below the belt

It’s been like this for such a passage, it’s been like this since the bleed at least, this other aim named aloud. The dusk doing most of the work, so when the night arrives all the stakes are already driven down. Hard to tell the lean of being from the falling stars you trail, cartoon sparkles and chirping birds when the hammer smites. Thoughts jostling with physics and fisticuffs, you hear train wail or dog bark or the savage laughter of imminent children. Flattened fair and square you catch the constellation by its dead give away, the reveal echoing through the realization, on your back below the belt. It’s all how the seasons hit, the settling of the senses. The sutra of hanging the frame.

There’s already a lot I left out; there’s so much more leaving out left to do. You can’t escape the associations. Nothing escapes unscathed, this faith of words surviving outside speech and flesh, a brevity trailing murdered darlings and bottle baby bastards. Pounding the pulpit or folded into a trust fall from the pedestal, every way laden and fated at once, from the improbable to the likely it arrives. I belly up and belt it out and stagger back to the Stygian depths from whence I started counting. The hours as evidenced by the heavens, the firmament emblazoned by the winter hexagon, the hunter whose specifics come and go.

It’s a story though there’s nothing to it. It’s a story because it got told that way. I went outside and watched while the dark caught up the clock. I looked up and thought hey there’s Orion, a muddle of dogs, belts, and cudgel. A smear of plots and archetypes, a becoming that happens again and again, breath and flame and the songs life sings. An experience so true and worn it feels quaint, an afghan strewn across the arms of a rocking chair, a saying worn down to words. I thought of you in ways that were about me, and some that were about you too. The easy depths at once too much, the letters scribbled with ache and panicked appetite, this animal too abrupt and abstract. It’s what I lose when I leave it there, written down as if it happened. 

legion

The clock slipped the count and so I stepped to a little late, the day time sky already set to goodbye, my life left sitting staring down the dusk. It’s the collateral of the calendar, all these days left to boxes, the stars barely stirring as the world turns and turns. All I seem to do is stumble from scene to scene, off script and stranded spitting bars that miss the beat, doing stunts and improvising speeches. The dusk goes dark and the days grow grayer, the old bones telling secrets, the quaint conceits of September Song playing in the well past tense. 

So time marches on, so the franchise makes concessions, trailing parts and pieces. The path is all process and it only goes so far until it’s a thousand other parts, a thousand other journeys through the flesh, the shuffle and the deal unending. All that’s left of the me I favor is empty pockets and percussive words, but there are a lot of mouths and feasts still going strong in the host I heave and haul. The husk bearing progeny and pestilence, partisans without flags all carrying the clock, atop this wave breaking in all directions. Life always falling under spells and curses, and waking up flush in new names and stories. I dance this mess to pieces, I dance until I drop, but the party never stops.

Still I scribble on the signal, still I write my manifesto on the back of receipts. I am a point in passing, a distribution of debris. I am the engine struggling to turn over, the genes left on read spinning circles in the mud. A story between stories, the probable fall of the words, a vague miming of looking at where a watch would be on my wrist if I wore one. The words keep coming in clouds and torrents as the pan boils dry, as if insistence was all the was to persistence. Waking into this want, the sun long gone, the light left on just in case there’s someone left to welcome. Colorblind, I paint by numbers, the night swallowing sight whole.

prometheus

We wake to the world still turning, the business below the proscenium, the sky projected on the scrim. The routine written on the windshields, the secrets scrawled across our faces. The story carries over, some vaguely unsatisfying reminder from an equation we never quite figure out. Ancestors tales skewed hard to modern attention spans, most of identity the operant of intermittent reinforcement. It was once so that it might be again, it wasn’t so it may be yet, and the numbers fall and fall. Somehow the light got left on. The flickering between the frames, the candle always burning.

So you sleep with the windows open. You drowse in your skin while the moon looks in. So you scroll down screens or sort through messages, living in this memory that’s never at rest. Awake to witness shapes full of intention, transgressors made of trousers and trunks, this restless grasping at the strings. The moment always vividly missed, extinguished in the tangle of sense and cognition, the monkey thinking it’s a joke teasing such sharp swift teeth. Dashed against this continuity, the discovery at the borders of being, this name full of dreadful wonder.

It’s there like the weather, the patina on the bronze Buddha in the garden, the rust gathering at the hinges on the gate. These slow fires and sudden conflagrations, the spark before the blaze. Synapses busy ticking away at the plot and the fabric, bellyfuls of hard hungers and happenstance. Here and now again and again, the dull report of the drum machine, the metronome of the missing moment. This light the blazing into atmosphere, every measure a rate of oxidation. Each of us a fire started by a want in the world. 

excavate

It’s like waking from a strange dream

in a strange place, wearing nothing

you ever wore before— how you know

there’s a story whether the world

worked it out, this built in

repetition backwards to ignition,

the mirror therefore it’s me.

No phone, no ID, this sense

that the three-second delay stalls

the signal to the senses, your name

a where, a when, a reasoned reckoning.

Now here comes the marked-up map, 

the dots on the decision tree, 

the presupposed path you spoke aloud.

The crown of stars,

the roots through the rocks—

there you are here we go.

The dogs charge rings around the yard,

flies taste at scratched skin and raw knees,

the radiance of the dusk

another retelling for the recollection.

Oh, the world knows its part

gifting this hollowed here,

scattering labels and receipts.

the wrong birds

Maybe it is the descent 

implicit in the way the symbols

stack, circles turning

inside circles, the wheel at work

as the end in the action eats

away. Something inevitable 

that structure of fitful scripture 

the cadence of water

rain making gutters into falls,

gray skies and dripping eaves,

want laying it on while

the battery runs down. The tree

written so often described unknown

as misnamed passerines,

raptors attached to the explicit 

tithes of divination and 

the divine, owls unseen 

closer than names

come the night. Half allusion 

three quarters vision from within,

the wings that do not pass

world after world, starlight 

and the negative space

a longhand sky leaves,

branch and bird, wind and world

saying everything a little bit off

stirring embers and giving smoke

waiting as the earth comes around.

obsolescence

It’s like a sixth sense

depending on how you count,

the way you feel it in gearbox,

the way you take the tension, you hear

it in the engine, that almost

right smack there in your mouth

organ grinder out of tune

that taste you admit you miss,

the song as it laps itself

a sound like a lonesome light,

the war crackle humming from

some ancient shelf in your mind.

Here it was the dance of dust motes 

the morning window and the bedroom closet,

a Disney train on the wall

that shifted in capered in the dark.

Lightning storms of static

beneath the blue blanket

dragging sparks through my hair.

Hidden reading in secret by flashlight 

because I had to know 

what happened next. Rain and stars

and animals, only a stranger to

every friend. I don’t know 

what stuck with you. I don’t know 

which parts are gone.

It is only over now in the after,

past tenses and wild swings.

Collapsed into antiquity,

apocryphal volumes and ancestral tales,

eras and ages vague islands,

hairstyles and girlfriends and

long dissertations on

why my boss is dumb. 

Over and over the fading lore 

passes through the wounds and

aches of the old ape,

life’s cruel slapstick and

cereal in front of the TV,

something sweet and easy,

cartoons and troubled comforts as

the world forgets me, then 

remembers me too well. 

pedestal

Put your kings back in their cubbyholes, hang your gods out in the garden. Kick your faith off its pedestal, know your way is a course of water down a slope. Here in this passing fancy, in the pained turn of the day to day, we find our way. From just desserts to devout pursuits, the circuit to the drain consumes us all. Written as if rules the inevitable again and again, wrung hands and gossiping flesh, the moment full of such certitude collapsed into tumbling photon and a flicker in the feels. Oh, such sorrow! Oh, such beauty! We post our apostrophes, we roll them bones.

The lighter sparks then it ignites, a flash of light and heat below my right eye. Almost at once the smoke heads towards the heavens, the restless winds not offering a lot of options. I burn a knuckle on the blazing ember of the cigar butt, another small offering to the improbable unknown, smoke sent east while the sun sinks west. I ease back into my habitual station, spine and eyes effecting the ritual, longing and the heat loss of the complimentary. Something holy in the dance around the empty, the hollow of the vessel ringing through the whole.

I serve the ashtrays and the negative space of sky and branch, I serve the dirt and the hungry creeping legions that abound. This starved soil, this blasphemous destruction of the building blocks of soul, while we feed ourselves words glutted on words. The tumble of these unseen axes, the animal loosed in every revelation, our ferocious trajectories and our determined dooms. More and more my eyes are fixed upon ghosts and games, the long con entangled in our chains. Species spent in fits of pique and power, the top down desolation another destiny imparted from our suspiciously absent gods as we stack the odds against ourselves. My heart beats for our desperate bids for life and beauty. A light left on, a tithe for all the asking.