the regrettable

 The stars are out even when you don’t see them, beaten at once by the boundless blue sky and the blazing yellow sun. The thoughts exist even when you don’t think them, spinning there in the circuitous grooves of the ethereal wax, your mind the stylus instilled to the inevitable. This spilling inside out self and sense, the thorough stirring of the every element in the mix, the prosaic to the poetic to the cyphers and the figments in and out the dreaming. The tables turn, the candles burn, every sinking sun takes away the breath and leaves the breathing. We weren’t before and we won’t be later, the scuffing of shoes, the shifting of labors. We are in the midst of our imagining, the regrettable day only going to go around the corner and come up behind you wearing a fake mustache or a wig. The moment only witnessed in its extinction, the self just a voice in the mirror.

Outside the hazy day begins to breathe a little easier, the smoke thinning in the blue gray gaze of sky. Flies light upon the flesh, beetles speed along the concrete, traffic passes as if it must. The unwatered tree drops its leaves upon the dusty earth and the jealous ants that swarm and huddle and madly thirst as the dirt goes dry. The crows that croaked and cawed have taken wing or hopped a fence or are keeping their own counsel. All that is certain is that the heavens are less without them, and the world hurts down to the foundation. From the firmament to the fundaments, the diminishment speeds as the matter huddles, everything hurtling away all at once. Learn to want more or learn to live in the unbearable less. Contend with the contentions or manage the machine.

The hours creep, the words have gone, the heart set many miles away. The day recedes, the ceiling weighing in on the cluttered roomful of empty. Counting in cats and lingering kindnesses, watching the sky and the pines. Soon the moon makes its way, flouting the fractious bonds of the night. We all scrape and fawn, swayed by angle and albedo, spun by the myths built into our blood. The television warm tones of remembered yesteryears, a busy two year old thinking the landing was old news based on the space family Robinson and that awful Dr. Smith. Jabbering away as plastic jungle animals and toy soldiers continued to contest the rug. The older lore, the revealed gods and plentiful werewolves had to wait, though gods and monsters were busy there already. This was long before the calamitous soul was loosed in the child, back before the sorrows of school and the long body count. The moon yet magic, all the mistakes save one still waiting in the chamber. 

idiot ouroboros

 I’m still working up the courage. I’m still thinking about loose ends. It builds, it eases, it begins to build again. It’s not news, it’s not a current turn, I’ve been like this for many miserable years. It’s part of the kind of impossible I wound up. It’s part of the picture I can’t see. It might be that it loves company, but it still ends up alone. All the world seems to move in another direction, while I keep on keeping on straight to hell. I know, I know, I’m repeating myself. It’s all I ever do. It’s all I’ve ever done. Lights on, lights out. Again the lonely corner. Again the long long night. 

The night is a little star stunned, a little hazy. The moon is out and making a mess of it. I watched a little this and that. I took a shower and shaved my head. It’s all too much, I’m all too much, the bounded in a nutshell but for bad dreams kind of king that I am. Delusions and allusions and the soundtrack always on shuffle. Always more limits, always less light, the foregone conclusions and forever just never with time to kill. Every single day now taking a little more. No fault, no clue, just sorrows and furies and nothing up ahead.

It’s getting closer. It’s dumb and it’s frightening, but it seems the likely course. I hope I stay my extinction long enough to put my defects to good use. There’s just so many fewer pieces left, and none of them fit. There’s no one here and there’s no one around, and nobody talks anymore. They just type snippets of idiocy back and forth, too busy fragmenting themselves to sit through a conversation, or to bother with yet another burdensome fool. The swerve the tech took eludes me, though I tried to keep pace. Yet another in an endless loop of failures and failings, this idiot ouroboros made of words and weeping. Yet another candle in desperate need  of snuffing out.

stipulate

 At last there will be a last gasp, a tremble before the final curtain, the structure’s vast collapse. All the burdens borne, all the grief beset flesh at last released. The unfinished business finished none the less, the work, the love, the leisure done at a stroke. Shapeless and changing, given all at once away. Neither woe nor consolation, neither trick or treat will reach. The lassitudes will be paramount as the flame gutters and goes out. It isn’t really a whole lot of help while the clock is still on, but like the heat death of the universe or the sun’s eventual devouring of the inner planets, it is the kind of perspective that gives some comfort to a certain sort of mind. Like a will that will stipulate the journey of all your loot and treasure, but for the moth and maggot set. 

The day arrives a little busier than usual, with fire truck and ambulance flashing their lights in front of a neighbor’s drive, and the animals restless to begin the rituals of the dawn. I remain agnostic to the immediacy, bound by blankets and an aversion to the world to my meager bed. The dogs at least delay the parade of the lost and the dead and the evil all about. The music softly shuffles and the cool ministrations of the fan feel almost cold as the hour of alarm approaches. It is easier than waking, shed of some distant dread or amniotic comfort, the aura of the other story and all the strange explanation abruptly dispatched for this same old sorry notion of worthless flesh and bones. A name I never took to, and the reasons left unmentioned.

The hours creep, all dust and grease. The empty is always on. Little tricks with dirt and bricks, tiny tasks all flame and ash. The war rages on while the election theft is telegraphed, vile brutal cowards and the associated guilty doing on camera what they once did beneath the cover of night. The bright and the beautiful lose direction and are stricken down, falling to plague and injury, and the ubiquitous hailing bullets. Knowing how you’re going to go is half the battle. Unless stricken down sooner, political violence will take me along with many, many others. No one wants me much anywhere, I am unwelcome even where I live, but my blood spills just fine. The earth and I still sing along, same old chestnut, same old song. Now that my fire’s all but out, I am but delayed dirt, the watched pot of passage here for now. Loosed, perhaps then purchase for fresh roots. Finally a chance for something good to grow.

skull sutra

 The night at its darkest, the dream’s encasement, the troubling music from organs unknown. Waking from the healing witchcraft, from the angle of insistence, the memory of the entangled limbs and breathless kisses between cures. Sore on down through the various barriers, the concrete poured so deep, the sledge breaking and burying at once. These whims and constructs batted about by the animal, these spells and prayers that poison the perception, tricks of light and mind played havoc by the loosening of the forms. Nightlight and toothbrush, mirror and towel, all the shifting from dream to being and all the in betweens. The head always hardest where it knows the least. The bone bragging calcium and carbon, the brain gossiping goo.

The nightly repast of dread and sorrows, art guitar noodling and the buffeting of the fan. The reading lamp yet another lost love memento, the starved heart and the unyielding stars, some secret syllabi of every lesson missed. Postcards and photographs, and the places where the conversation broke clean off. The ardor still fueled by the flame of the first fire, teeth slick with coffee and gravity, these smiles that cling to the skin of all this honest want. Sinking slowly beneath the strata of burned bridges and blown chances, the madness of the meat and the beaten on bones, flesh slack and turning towards dust. The constellations slide on by while the spider of the mind spins its busy webs. 

The morning holds the darkest parts, the tomb and the passage, the heart and the earth. Things take shape between sense and thought, between dawnings and the dawn. The ghost holds court, bathing in blood, sealed in the skull. Placeholder, face maker, thread bearer to the great weaving. Goggling bloodshot eyes, wearing the sagging skin and worried mien, the mask full of capers and caveats and the uncouth truth. These bones tossed and twisted upon the tides of the dreaming, thoughts sloshing over into the brick and mortar world, the dirt and bug bound opulence that the words are birthed from. The healer’s percussive ministrations interrupted by these idiot dogs, the breathing tethered to the ache of this failed form, awake in the coursing night. The way yet witnessed in the shapes we shared. The touch still missed never truly gone. 

spoons and sails

Everyday is all wake up and wonder, everything always hurry up and wait. The fever breaks and you barely notice. The moon sails by and it barely makes a dent. A blunt bowl, a glutted sail, a luminous spoon spilling shine in a drive by sky. Not a hint of that as you spin on your heel and get to work. The padding to the picture, the packing peanuts of the words as they aggregate in all the negative space all around it, the margins around the real where the descriptions fit. The move from dream to disclaimer, the singing in your sleep becoming the song droning on. This ache, this absence, this shape that thinking makes around the thought that is gone. 

The dark night of early mornings, the reading lamp and all the constellations that got along without you, the absence in the song something about the space in the room. The waves of light fussing with the shadows and humming along with the skins, photons bombard the neighborhood bandwidth jostling loose the sparks. The adjustment to the atmosphere as the scene is set, the temperature and the impending doom. A sip of water and the trickle through the mouth, the small moments and the fleeting joys. Then the rush of thoughts and the map, the heart heavy not this but that. Scale and placement and the current of your urges. The shape and the negative space.

Flesh and phantom, the aches and pains and frets and phrases. The press of the breath against the blazing moment, the drag from perception to conception, the scrapes and bruises as you put it all together. Hungers and appetites and the lingering upon the bones of the one that is missed. The longing in reveled sense and air thickened by the insistent anticipation, the ley lines and the old lists, the ritual spilling in slow ripples along memory and prophecy. The singing of the taken shapes, the droning of the blood’s demands. Every breath a burning down, each thought an effigy, written in the angle of enchantment. This alchemical transmutation of flesh to fuel as your flame burns bright. 

manifest

You might stand time’s test, you don’t know. By now you might already even be a cult, who’s to say. I go by a book or two, but that’s mostly all I got. A corner and a call sign, a preponderance of words. So drolly as we fade away, so glibly as we grieve. We are seen or we are occluded, the dream unraveling in the day. These small pleasures, these endless sorrows, we do and we don’t and the scene goes on and on. From squirrel leap to bird scrabble, from root to vine these tendrils reach and stir. The clock is on until the clock is gone, we are counted until we no longer count, still we may stir the earth and atmosphere. You might be forever, but it will always be too soon to tell.

The coffee scalds, the coffee cools, the coffee swallowed just the same. Inky as the dreams of prophecy, shiny like a lucky coin. The incantation a conversation between chemistries, the tithing to the blood, the tide of ignition rolling through every breath. The stitches in the seams of seeing, time passing between bleed and burn, you always riding the wave you watch. The stretch where you meant to speak and the path of the stumbled tongue, never that permeating version, never a resolution to the tension’s secrets. In the field behind the fence the school is being mowed. Something in the way the grass smells, something in the difference between the sense and the expected ideal. Lost thought to current bird, flight forever a becoming and its lapse. A sip of magic mirror black coffee, the tape moved along.

It is the ache of each mismeasured breath, it is the pain of the shadow shook loose. The day presses on, never waiting for you to keep up. It rolls like thunder, a temblor set upon the moorings of your heart. The old frequency where the moon was always whispering away. The elder channel before the elders were there. So it was and so it is, always entangled, always in the dark. The sorry amplifier, this insistent bandwidth. Leaf blowers and riding mowers and Counting Crows, as the wind breathes clean and a kiss nuzzles the nape of your neck. The habits unacknowledged always make their mark, little scars and drear repetitions, letters and pictures and odd parking lots. The world burns and the calendar is counting, a cup of coffee, the talk about the stars. I take a swallow, I see you shine. 

the whether

 These are not the days we savor. These are not the joyful hours. The morning smoke from the blazing fires, the choke that grows throughout the afternoon, the early evenings clouds and winds that loosen the cord and drives the clouds through the burdensome blue. We make do, sweating through the swelter, holding our places as long as we can bear. We do without, the thick air full of exhaust and heat, the little room crowded with dust and the sorrow down the years. The walls closing in, life on the downstroke, living in the painful dwindle at the end days’ end. The will is all won’t, the whether, weather or not.

The day is a faraway country, the sun a long lost tongue. The burn quickened dusk comes thick with mosquitoes and broken hearts. The night always off to a staggered start, its parade of wounds and wishes ever more vicious as the losses add up. A bite, a bruise, a cut or a scrape. Sprains and tears and breaks. A body can only be so much. The moon in bloom, the sea of sky a seethe of gray and black. Bones strewn about the rooms, a wheelchair dragged through the darkened halls, the near by hills obscured in shadow and smoke. There are fewer and fewer avenues of escape. Doors left unlocked because there aren’t dangers that would dare. Windows left staring because everyone breaks and looks away. 

The mystery shook me off years ago. The moon and me have long since parted ways. I only know the short cuts, the old ways of moving without hearth or home. The knife and the flint and the starry tomorrows. The wandering of the beasts, the lift of the moonlight taking to the sea. The songs sung by old bones about the rain, the limbs of a lover seeking shelter from a storm. The hail of fists and boots, the sticks and the stones. The falling off in ones and fews as the years burn away. The changing stories to fit the latest lies, the outside all that’s left of us. No more shared beds, no more love letters. The roads were chosen, the sides divided. All that’s left the consequence and the barn owl’s screeching. Pale wings against the gathering grays, the moon’s shift sliding off her shoulder, the burnt smell of scorched earth everywhere.