foundation

Without a doubt beauty will

leave, without a pause it may

all go away, snuffed out

in an instant, altered in

the angles, heaven heavy upon

every crown, broken branch and

bent bough, the burden 

hurled up cradle and all,

the slow strike of scratched out

lightning across the lot of 

all this sparkle and pitch.

The world waves goodbye to

the luckless and the foolish,

the foot dragging along

the floorboards, the foundation shifting 

beneath each ache.

Oh root, oh revel— let summer

uncoil through soil and stone 

following the flower to the fruit,

merciless sunlight beating down

burnishing each burden

with a failing flourish,

the mindful moment 

disbursed as heat and light.

brick

There was a question 

posed I suppose by

the words’ weight and

the way they stack the deck,

by the side of the phrasing,

something in the degree

the slope takes to mitigate 

descent. Suppose it took 

a sky that shade of blue,

the sweat and stick of

heat and shimmer,

the obliteration of the atmosphere 

in these tragic captions.

There was something said

again and again, ritual 

prophecy and prayer,

a warning left behind by the wind,

that dry that seizes 

the breath in the breach,

the ask worked from want,

an answer left like a brick

chocking the tire in the drive, 

waiting for the wheel to turn.

enchanted

The sickness sticks 

from stem to stern

it thrives from shuck to jive,

a shambles dragging 

deadweight through

the bright blue of

the livelong day

the depths of the intention 

buried in the sediment

the one-way ticket

up and spent, breath to breath

all dust and dreck and slow

dying in dribs and drabs 

clockwork and wet work and 

this turning of the word

thick with breezy warm gloom.

The weeds are thick with wish and

worms in turn as each

dog takes its day and

these liminal bones

clack and thunk as

the socks come off,

the consequences left of

this service to the vast enchantment.

small loop

You read it and you think

maybe I read it wrong

so you find the line

going back a few,

maybe the poem misspoke,

maybe it took a tone

feeling the weakness bearing 

all the weight, whatever 

the wind or the way.

Maybe at last

you’ve been found out—

just a little meat

a puddle of blood 

a few greasy bones.

Another set of botched confessions,

dull stratagems pushing shadows 

all around, a small loop

shoving your greatest hits

up to the surface and 

down to your depths.

This suggestion, this assertion,

this cutthroat cull spilling 

blood to rust setting up

a say so. The words

caught you in a corner,

a heart all a pitter patter,

a breath that knows it’s spent.

inert

The flame separates the stick of incense from its soul, smoke curling upwards for a few laps before departing on the ferocious winds. The dull intention and the empty heavens torn silk before the exhausted earth and boundless sky turns again to extra words and clumsy embellishments. The feel of the fool’s nipped heel the whole of my identity, a tattered spectacle, hapless and chained to this decay. The mind exuded from the meat, thinking it is the exception rather than the rule. Like the tree cursing the sun and the soil for the limitations of its roots and limbs. Haughty stardust bleating and bleeding and shitting itself to death.

Once you slip loose from the story, the gravity of your interactions lose their abstractions and alibis. You keep mouthing off and counting cards, knowing each choice is futile, but you got to have something to do. Gone are all the old compañeros, ascended or descending or dead. Gone are all the equivocations now that the invitations ran dry. Like smoke, like shadows, like footprints beneath the rising tide. The world is not the earth, the wants are not the needs, the paths all dead ends or stations of the wheel. This recursive urge to say it out loud endures, to speak the same phrases again and again, like there will be a sudden outbreak of listening. 

The sun just keeps rambling on, westering on its way, throwing shade into the street. The shadows roil and shift, as if awaiting their transformation into their final form. Hints of jinn and angels, the host coiled just on the other side of veil, waiting to seize the loose parts of the mind and manifest. It suggests the unknown terrors that would visit me from the darkness of my opened closet as a child, with demons fashioned from old fashioned movie monsters and the enemies rallied against Scooby-Doo. Waking to my name whispered, body frozen in fear, choking on my attempts to call for help. I never knew that I would unbecome, a shapeless shiftless shambles, seizing hearts and embraced as the object of the torch and pitchfork set. I never knew that I would lose my place in the world, volatile but ultimately ephemeral. Furiously spinning my wheels as the earth consumed me. Smoke rising because there’s nothing to hold it  down.

humdrum

The tide of dust slowly swallows the static and the forgotten. Music seeping through the rat clambered walls, the separate faiths of song haunt the house while the ubiquitous bass thumping down the street. The low keeps diving and the ghosts keep driving nails through my skull, the last contrivance of reason long since hacked to pieces in the basement of my brain. Mercurial turns from sob to seethe dance me around the madhouse days, beating my head against the wall, my heart and head bricked into the masonry. Madness around every corner, help a curiosity from a quainter era. The gates all locked and the gardens a shambles even the serpent shirks. The fruit all fallen and not a tree in sight. 

The house is still, but there is no peace. Too many crimes committed inside its crumbling walls, too many sins have taken up residence beneath its eaves. Hell doesn’t happen all at once, people decide to inflict it upon themselves and others, dull and dumb and breaking out all over.  No one listening turns to no one to listen turns to the grunts and mutters of an obvious nutter. A reflexive cruelty built into society, law largely the need to kick them when they’re down, religion always punching in that direction. The flag of the abattoir waving proudly over every nation, the fires of perdition turning over the motor of each automobile, gifting the atmosphere with a little less breathing. The glow of screens and a single gaudy lamp reveal the latest abomination.

My old man bones hurt so I let old man moans slip, cursing under and over my breath. The old furies have returned to my blood, and with nothing to drug or distract there’s little to my act. I tire of the contempt and the mockery. I tire of the fear and the fleeing. A lonely and beset child grown into a lonely and feared beast, I have become a bouquet of quirks and afflictions, unpleasant and unlovable and irredeemable. It will only get worse as the private and professional fustigations and drubbings of the last couple of decades take their toll. The humdrum hell of each and every day worse than the next blaring away the most persistent lesson of my life. The sooner it’s over, the better.

bygones

Break out the boxes and blow the dust off the ledger. Open up every seal. Dig deep beneath each surface, pry loose the floorboards, slice through the trembling flesh. Slow cancers and ancient grievances, love letters and other curses, all that is buried rising with the least graze of the eye. Intention loosed and memory jostled, we wake in cold sweats and anecdotal frenzies, the forgotten clawing at our thinking. Nothing is ever over, things become other things, a wheel of infinite begats and bygones alive in our blood and breath.

What else is there but these scrawlings and mementos, this flicker of lucidity beneath the dreaming? The slow drip of heaven in the accumulated cuts and bruises, the occurrence of the lost thought as hope momentarily arises in the heart. The rituals and replications, the wreckage and the reenactments, we stand still as time passes through us. The lives we would live, the people we would be, the chances and the cheats we carry with us though they are the flimsiest of fantasies. Woulda coulda shoulda in an infinite loop, if only if only if only it had been.

I crawl in bed early, an old man shivering in the spring. The blood goes bad, the veins give way, the body grows cold as the years take hold. The trees are green, the blackberries are in bloom, children laugh and play in the street. The first ladybug of the season freeing its wings on the bird of paradise flower, catching a breeze in a bright swath of sunshine. Life goes on, with or without. Warming my bones, the litany of those that were lost and those that left settling in with me, I am buried beneath the consequences. They don’t even bother with goodbyes, they go bye bye and begin the next campaign. Old bones and a husk of a heart full of alarming absences, I hold on to the long gone.