged by the overflow. Reason and reckoning, the details you spare as you spend your breath settle in the corners, rattling the chairs. Dish and spoon, cow and moon, the crow decries my simple sanctimony. I wear the same ruined skin, the same dull hostility, blood and bone and this latest incarnation. You speak that silken incantation, and your mouth draws down the sky. You speak those slow delicious words, and I cling to the trembling air they elude. I am lost again, everything falling down like stars.

all tomorrows

My hands are always empty, my head is always split. Years of beatings shaping knuckles and skull, the depth of earnest bruising a shadow cast by every smothered hope. Finger reach and fingers grasps, somehow always slipping, somehow always bereft at the moment of contact. All the holes bored through the brain by the usual demons, neglect a crop with deep roots and sharp thorns. Even the words grow sick, grown in such questionable soil.

The flesh errs, mistaking sparks for soul. The hunger and strife and ache and error, all these dead leaves and dying flora. The blind trembling tissue, the busy cells, the burdened blood. It is all downhill, this human tale.  From the tools of myth to the conceit of religion. From the plains to the mountains to the forest rife with ghosts. From sea to sea, these shining symptoms, this splitting pain. The example elaborates, the rule never proven by exception. Down from the high mountain, the words of god dead on arrival.

The sky is blue, it sweats through the dismayed spectrum, resonance and bandwidth and the writhing of this mortal coil. Heat is drizzled through a sifting breeze, curling a cruel lip to reveal such brilliant teeth. I hunch and shuffle through the light and dust, head split and heart just soaked with regret. Stones cluster in their station, singing a song of lingering dissolution. The earth mutters its mad promise, flood and fire and certain doom. Waiting for yesterday at the bottom of the sea. Sad and certain, and in this vast decline. The sun devours all tomorrows.

the one that got away

The last days of summer bunch together, creased by the wind and knotted with clouds. The winter constellations all skip auditions and start previews in the early hours. Sweet kisses turn treacherous as the sun settles into office hours. Promises that only seemed to ripen begin to rot. Now all the radio knows is how to ask for money, it whispers across the ragged distance all its offerings and premiums. Now no-one knows how to work their eyes, the light strung still in the high branches of the wavering trees.

Come along and call down your consolations. Come along and give the emperor your high sign, buttered bread and flea circuses. Let your voices rise up ringing, let the anvil of tour breath clang beneath the hammer of your heart. Make your claims to the crowds and the beasts, shout your wished for triumphs out as if it made them true. The pundits will bleat and gloat, they will gripe and blather. Another season host what feasts it may. All  the bounty of the fields and the seas laid before us. Only gratitude is gone.

I save this for the good old days, the ones they keep for the telling. The valiant fight, the winning run, the way her smile collided with every definition known. The tales where we are so terribly clever and so terribly kind-- would that the world could be so wise and brave. Hard times, but so very noble and so very pure. The seasons change though their borders are settled in skirmishes of colored leaves and battles of maybe bring a sweater. The wind descends, setting dervishes whirling through the dust. The days are numbered, then the numbers begin again. I lose the long campaign through the usual foolish sorties and the attrition. My best days far behind me, someone else’s right there everywhere you look.