take

There in the grays of the season settling, there in the blues imbued dusk, the shape goes soft. Vision scratched and hindered, the roosting birds come home. All this splintered purpose spent over the long dull stretch of days, the years fraying the fabric until the wind blows clean through life. One thread, one blossom, one grain of sand. Every bit absolutely necessary, but the world is the story of getting by without. I’ve had about all the time I can stand.

spent portents

All these pages peppered
black with words,
trite poems and
weathered love letters,
strung instruments and
rosined draw,
only to say the dead
stay dead, and
all this lonesome
lives alone.

the hours until

The chainsaw blathers long past
sundown, the conspiracy to fell
all things lovely and true
drags on, slabs of laden gray
and drowned blues laid like
the law inside empty yard and
the dark keening street.
How do the days know,
they heap it on—
hue by hue,
blow by blow

the broken earth wailing
true names in long
chains, matter passing
states, beloved flesh
now cold clay decomposing
despite all we call and
crave, a return to
the warmth we never
hold dear enough,
passing the hours until
the past is the only
place left waiting.

American Songbook (My One and Only)

There’s no winning this one
whether they sing until
they’re out of lyrics, or
they stick to the melody,
somebody’s going to get hurt.

They were there when
the kiss turned real, when
the heart blooms past its
beating wings and
all at once the music
swells, you sing along.

Listen, the words don’t mean
it until they touch you.
The music isn’t there
until you are, the stylus
singing out the spin.

heap

Uncanny how the hands
always fold, as if at long last
conceding the point, yet
stay in play on the sly
side of this daily aggregation,
these sins that come tumbling,
crumbs on the lips,
salt for the soil. A vast
glut of plastic gutting
Ahab’s nemesis, our evil
the heap of debris and
the burned down world.
So I gather my attrition
wind the clock with
dull routine and tiny hopes,
closing the loop,
sealing circles, sitting
footloose, arms open wide.
The long talk and the big dreams
all come down to broken
cups and buried cans,
the depths of the earth
only stacked up
rocks and ruins.

devotee

The record observes and
the memory compels,
witness to your troth,
the rigors of the ritual,
the rapture of your grace.
Some slow, strong kiss,
the evident reckoning
between the daylight
and your ghost. Still,

your words stray into
this dull bludgeoning night,
like the way your hips sway
as you ascend the stairs,
your spine stretched like
prayer, posed in the form and
phrasing, will and words
bound tight in my mind
as I read you again, aloud

the right now of it
all tongue and lips and
anxious teeth as again
the condensed breath and
low animal sounds
seal this moment like
fingertips pressed against
the unspoken, the summer
floor spread with shed
hesitance, waiting in
the words.

hubris

The words will accumulate without any encouragement. The words will flex and coil, out there in the common tongue. They strain and gall and gather, each one a secret seed. A piece of something too big to fit in any one skull. Even the least syllable more than a mouthful. Even the shortest sentence served hard, parsed out like bricks for wolf worn pigs. Even these claims and cautions are hijacked by the ten thousand rivals and the rigorous grift for meaning. The long haul left back somewhere on time’s old roads. Tomorrow changing flags as it’s read.

I’m not that kind of man, whatever kind you name me. It’s not that sort of story, whatever the story told. Dying in these daily revelations. Stuck staggering around my cage. Circling this sickness, folding the forms. I’d lay it out as plain as day, but the days are all too plain. I’d save it for posterity, but I’m not that kind of writer. The day come due for deft elaboration, and I turn out all thumbs.

These are the letters never written, the books in the blood remetabolized as dreams and ghosts. That train in the station waiting in a huff, the busy dither of jobs and bodies, cups and headphones. The glazed trail of daydream eyes, of strangers and stops.  A touch of color, a flash of sky. The words all playing freeze tag, wild in the idle of the mind. This the unmarked stone, awaiting the rise of the revenant.