half a moon to go

Here we go, the wheel turning fast. Here we go, the berated gift of vision. The shadows grow as the dancers reel. The scent of smoke and the rise upon the wind. The tumbled skies bright and bedazzled as you smudge your chambers and light the candles. Frantic panics beat their wings within your shroud, troubled grumblings from hideaway child and the windows giving in. Awake within the measured breath, you are at once winged in ascent, the moon on the water encircled with the word. All that you carry carrying you.

I crack my back and shift my hips, trying to briefly turn the tide of this rough decline, shifting between aches like bare feet on hot sand. It is a dance of diminishing returns and intermittent respites, leaving me the questionable benefit of at least being on brand. One foolish squander to the next, here a star, there a forest. Carrying memories of kisses and coyotes and circle of paw prints padded in the sand. Small fires and cold nights, never knowing there’s always colder to come.

It can only be a temple, this clumsy conduit. It can’t help but be the journey, it’s the only thing you take. The days float past as the years flood in, drowning in the distance carried, wearing only want and wound. Little treasures wear away. One by one our compañeros ride off, leaving us alone as the sun goes down. Still we spin and spin. We turn, holding the world together dancing ‘round the flame. The fire smokes and cracks. Join hands and rise. 

the way it breaks you

It’s sorry about the news, sad about the horns, the song spinning thick as the scene pans around. It’s the trial and error, it’s the force of habit, go go dancers and the rabbit on the run. Sundown has hung around in the recursive strings and minor strains, the moon met night seeping in through every crack and keyhole. Hunger in the way you want it, beauty by the way it breaks you. A soul left hollow by a riddle. Footprints trailing straight into the tide. 

It is blood for the breath, blood for the bramble, the tangled shadows loom as I take the stars for a spin. Briar scratches and bug bit, I turn the slow table. Moon met halfway beneath the shrugged pines and early stars, I unwind these wants and whims. They fly like arrows loosed, bent on intent and wish. These unbidden directions, these wanton haunts that hook the heart. I close the circle and set to singing.

The night comes to small rooms in dimmed light and dust. It sits smoking, staring at a screen or window, at the cobwebs in the corners or the spider on the wall. It sits in grim rooms with the music ringing tinny from the phone. The alarm of the instant, the catch up touches of gray and the darkened weary eyes, the dull plod into the inevitable inferno the echoed dreams of the nevermore. The smoke always rising and the memories blur. The night and the thought of you and the empty bed again. 

gaze

Before you were you enough to recall you were wide eyed, your hungers bent to illumination, your vision pressed against every vivid skin. Along comes the light to burn away the placental tendencies, the flame now loose inside you, another facet to bear the fire. You awake in the world astir, language steeping through your senses, the self risen and churning with the unspoken. You point it out and say the word until the word is pointing for you. You say aloud all you see, until you see everything else looking too. Bite down on that forbidden fruit, the garden will never be the same. Welcome to the waking world. You are here.

Most of our lives are like wasp’s nests, built of what’s available by whoever happens to be around, unplanned but allowed the providence of legions headed in pretty much the same direction. Also, they are full of a shitstorm of pure vengeance and pain if you kick them hard enough. Swarms of stares and words and obligations, the harkening of the hive, whether we resist or oblige. Id and etiquette, empathy and appetite. The gaze an anchor of language and intent, a circuit to the unseen architecture that bends and binds, the monkeys never typing all at once. All awake within the power of the place you hold.

I remember everything. The soft touches to the leash lessons. The bare shoulders, the brushed back hair, the summer a silty weight against your skin. The hunger and the hallow, kisses and bruises. The recitation of the recipes. The devoted gaze, the clamber and sigh of knees and hunger, the sacrament of oath and salt. This I harbor in my heart, this lingers upon my breath. I bank away my witness. I saw you then, I see you now. The way the light wove its way along your stride. The way it made you look.

conceit

Blank page or blinking cursor, the meaning is what’s missing. The inspiration or the impetus or the stain of counted sins. The tools change the task, and we are ever measured by our lexicons. The metaphors where our stylus dropped, the verse we jumped in on, they ink us to this long missive. The deck is shuffled talk and tech and the local color. It’s the nature of the idiom, the truth of the work. It’s words on the page, or at least the conceit. The writing is the work, the rest is left to the reading.

I’m sitting on the back porch smoking with a squirrel. Writing is lonely work whether you’re doing it or not. A place you got put you are always getting away from, the steam of the aggrieved finally telling your side. A need to add words to a bunch of stuff no one needs to know. Spreading your troubles from town to town, scribbling whispers in strangers skulls, tagging your words on breathing bones. The combination of treading water and rising as blinding light that comes from smoldering stillness and practiced craft. The eternal urgency of the tragically mundane. An old man all dog hair and house slippers, playing at poems. 

Say it’s the birds or the blue of the morning. Say it’s the absent school bell and the dog by my feet, the tenacious strangeness of this presence, the missing piece ache clamped hard on my heart. The words were just passing through, marking me in the strata, my point in the plummet. Last line to last line, the language turned like worm dense earth, the animal all skin and game. Morning mosquitoes and dead end dreams and letters never written turned to bare laments. Lack and longing and barely the breath left to tell. A habit of tongue and static, this conceit of ink bleeding brick and rune.

all

All at once the wind comes up and all at once the trees alight, waving green and gold. The fire on your mind becomes the fire in your eyes, seeing always saying something, the smoke and mirrors until we appear. Awake in the world as the tides collide. Painted in kind words and ravening hungers, the whim and wonder lapping at the shores of the self. The scintillations of every present tension, all the now you can handle. All of us in it at once, a bright and boundless center and the sea of strings and sparks. Shimmering like leaves in the wind, scuffing up every surface with makeshift mirrors and algorithmic lenses. All these flames burning time.

It’s really the senses playing catch up, the words overwhelmed or the engine diverted. It’s what all that focus is for. Love and kindness and passion and hunger. The things that claim us and the things that make us, always looking out and ever in our hearts. We plunge and plunder and steal some souls and seal our fates. There are windows we leave open once all the doors are bolted. There are lights we leave burning even once we’re gone. 

The sky is bright and the wind is high, every bud and bloom, every leaf and limb bearing the blessing of the play along sun. The world does what it wants to and we keep the game afoot. Creeping through the undergrowth, crawling with intent. All eyes and appetites and origin stories. Catch phrases and frequencies and stretches of the spectra. Alive in the only time that will take us, now spilling over the brim and no one to say when. The flame we carry, the fuel we are. The wind full of pollen says it all. The wind says go. 

celebrant

The year the long way comes ‘round again, full of long rooted shadows and heart haunted rocks. The journey always a step at a time, this long toothed wander restless through time and continent. Roads older than the species followed over crest and crag, the deep tide of the cooling slabs of iron and stone expressed in bluff and peak, the old walk between hearts and hunger just another piece of cake. You take your turn at another reel around, from the pale thirsty filaments writhing around rock to the great splay of leaf and limb that sweeps clean your skies, you dance to polish all your stars.

The day drawls on here, the heat like a hush in the gray green light, slow and mosquito thick. The reach of your roots and the sway of your radiance touch my every breath, the dogs lying down and pollen everywhere. I shift my shoulders and clear my lungs. I see you standing beneath imagined trees, the rising and the fire. Your bones an old church, your blood the most devout of congregations, your foundation fixed in rock and firmament. The fire taking its heat from your shine. The altar only where your intention sets.

This is the story of the story you tell. This is the path where your feet touch the ground. One turn and all is same and different. One turn and the dark is coming hard. But your skirt sashays mischievously as your boots shape the earth, and you dance despite the song being wrong. Your day, the first of many others, all color and canopy. You stride along your bright and weeping path, a candle in the darkest night. You are the work and the earth. You eat the cake.

apostasy

Mostly, I know things don’t go this way. Mostly I know it’s me. The baffling bare knuckle of the everyday, calendars and traffic and the traveling sun. The way the ends won’t meet me halfway.    The way I never accomplish accomplishments. Nothing sticks, nothing lasts, and also I quit a lot. The world works one way, and I barely function at all. So, yes, I know the problem is me. Nice work, Columbo. 

So I sit here as the day goes long. So I sit here as the earth exudes its multitudes. Aphids, mites, and carpet beetles. A legion of the chitinous and winged tangled in my beard and crawling on my scalp. Mosquitoes, flies, and paper wasps. Eyes grainy with allergens and the green exceeds its bandwidth. I smoke long and slow upon the sacred path of diminishing returns. I turn over with my back to the sun. 

This is the path of attachment, the low road of letting go. This is the wash of warm shadows in the glow of the going gone. The consequences of being of such little consequence adding up in ache and drift, hunched beneath these ill fitting burdens and well earned beatings. The monster stays the monster, the beauty goes her way. This pause before the dusk comes calling, this settling of old bones and new mantles, the dying name and the bloom of the forever moon. The world spills away, awaiting your return while this absence looms.