toxicity

Shine all you want sun, you still won’t touch me. Pray all you want, the blessings won’t bend the will of the world. The wind rises, the ache expounds upon its thesis, pain the way flesh navigates the music of the spheres. I don’t say, and no ones asking. Just the clock and the calendar playing telephone pole as the train pulls away. Flipping through the pages so the figures seem to move. Progress another way to record the rate of decay, this heart counted out in the time of there will be no other. Even the muses know I was never worth the words.

There is nothing here but the vagaries of leaf and wind. Nothing but the relentless passage and the portal to hell. Just distraction and mitigation, and not a thing to say. Stretch the words across the wounds, fill the blank pages with inklings and itches scratched, just a fuse without a match. Just a wheel with nowhere to turn. The nights are a grind, the days are spent. Ten thousand ways I miss the mark, the darkness and the lost spark, the constant of the world working the wounds and all my time apart or alone. Come home to be whittled away by the burdensome blood and the wrongs I can’t get around. Come home to play out some role they needed filled so they could keep running amok and going astray. 

I don’t pretend that it isn’t all my own doing. I can’t say I don’t deserve every lick and clout. The chemistry and the cage, the ruckus and the rage, there is no one to blame but me. I have nothing to offer, but that doesn’t stop them from asking. I have nothing to say, but I cannot shut up about it. I am only tolerated, I am only suffered, an object lesson to drape in pity and contempt. The water always wins, but only after whole generations of waves are broken upon the stubborn rocks. Obdurate and intolerable, I hold any line I stand upon. A calamity sitting and smoking, waiting for this sickness to at long last end. The beautiful blue flecked with green and gold, I grow ugly and old, waiting for the end I asked for. Tired of being poison to the ones that claim to love. Tired of being pummeled and hearing about how I broke their bones. 

burning down

The day goes on and on, like it’s cornered you at a party. The day just keeps at you, like some guy you’re going to deck. It makes the hard pitch, it has the patter and the pressure, but it doesn’t make the sale. The sun slips away, well past the point when it’s almost gone, it has tipped out leaving the sky aflame as dusk shows its hand. You sit and you smoke, a joke only you never laugh at. You sit and you smoke, watching the world burning down. 

The trees sway and tremble, the last mottled light dappling their leaves long past the point of transubstantiation, the sugar shaker shutting down for the growing night. The long shadow reaches over rooftops and past their crowns, as traffic spreads the flesh around, ghosts and glimmers dancing on street and steel. The sky yet to meet its impasse as the soft blue sky follows the moon’s latest revelations around. Negative space shimmers between the tattered shroud of leaves as the breeze tries to make up its mind. The smoke rises, the mystery and the altar, the offering between minds.

The wreck washes up the way it’s supposed to, revealing shards and ribs, the structure only architecture as the hull is humbled on the reef. Crows rise sideways across the incoming moon, the roost left to conjecture, twilight seething through every skin. Too early for the wishing stars and ancient wanderers, to late for love letters and lucky kisses. The work of the ordinary always being torn down and assaulted, Sheela-Na-Gig and electric guitars a fuzzy fete into the gloaming. The weight of want, the lessons of lack, smoke soaked skin and tobacco flecks on your tongue. Ever the once and future while declaiming time is a construct, the dumb proclamations of humankind digging its own idiot grave. The hubris a feature, the monkey climbing to show its tail, while you rant and rail, the inevitable right up on you. 

looking for the moon

I went outside to look for the moon, to see the moon and think of you besides. The sky all stars and silhouettes, the scrub pines and hedge cypress against the light washed night. But the moon was missing, and you were too, though I didn’t expect to see you. Even the moon avoids me, even the stars take a pass. The night too far gone into the morning, the next day too near to count. I check the calendar, I check the clock. Another set of maybe sos and guesses not. Satellites and wanderers, the winking goodbye of a passing plane. 

Sleep won’t come easy, and there’s nowhere left for dreams to go. A feeling slow in passing, a pillow tossed and wadded through the dawn. Daylight lingering in the window, the television busy being on. Letters to be written no longer, presents only left in the past. Nothing but the leaned on alma mater, nothing but the photos in the roll. The songs that stick to once shared spaces, the litter always playing in the wind. The afternoon with the moon overstepping. The night so thick so fast so long.

Now the wind is tripping through the treetops. The moon is up there waxing in the pines. The day left late in a few hard strokes, a totaled motorcycle and a kid busted up in the debris of a redwood fence. Another dent in my old jitney, the broken mirror sheered clean once and for all. The neighbors gathered to parlay and gossip, the cops on the driveway in scads and swarms. More unwanted gifts, more chores moving up the list. Another story with no one to talk to. The sky given over to the night. 

heart problems

In the age of flagrancy there is little that is revelatory, the moon from the blue, the books in the red. The buried bloom, the bared root. The teeth that have never shown for smiles, the heart that wants for some other tautology. Office holders openly advocate murdering their constituents while others in the government sit shiva as accessories, stealing, and sucking the nation dry. The attacked and the neglected conveniently at each other’s throats, while the world is parsed and pitted for Monopoly tokens and fairytales. The heart dies slow, but who doesn’t in this pandemic. 

Every day the trouble grows greater, every day I matter less. Another worldly inconvenience, another ghost dragging a corpse that just won’t drop. The sky full of flies and fireworks, the moon sneering with contempt, nowhere to be and nowhere to go. The slow rot of obsolescence, the dismal creep of senescence, the heartache and the burdened breath. The stars keep time while we sputter and burn, bursting all at once, fizzling out on the wasteland landscape. A touch that turns it all to trash, the words only for the last episode’s rehash. 

There is a sort of crime under cover of authority that only calls for death. You wield a gun or gavel, you hold a title for some term, your corruption is only truly answered with your vicious, violent death. You want to play cops and robbers, you don’t get to be both for free. You move your funny money in the dark to take food and shelter from real people, you need to be put to the fire. Too foolish to allow people to live their lives free and unmolested, you don’t need to exist. I am through abiding by the laws of the unaccountable, who rely on goons and liars to enforce their will. I am dying, but I will not go alone. 

the hammer sounds

The beat down gets busy once it knows where you sleep. It falls on you in the softened darkness of the room where you scratch at sleep, it hits you in your dreams and days, it strikes out of your eyes in the mirror. This pain begins the slow estrangement, the false duality of body and mind, the brain there to cool your blood as it charges towards its next fated engagement. You wake and the hammer sounds, uncertain of skull or heart or the set alarm. Just you rushing fast towards the place where you await the self, the bone and sinew, the sigil strung through your guts and marrow. The place where you just miss the moment every time. 

There was a moment half a moon ago. There was the morning star alight at dawn. The tire sound and the wounded man too blind to give direction leaning into the turn, street signs hard to read with your half life eyes. A handshake in the driveway after you picked him and held him steady, all in the dawn’s early light. The weight of the world heavier in half by the diffuse photons stippling the day with their charge. There between the general and the special, there on a scale where some thoughts are inevitable, though seldom helpful, came another story you’ll never tell. 

The body emerges from the shower, warm and slick and still not right. The towel sloughs away at the glistening skin, the sore joints and loosened bones click and clatter, sharp reports on several fronts as the pain reminds the mind of its primacy. The words come later, maybe beneath the sheets as the sleep won’t work, maybe in the heat and steam of coffee coming cup after cup. The words come and disperse their quanta, colliding at surprising velocities, the momentum of that famous formula spilling out your mouth. The impact of lack and mass getting a move on, the nail that stands out seldom outstanding, cudgeled and clouted about. The day never needs to spell it out, the words never needing much rope. The poet misses the point as again the hammer comes down.

transmetropolitan

This is the light that comes to pass, this is the blinding sun through the windshield. This is the light loosed at last, the arrival of the fiery horizon. The doves stalled upon the fence, the sparrows busy in the yard. This is the city never known, the crowded crosswalks and the fitful traffic. No heady sense of purpose ringing from the bones, no draw to the yawning direction. No skin of brick and barter, bathed in sound and shadow. Driven, not like a car or a blazing heart, but like a spike pounded down into the ground. It is this, the breadth of sky, the depths of dirt, and the business of being in between.

The mind is full of what it is missing. It is filled by whatever it happens upon, bluestone and sarsen, limestone and gypsum. Wooden joists and steel girders, plaster glass and concrete. The miles of steel and iron and tarmac that wander to and fro. Money is magic, it is the death of the imagination, stacked symbols and errant decimals. Tough talking dandies and their murderous mentors that visit no considerations past their glut and greed. The great envisioned cities of tomorrow now only fronts for continued thievery. Bullets to the breadbasket and the clatter of brass. Blunt force trauma the going rate for doing business.

The day hits hard, the dreams come loose, mythical beast wander wild in the streets. The ferocious assault upon the gods of life and the law of plenty have called down furies of heaven and earth unleashed. The shining of the city on a hill the glow of the inferno up on its hind legs, the graven gods of the watch and wallet slapped down by the blood and bones of the waking world. The parched throat, the burning sky, the answer of the very air abounds. The fields turn to dust, the peoples wander, the avaricious thieves keep stealing with all the hands they have. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow never more. We awaken all at once, too late so long ago.

dem bones

There’s always tomorrow I say, only having ever known today and the vast, vanishing past. I crawl out of bed before I’m finished sleeping, I don’t get started until I’m through. Time is always talking trash behind my back, laughing like god at the plans I never bother making. All dread and drama and misplaced commas. All supply and demand and mapped out last stands.  I lose a little, I gain some pain, the sun it comes and goes. Sometimes I make out the constellations as I miss your kiss. I trip over something in the dark like I was made for this.

Everything’s connected she says as it all falls apart. Nothing has changed she says as nothing is ever the same again. Them’s the breaks, them’s the rules, the crumbling cookie, the tumbling dice. I never had the jump, I only had the reflexes. I never had the answers, I only had the words. The shadows stretch, the night unfurls, I leave the porch light on. The gate is locked, the doors are shut, the dogs work their way around every corner. The music plays and I sing along, even though there’s no words to the song. Yesterday is always playing tomorrow never comes. 

Look, I know I’m nothing special: a scratchy track on a garage sale album. An unsigned handprint in the cracked cement. Bills to pay and miles to go, the stillness of a hidden lake, the ravages of a rough road. A sight to see, a box to check, a letter never read again. I collect scabs and scars and bone deep aches, an awkward limp, a pain in the neck. A quote that they misremember as they lift my style like sifted strata, like a crime scene pealed off finger print. A plate excavated in pieces. A song only remembered by a line or two, the singing long gone still lingering, somewhere all those tomorrows ago.