the sort of things you’d think you’d say

Beating uneasily my heart slips over the edges of the bowl, a steak plated to impress blood red over bone white, oh the savor, oh the sacrifice. The night is alive with appetites, a wet winter loosing a river of green fiber and stolid chitin, life ever striving to take a slice. This long losing over at long last not meaning there’s not more losing left, the transition from kin to decedent, the curtains drawn and secrets kept. I sit exposed to local gawkers and famished mosquitoes, meant for another round of sharp passes and easy pickings, grave punctuation hazily in wait as the night drags on and the days flee like roaches caught beneath the unforgiving gaze of kitchen light. You’d think the words would’ve worked their way out. You’d think the years would’ve gotten their lesson through.

It’s mostly gone, all the ways the words might have gone better. It’s all done, these ways I would’ve wanted it to go. There’s always a fuse waiting to burn faster, there’s always a tire ready to blow. There’s just rooms full of boxes and stories that no one knows, places to wake and drowse in, moments to shock and to shame. There’s the knowing that the only people you spoke with for years had turned you off ages ago, strangers by birth and association. The flesh turns cold then the ghost is gone, a fury lashing out for hours, a parcel waiting pick up in the full on empty. We all grieve and continue attending to our stations. We all get the comfort we’ve earned, alone in the big cold world.

So much for what I should have done. So much for what I’d do instead. The dead are the dead, well past caring and tenses. The fate we face, the fate we make, the hank of hair that gives us our uncanny powers shorn by way of exposition. Sisyphean years to grind us down to the nothing much we were always taken for, tanking against time for all our never nevers, promised paradise on the other side of a tomorrow that never comes. Burned to the soul, singed through meat and marrow, I fail and fail. My worth among the ruins and relics all sin wages and the exchange rate of ashes. The radio playing from another room, chatter and static from some distant memory of night in this hollowed house. The last light on at last is dowsed without a word or way to settle these hoards and debts. 

opt out

They’re going to have you take a number. They’re going to make you spell it out. The softest gray before the harder colors. The feeling grown into the bones, riding out the last of the light. Only warm around the wounds, the instrument a balloon losing air, the music so much exasperation killing time. The rain comes pacing the swollen moon, smoke always hanging around. The ache breaks like a gasping of atmosphere, like the lungs really laying one on. The offer almost ambushes you before the reflexes kick in, the choices picked over like late day donuts, like opportunity when it catches your dreams sleeping. That knocking that counts down to out.

It is not a want for words, it is not a wish for wings, the same old arc of sentient beings burned through to the least inkling marked across this inference, this name worn inside out. I am taken by the same old waking, the slow blaze of day weighing heavy from the instance of ignition, the push start of cold cognition into the relentless traffic coming at you head on. The claimant to the space, I trod along my limits, offended by the insistence of feeble limb and brittle will. A compass needle pointing along the ley lines of intention, a muttering of the meaningless mingled with oath and curse, I wear worse and worse. I carry my corpse in the middens of my plodding heart, staggering about the borders of this closed set, learning the earth by the way it bruises.

Each night it’s all the same, close walls and sinking ceilings, a blur of words and light with music seeping in and dopplering on. Crumpled up valentines and the stir of dancing ashes, these stars recorded and forgotten in one fell swoop. Weary flesh and the stench of failure foreshadowed in the architecture, the castle built with the tide on the rise, teetering on the brink of the topple. The self left to the elements as it dwindles, something marked by the wind and the rain and the beauty that goes bouncing by. This moment so feeble in the antecedents, so firm in the winnowing will, always just too late to take the wheel. Our best hopes buried before we let them die, this mortal pleading as the cruelty holds course.

motif

The crow calling loudly outside 

the front window is the same 

crow hopping through buds and 

blossoms about the boughs of 

the front yard tree reaching towards 

the bright blue cool spring sky 

stretching itself a path to the sun.

Those black wings warning everyone 

heaven is farther than it looks.

Like the shape we call a star

marked like art across the firmament, 

it flies spirals down the skin

sight applies to the puzzle,

the mess the mystery makes of the map

the raw knees where the road

touches rhetoric sharp

jostling the gossip 

memory makes

the click clack of bones

off track, every vision 

a dare to look away.

lockbox

It’s the numbers I assigned to see you in the repetitions, it’s the name I wore down to letters and lore. Something to fondle in fist and fingers, something left to leaven the dreams. The weary report of the body, the circling of the thinking as the batteries give out, the mystery you give and the mystery you get. Always wandering from scene to scene and year to year, the self the cheapest sort of cheap cinematics, a narrative broken over what you cannot say. Someone dwindling in the rear view, someone waving in the blinding sunset sun, mirage water rippling in the black tarmac heat. Those first stirrings, dust motes dancing in the lush morning light, arriving from the elements as this flag unfurled into the reckoning. Relics kept in dresser drawers and old shoe boxes, the soul a story loosed in gasps and bluster, the sputter of a fire drowned in fuel. Treasure held until it is trash again, middens turned to barrow tombs, counting the days back to ashes. 

The moon fills and empties, the signaling seasons arrange their portents in incense soot and mantle dust, the count of closed windows and open eyes in the variegated light. Here in the aches and appetites we scheme out the signals we heed, the senses always swelling in the music of the mind. Stranded in the alchemy of accumulated ages we exude the certainty of our abandoned incandescence, we fight against our fall as our stubborn materials follow their chemical continuities, these fierce stripes and stumbling phrases trailing into unknown bandwidths filling out the forms. I am bludgeoned out of sync just saying it aloud. A locked box and a three panel mind, a page of pictures with the captions pencilled in. Your shoulders a swelter remembered in this life of cold and rain.

It’s down to the trembling of the animal, it’s up to the illumination of the room, blood and guts and the vagaries of luck. Wretched flesh and glorious ghosts in the spaces between the stories,  the shimmer and slide of streetlights over gutter water, the eaves stupid with the swagger of storms. Madhouse motions gnawing holes through the routines of clock and coffee, the heart thick keening of a need never met again, the sun bled slogan on a fading billboard encrypted by highway and forest with all those miles left to go. Stacks of books and the roads not taken, the ache the seasick tilt of the light of the lamp left burning, what a wonder of words without anywhere to go. Out in the epilogue there’s another world over, a name wasted on my breath whenever that number comes up. 

crumbum

It’s a song you can’t recall from some 70s FM canon, it’s the slip of the trick up the sleeve down past those same old razor wrists, cradling some plastic handset in the crook of shoulder and neck in some middle aged memory. The soundtrack of blackout conversations taking on the tenor of intimacy, a tension all but expired in the continuity you’ve acquired, a window always open to the rainy street below. Someone chanting their doo dah hoodoo on some indulgent vocal track, an echo of and echo, the crash of a careening shopping cart and the bad news flashing blue outside. Somehow the lows go lower as the song drains out into the good night grays, it gathers in the fabric and bunches up the thinking, so much worse and still not bad enough. The effigy they burn you in, the fetish they shape from your shell.

What the day won’t contend, what the night will abide, you move the lens from side to side. You see what the light provides, the dirt and grime and evidence in small doses and cruel rooms, from the filled in margins to the moody periphery. You turn from shoulder to cold shoulder, adrift in the demography like a body tossed in restless sleep, the dream logic left of the everyday. All haunt and hunger and a keenness for signs, the leaves in the cup, the hawk on the line. Wadded up letters and dusty old drafts, an object in a mirror, a shape moving across the blinds. Wrapped in your own arms, this inevitable embrace, this road of ruin. The animal and the entity a lost temple returned to the earth.

It all goes with the territory, walking the path between worlds and dreams, the colors are coming outside the lines. The circles become spirals, the scribbles heaven’s latest revelations as the camera pans, the swell of that song glistening on your skin. The ends wide open so every telling fits, from motive to mechanics, as the contempt snaps and paces at the boundaries of countenance. Your grubby altar like any feeder calls to all loose hungers and unanswered entreaties, reaching from foundation to firmament, a steady turbulence in the muddle as flesh and spirit dwindle to ash and spit. We eat their sins, we carry their shadows in the trappings of the other, the schema that settle like the strata of sediment into monuments of fossil and sandstone. The witness worn, need acknowledged only as lack.

the lookout

I’m down to nouns as the day runs long, all bleak grays and dull rain and gulls cutting across the storm.  With my crooked spine oriented vaguely to ley lines strewn haphazardly throughout the landfill the signal runs from rote to riot, ache and inflammation this last vocation as the vessel feathers and splits. I chain smoked the dread from the litany of days and the sky weighs down on these shaky frames, the sediment of cravings scraped clean on the crumbling curb as the gutters overflowed, rivulets and waterfalls and landlocked lessons where my dreams ran dry. A pile of words to hunch over as the dusk spills from the eaves, the open eyes of a diminished return.

It’s growing thin about the matter, though mass heaps it on thick among the consequences and the givens, the means turns meager inside this animal act. Side eyed glances of intermittent reinforcement to take in the length of ash and ember burning between my fingers and the percentage of battery left, to take glimpses of the greenery and the names of notable birds. Shivering a little in my shirtsleeves as I give in the creed of the scribble, the scripture of the screen, following the path of the blinking cursor and the stumbling thumbs. Sore to the bone as the exits glare next to everywhere with the inside running out.

Words written while facing the east with the skies a storm grumbled gray, everything that sways in thrall to the gusts waving treetop to tall grass goodbye, the wind lost in the weeds. Eyes wide open I miss a lot, filling up long passages of blurred sense and poor transitions with disputed data and old maps, looking to see the pin drop of perception while the spirit spins out. Some words that generally mean the weather, some pictures that haunt me when it rains. Mismatched songs stride on by, messing with the tuning, addressing the lens. The gaze beset by hungers and appetites alike, echoes and reflections and narrative deficits flickering in the bandwidth, sitting somewhere beside the point. One way then another less and less as the lookout gives way. 

pompeii

The moon still full, gleaming on the bones of the moment

the earth aglow in the imminence of this bare

albedo— a called bank shot over 

the sun’s shoulder, the forlorn witness 

to late winter’s wringings the truth known

hand to hand with the here and there, this machine

a dreadful sharpening, a narrowing by number

naming the graces of the ricochet once

the race runs downhill, the drip drop

drum machine drubbing the ambience,

the founder in the fathoms as

physics takes a picture and science takes a slice.

The days keep changing, today always the same

dull hungers and sharpened appetites, the marker

moving in clockwork around the wheel

the world always ends up, consequence and 

continuity marking exes on the calendar

page after page all aches and odds.

Oh, such breathless dreaming caught in 

the exquisite muzzle flash, the endless 

game of Russian roulette a bubbling of

hammer snaps, a flurry of flashes when

at last we are caught fully mortal

naked and helpless where we run out of road.

You can see the weather wander down 

the walls, the sky suddenly a crow cleansed blue

casting incomprehensible manga across 

the grubby ceiling, pressing stanzas through

the blinds against this witness, the circuit

words makes once the ghost says so

long, ash flecked mementos and photos 

waiting on the phone, the matters 

that prove my mettle all

pot pot kettle kettle. Here waving

tattered blessings in the chill winds yet

to blow, drifting with the broken

traction at the turn of phrase somewhere 

between the scare and the crow

something happens that stays unknown.

The rain falls and falls.