I was a lover

Hungry with nothing but a toothache to chew on, the night works its way into my lap. Something wrong with the body, the body language follows suit, leaning into one pain to avoid too much of another. It’s the sort of thing the animal knows, gut and limb and the untithed mind telling stories out of school. It’s the sort of thing the ghost will tell you if you get too reckless with the instrument. The flame may pass in inferno and in spark, jumping from vessel to vessel, abiding in the unyielding dark. The flame still burns in feckless ember and bright conceit, though the temple has long since burned down. 

A second cigar, the street gone dark, quiet for the night before garbage day. The same scene as the cold closes in, cold fingers and dimly lit screens, the ghost always closing in as the words seal the circle and the story goes again. The same complaints of blood and bone, of love unrequited and the same old song. The same refrain of memory and fantasy, lovers returned despite it all, a cloud for a cloak and sunflowers for a crown. Working the ember through the leaf, all my efforts to end in ash. The attendance of the station of the altar of the unseen.

We all live in some sort of story. I’m not saying I’m exempt, it’s just that my stories are part of a world that’s all but gone. It’s part of the natural order, the ending of a branching, the blooming of the new. It’s the other nature— not the stroll through the majesty and the mystery, but the pop gone weasel, the brutish tooth and claw. This senescence mirrors my uselessness, a young man’s skill set in a broken down old man, limits that I never expected to live long enough to meet. Only the wisdom of the fool that touched every fire twice, a busker’s patter and a juggler’s touch. An embarrassment of letters making claims the ass never had to cash, mistaking boredom and poor choices for the hand of fate, going all in despite the deal. The spaces left in a life left burning. Only assorted scorch marks and smoke spilling up the eaves.

little bird

I’ll admit I haven’t given it my all. I haven’t even hit the books, ordered by silhouette, revealed in color photographs whose colors I don’t always see. The little bird in the city tree late in the afternoon, flitting from branch to branch, browsing deftly in the late season greenery you get after a California storm. The dusty deadfall yard at once lush and verdant, the brown shrubs and drought starved dirt alive with the kiss of rain. It looks almost like a wren, it moves not unlike the red breasted nuthatches I see patrolling the pines. I couldn’t tell you anything about its colors, as is my constant cross. 

I missed a lot of acts I loved, always broke and with a pronounced aversion to crowds, I never was much one for making any given scene. At 16 I saw Wall of Voodoo, Divinyls, Missing Persons, and the English Beat, but was sick in my car with sunstroke when the Clash went on. Laurie Anderson, my first big art crush, canceled a show I had tickets to in San Francisco. I saw Tom Waits during the show that became the concert film Big Time, despite a prophetic dream that came true during his performance. Shane MacGowan ditched me twice, his own adventures leading to cancellations nearly a decade apart. The second time he slipped me was at a Guinness Fleadh where I managed to catch both John Prine and Elvis Costello, so it didn’t sting nearly so much. There are acts of love in the witness, the attention owed to the beauty that touches your heart. The list of sins and infractions always greatest in omission.

Dusk has come, and like my father while he lived, I smoke as the evening arises. I live in my father’s house, stare across this devastated legacy while I wait for unseen stars to bear out their constellations. I care for my mother as she sinks into further dementia and senescence while the foundation cracks and the firmament reveals its less discrete portents. Life goes on as this branching withers away, our devotions only carried on haphazardly as the earth receives its own. A devotee of the open stance I take what comes, everything coming down to where to put my hands and feet, the rest too great and reckless to reckon. A little bird, at work in the world, the open yard spitting green as the leaves decide their fate. Last words buried deep in the turn of the soil, this witness among the words unasked as life strives past my days. This witness all I have to offer to the end. 

another song about the rain

It’s been a while since it rained here last. The next one forecast is a chance on down the way. Cold and clouds and the waning moon is all my skies provide. The night and the ministry of memory, some old song and a dozen lives disappear, returning to the earthquake rattle of the window by your bed. A train, a trace, the draught of grace minus the trickle through the beard. Drink deep enough to drown the dreaming, smoke long enough to bend the memory to the will. The heater goes quiet and the house takes a chill. A heart full of things I can’t live down, and the long road down from the going wrong, 

It early when the room closes in, crowded with song and smoke and mean old me. I’m crawling on the bottom, getting one breath of every three, beset with this burning ache from root to crown. The heart staggers though it’s bursting, a clumsy man beset with countless stairs and an unfortunate tumble, the sad provocation as it races to the basement. The shadows sift and soften at the beckon of the light, blue plumes and the shifting skins of screens in this amber elder pall. Dust and unsettled bones, a stirring in small circles. Tears and the portents of the coming storm. 

It’s not even ten o’clock and the front door’s locked. Midnight still a skip and a hop off, and the gates are closed. The broken clock, hands always straight up at twelve, sells the same old lie without a tick or tock. The table is laden with books and dust, the ones I’m still reading to the ones I gave a rest. There are words I won’t manage to see, things I’ll never think to say. There are letters I am longing for and letters I never sent. Something I want to say to someone I never knew who’s long since gone. Something I want to hear that I wouldn’t believe if you swore on a stack of blues. Just a bunch of stuff I think I know from so long ago it may as well be a Bible story. Just a lot of words so heartfelt they might as well be from a song.

beauty

We are the mark of the unique threaded through our inheritance, the distinctive iteration of factions of proteins stumbling through the chances and utilities. Brushstroke and handwriting, fingerprints and the culture added to the culture that carries over, the stitchwork of the distinctive strings. We speak in the minds of the times, plus or minus decades or days. Those now extant and unwritten, crumbling into memoir and saga, that wisened eye always a little ahead of the telling. The last thief to sign their name on the hapless galleys, the tolling of the eternal. All the heavy lifting goes unnoticed save for those wagered in the vagaries of the game. 

Watch as the phrases share bandwidth and trade breaths. Watch as the enemy changes shape. These are the tricks of the trade, the tried and true lies every devil you know thinks is your due. The service of hard longings and secret wishes, the deep machine in the monkey mind, a series of dots and dashes and a few tripped switches. The fields full of the legions of the empty cupboards fed scraps for the honor of dying for the contemptuously laden table. No matter who crashes the vehicle, it’s always the enemy at the wheel.

These are the drums I tire of hearing, the rattle of the saber, the favor of the flag. Perdition is built on the bones of grasping ghouls displayed in crown and epaulets, the drift into gaudy abstractions as all the treasures fill a few castles, with a few words strategically scattered sparsely over the gardens of the dead. It has been a disease in the soul of this failed state well past the limits of my memory. To be of this tribe that preaches murder as freedom, so sick with evil that we resist justice by reflex. Born into this violence, I long for beauty as it is destroyed by habit and fiat. I dream of beauty, however foolish my dream. 

in it

Dusk comes, but the dark came earlier. Night falls, but the bright blue sky hit first. I know where my feet are supposed to go, but still I miss my mark. I step dutifully to the simplest of chores, but I fail to meet my standard. The old ideation, blown brains and swinging husks, the heavy handed hyperbole of the de facto narcissist. The doom laden brow of the dimwit too frustrated to know where to drop the hammer. I sit, thick with this inconsolable sorrow, like I have so many nights and days. I sit, deep in the labyrinth without a Minotaur in sight, hollowed out from these decades of hard thoughts.

Doors keep closing, people leave and keep their distance, I keep cleaving away the possibilities. The broken habits and the strange compensations slow to a laden grind. The power is still on, but there’re more gaps in the magic than completed circuits. It’s an old saw, a quaint waltz in a bombed out dance hall, this tired banging of the drum. It’s even worse from this end of the words. You do what you know, and you take your licks. Each of us a one off, a candle among billions of other flickering flames. The self you can manage, the self you’re left to be. The light will find its way.

Last night I surfaced from a drowning dream, the fear upon me and death bearing down. I woke gasping, clinging desperately to the tether of living breath, bodily pleading for my life. The weight of this dolor heavy on my racing heart, bewildered tears at this being of no reprieve,  the mad gnashing at guts and bone awake and alone. It is an act of will and the epitome of this cowardice, arms folded tight around the empty, the next day the fustigation to be. As sure as the fall of the swallow or the phases of the moon, I take whatever is dished out like the played out punk I am. Kicking and screaming, scrawling words down these imaginary walls that won’t stop closing in, the distance trapped within. 

report

It is as loud on the last day as

it is at the latest, the city tree

clinging to greens and reds

that might be imaginary,

limbs dozing and dreaming out

old seasons. Bright and 

haggard as it holds

high the sky, so far as it knows,

telling a story that is over.

All these letters shed over

the heart’s many seasons,

love and salt and the radiant

half-life of madness

blazing down the page,

wants and wishes and the romance

that just needs somewhere to go,

these ashes returned to affections,

the earth forever in love.

cradle and all

It’s life, so sometimes the sirens slide under the saxophone. It’s life, so sometimes baby goes boom. There’s no telling what’s coming around the corner. There’s no telling who’s getting hurt. Hard bones bumping into things that are harder still, the mind never really ready for the lessons matter has in store. All the things that didn’t kill you, didn’t kill me either. We’re all immortal until the hammer comes down. 

Sunup, sundown, the day keeps dragging around. Nightfall, it’s all wolves in wool, how we howl and slaver at our secret dreams. Comes the chalk, comes the clock, comes the lady with the alligator purse. We strive to stay a step ahead of the devil or to knock god off their throne. The world we built around the world is a centrifuge, built to concentrate graft from our common gifts. Stacks of tricks, words and wicks, things to sling wildly and burn when we’re not feeling too terribly bright. All this labor without a word from the savior.

I was cold, and I was beneath the moon up the tree. The night was sotted with broken clouds, so I’d see a star here a star there, but not enough to get a sense of the constellations. I stood hands in pocket, looking at the waning moon, turning phrases silently on my tongue. I had stepped outside in dull resignation at the insistence of a car alarm, a little gander to go with the what the fuck, but I stopped to stare because what was there was there. The sort of thing I write about, if I write about anything at all.