world of wonder

The night comes hard softly, the weight upon you all at once, a limit learned by doing. All the moments left unstolen, all mistaken appraisals and summary judgments, the key broken off within the lock while the mechanism stammers and sighs. The somebody you wanted to be no one you’ll ever know. The ledger the red of debt, each breath the red of blood. You fell off the ride so hard so long ago, there’s not so much as a thought of getting back on. The horse made its choice, and there’s a whole world of falling yet to beat back the flesh from your bones. Debt, pain, and squalor your steadfast retinue, the night bumps the hardest once you’re down.

Time moves quickly among the orbits and contraptions, slipping around the rotations, counting on the eyes being fixed on the clock and the minarets. It walks with your ghosts, seeps in your bones with the cold, hides behind the mirror and inside your eyes. It plays with the numbers and delivers the medicine you don’t want to take. It takes everything, but it takes it from everything to keep it honest. It is the fire to your fuse, the boiling pot to your frog. It runs you down to rims, then it leaves you there. The road goes on without you.

Now it’s the long toothed hour, dead nerves and bad joints. The growing list of afflictions, the empty roster of kith and kindreds. The wishes still exist, but mostly as the curling smoke of snuffed candles, the stars so impossibly far that their burning might be over, the lover who never loved you, and never will. The bad art and self important raging. The cold hands of the earth, the deaf ears of the world. Before the meal is over, we will all be meat. The world of wonder devours as it shines. 

agency

The eyes feast

open before the leavings of

the light, the sensing 

ever bearing the brand,

the here I am

staring into the world

while the mind makes

mischief of the map.

The magic of the focus,

the framing and the lens.

So the sky goes, so

the flesh seethes,

this road from face to

ache, from the fence

line to the far horizon. 

Wishes and antecedents, 

the twilight the escape of

your warm name from

out my mouth. 

The wind always swooping in.

I anticipate your unfurling, 

the bent of bone

as if a wing embracing 

flight, all the tethers of

tongue and troth. 

Eyes open upon 

your skin and shine

the draw of want pressed

against the story

left beneath this kiss.

husk

There’s no reason now that the rhyme has curdled, blood rush indemnity and the sudden death of the day. It’s all answers now that the asking is done. The coffee sulks and steams in the ritual steel, bitter and so near to burning. There is a breeze in the back of the throat of night, tickling the stubborn heat from the air, my flesh stippled with hunger and hapless sweat. I am the perpetuity of intermittence. I am thick with ink and time.

Call out to me like there’s no tomorrow. Add my name to your list. Whether the settled bet or the diligence due, we’re all waiting for our cue. The sky shifts and night descends. The dead street and the parlance of cars. I will not return.

Brake light glow and the clamor of children. A flash of headlights leave their watermark in the eyes, sigils blazed into the brain. The nested promises, buried in the retinue of act and instance, stir slowly: the dawdling, sorry story of the journey from A to B. The algorithm nestling in the atrophied alchemy of the scuffing and the self. The melodious stories and the tenderness of the abandoned animal. I flip a switch. The lie of light fills the husk.

portraiture

I am now, and have always been, a disaster. Impulsive, volatile, undependable. Selfish, loutish, brimming with unyielding rage. I’ve never been able to hold a job or sustain a relationship, seldom grateful for a blessing, quick to hold a grudge in the petty vise of my heart. Thirteen years ago this October my father died, a few months after my mother broke her hip and was stuck on the floor of her house for ten hours before she was able to drag herself to the door to let help in. After a few months of commuting back and forth, I moved back to my childhood home in a town I despised and had left happily behind, ostensibly to “help” my mother. I was 41 then, I’m 53 now. The last twelve years have been a steady descent into deepening depression and madness, punctuated by a few daily routines and occasional chores. No one who knows me speaks to me without anticipating some sort of outburst of rage and vitriol, and no one who loved me hasn’t learned to regret it. I am a deficit now, as I have always been.

None of this is new. I haven’t had a good time since my early thirties. My mental illness and personality defects have remained largely untreated, self medication and unhinged furies taking the place of therapy and medicine, and other than a patch of group home work where my stubborn ability to hold the line and ability to take a punch proved assets, I have been an unmitigated burden upon the world. I lack direction, talent, and ambition. My long term plans usually end in suicide, and almost every time I awake I am saddened that I am still at it, even though we all know my particular jig is up. As the nations of the world race to extinguish life on earth, I’m here wishing I had something to smoke while all you jolly partisans burn your houses down from the inside.

I think I had a mild cardiac event earlier this evening, overcome with nausea, vertigo, and a cold clammy sweat. I haven’t dropped dead, unless I’m continuing my streak of crummy narcissism and gaudy verbiage into some baffling afterlife, but I feel poorly enough to be hopeful. As I write this, I’m sitting on the toilet thumbing the keys on this iPad, ignoring the little pains in my chest and left arm, planning on a shower before I crawl back into bed. All my aspirations are dead, no romance, no written legacy, no cabin in the woods. I am a fat, bald, diabetic without the illusions necessary to sustain the momentum of a life. I close in a cold sweat, dropping a note for some posterity that never asked to hear from me. I doubt I’m dead yet, but it feels like I have a shot at being gone. It’s not the sort of assurance I hope for, but it seems a turn for the worse on this long awful downhill slide. It’s no bullet to the head, but for the moment it is the feathered thing I am holding tight.

slump

It is the busted blue weight of this sky too early for all the other starlights, the long shadows and ghost town gutters, the shoulders slung so broke and old. It is the screams shook loose by the humdrum bass line and the fizzle jangle of the feedback guitar, earbuds boarding up the building. The weary reportage from a place torn by the wars to come, the high hill above the bent of time where the roads offer up their journeys, a bitter mouthful of smoke and oaths. The backbone backs down, and the high point shrinks into the rear view mirror, this listless passage gutting the husk. The day ends in smug punctuation and the scent of burning flesh. The coffee is still warm and goes down strong and slow. The calendar says there’s no more homes to go to.

The wind skates the pavement, slips the brickwork, fills every crevice with its long restless broke tooth tongue as it sweeps and swaddles, a lavish passing and a spill of flies. Traffic glides by as the day grows old, the hint of mingled means and seasons as the summer leans on the leaves. Hunched over this trash heap with bug skittered skin, all reason given only to sweat and ache. Dull in the clabbered atmosphere, the perceiver a slow sinking, the story of drowning as told by the fathomless depths. Despair in a shady patch, an anatomy of all ending. Clothes stick and billow, depending on the position and the breeze. A flag knows no direction save the way its blown. No clever name, no fitful description, just the beaten in your bones.

Maybe there is a letter, maybe there is a meal. Maybe you line up with the world according to your wants and local topography, the day breaks and you know what to do. The daily trespass and the old soft shoe might do, there’s no telling what people might be. What is there worth the telling, what is there that makes you stay. The tautology of the bilious palaver, the countdown of the hit parade. The nothing always has its fill, the grip a slipping rictus, the fall a long slow draw. Too much and not enough. The walk of shame, the dwindling of the light. The same old song breaking like a neck.

just this much

The day fills in the places where our expectations failed, the real deal versus the best laid plan, the span of sky that seals us in. Spring comes with all its blues and greens, the press of sun commanding skin. Spring comes with all its birds and engines. There is a space where the curtains loll open, a stripe of light against the wall. A sharpness there to bite the eye as I cower and cry, the unlit room forever closing in. The weeping a leaking of the heart, a place where the mind leaks out. All the brightness upon the palette dries to occlude the truth.

The seasons peel off, one after another, the years barely linger. All the chances are gone. Just words that no one reads, and words never written. The flutter and the rumble of passing engines, everyone so hungry and so excited, rushing around to fill in the blanks of their future conversations. The reasons always turning over as the cognitive dissonance becomes the zeitgeist. The zaftig explanations spilling despair over the unaware as the world sinks beneath the final horizon.

I feel it in my heart as if I was dying, but I feel it every day, so it’s an everyday sort of dying. The beat downs and bitten offs add up, and we die in our insistent repetitions, flies on the windowsill, moths to the flame. The striving lives choke out the broken and the slowed, the wheel turns, and the traveling company becomes the Broadway cast. The old ensemble disassembles, and even the words give way. The roles dwindle and the offers all dry out. Eventually even the scraps you’ll take become too much to ask for. Just this much, just this one day, just this moment. As if.

flower count

It’s right there in front of you, staring straight into your dead dumb eyes. The sharp pop between the teeth, the warm ubiquity of blood on the tongue, these words rooted in the sooth of your soil. All the true worlds lay hidden in the weave, so featured from foundation to firmament that they fill the fishbowl. We float surrounded by the spectrum that we sing, the long talk, the old story. A world of constant warning and meticulous wonder turning on the tip of the telling. The universe can’t get away from us fast enough.

An endless repast, a constant parting, the passage and the reel. We are among the recent verses, a few choice words spoken sharply and a little too loud for the room. Here it’s spring, now is then, the road can only open. The days barely graze, the words go on and on. Bleeding out with the world in bloom. Dissolving with the straying attention. It’s a tough life, deep into the epilogue. The going only ever gets gone.

The weather is turning by the bay. The ocean rocks away to the west, letting loose a lullaby, a sheen of rain set to the natal greens of the rolling hills along the coast. The voice of the forecast somehow calling down bridge and highway, through wood and weld some once dear ghost, a lost love or beat poet as memory gives way to myth. Blackout mornings fumbling with the keys, the stairs a hollow half step, voices down the hallway, TV through the door. All the ancient derelictions, skipping school and stealing books, the random cackling vandals and the line gone dead. The strange winds that left me bent and friendless now remind me of the flower count in itch and reddened eyes. It is what it is until it’s something else, and then it’s all that and the night before too.