same old man

The ritual reiterates, the stagger in the shuffle, the gaffe in the deal as the heel toe slides and slides. The eternal bluff waiting on the call, ashes ashes then the fall, the gait beneath the gathered weight. The slow to the circle, the wobble to the spin, the blazing branch lit from within and spitting dizzy nonsense to set the world on its ear. Back bent to the burden this shambles scrambles along the drift and drag, all the love left written in the gist of the bones. The spirit itself babel, the wind in the declarative as the eternal takes a whirl.

The beauty is there in the architecture, the music is there in the flickering of the fuses, each wire the fretting of some invisible choir. The self that you are bound to be comes in by dozens in twos and threes, depending on the orchestra and the instruments and the agreed to terms and services. Pledge an oath to the style of deception that you favor, be the allotted self that freedom decrees. Reasons change with everything else, the endings and the origins altered to fit the current tempo and the latest fads. Even the magic doesn’t see it coming.

The song takes hold before the meaning is settled, it takes root in depths that endure. The beating heart, the thundering blood, the endless tide of breath and sky. These stories that we encumber and untangle, these truths we tap in the weaving of each deception, the heft we seem to hoist on our personal petards. We are the terms of the turning earth, the expression of sentences ended, and song lines walked. The path revealed step by step, the map made the world again anew, each day the revelation of a sea parted to inevitably come crashing back. Our lives written in smoke, remembered as sand.

where it’s at

The scene opens, or at least the line starts to unwind, the sense of a spindle as the stylus finds a scratch. Again and again, the metaphor hewn from allusion and skull static, the old song despite my lack of even a single turntable or the clout of some hefty hegemon. Here on the precipice of the vast decline, at the moment in the fall indistinguishable from flight the phrases turn and turn, ever the glow from the burn. The breadth of the sky, whether thick with rain or stunned with stars, and strictures of the mind meat stuffed in my skull that measure out my limits. I am here, I say to no one in particular. I am here I say as no one in particular at all.

This loss is a location, it is a mark upon the flat circle, a setting for a settling. It is an awakening and a resolution, eyes rubbed back into vision, all the sites having left me sore. There is little done that is not debacle, tied so tight to the meanings in our minds we cannot help but spin from this speaking, the story swapped out part for part to ease all the other monkeys in the barrel. We say the things we always say, the quiet part aloud. The joinery of the hierarchical, the avuncular ape the unseen architect as we climb and hoot, going along by making it up. Cliqued up in the pitter patter as they name what does and does not matter, the coin that funds the crowd. 

It’s been a hard landing out here in my leasts and lasts. The old ways crumbling as the light shifts, the shift in shadows adding absent shapes that cling, eyes grown into the new sight now strangers to the earth. Towers rise from foundations of ad libbed myths and mistakes in the translation, ghosts of ghosts as the cull hungers and moans. I let go of a few dear habits and deleted the final drafts of my residence in the para ethereal, no outlet valve or repurposed brand. Giving up what isn’t good for you is immaterial, I am giving up what I’m no good for, these clades and strata and five things that surprise. There’re are two more pieces I plan to write in the ol Blood and Ghostal, then it’s goodbye cool words. Until then all blessings to the doomed, the danged, and the hanged.

the habit

The dog is barking and you’re sick in the dark, surrounded by the sounds of the wind and television, dying hard with every habit. Now the light by the mattress, now the meandering of the ash. For a moment smoke tattooed the space between the lamp and the ceiling, some slurred slogan, some mumbled oath. This the air, this the light, the sawed off end of the night.

The moment goes barefoot, the moment unpaved and woven around the flicker of unspoken intentions, the knock knock of the ubiquitous joke. We live or die by our plot points, by the chosen flag and the choosed up sides, stories thieved and spun and given a paint job and served up day after insidious day. The sky slick with tears and dreams, you stare and stare. This madness, this silence, the road hiding behind the horizon.

It’s too late for much getting better. It’s too late to save your soul. The stars you never see oblivious and obdurate as the cold seeps in and the rain rattles around. The dog is breathing in its dreams, head heavy on your knee, the cat curled against your ribs. You feel it in the ritual, in the weary unspooling of the feeble routines. So much more, you’re less and less. The dwindle in the spin, the certainty of the ending in the way of things, you pace the cage and make your mark. You hear it out there, drawing near.

slow to the slide

It’s the next time your eyes meet the sky, the sirens sound and the dogs all howl. Such a sharp eared season with the summer on loiter. Such a sad sighted dream between here and the horizon. The numbers stand in stacks as the ceiling takes its time to settle, last long lights on emptying days, headlights in ribbons in stretches and strings as the road sets aside all reason. Sitting indoors facing the sunset, a life of yields and screens. It’s slip and slide living in second glances, a moonwalk into the rhetoric and the architecture of sensations slow to take. 

The night goes wide, all those gnawing worries and wrecked romances salting the clock. The walls dress up as the thoughts strip down, fragile in the swaddle of anxious shadows, painted in the misread colors of someone else’s dream. Wind woven into breath, breath plied into voice, the stories all strung upon the tongue as this unbidden stitch work is extinguished on the page. Time told on and time told off, the dogs all bark for the thrill and in alarm, scars and stretch marks and tattoos now a touch from me and you. The moon goes missing and still hits its mark.

Here’s where the road ends, unremarkable and unmarked, so many shrubs and stones. Here’s where the words lose weight, every saying only so much spent breath. The time it takes is counted in your blood and bones, the years adding mostly the mad and alone. The day goes dark and the music shifts, another singer, another song. The world is over but the seasons do linger out in the yard beneath blacked out stars, moths and mosquitoes and the thinning partition. Words that would slur or drawl or fizzle if left to the air sink beneath the skin, below the dreaming. All this fuse to feed the fire, autumn tumbling on in.

the drop

Again it is the slow sweep of green against the crawl of cloud and sky, the wind on its hind legs kicking up the dust, this strange drawling afternoon of shade and swelter set down in the particulars of these posts. A happenstance of rhetoric and idiom, of summer and sprinklers and the breeze borne whiff of water as the heat of the day gives way. An all but abandoned habit, feeling like ellipses leading up to the end, a glimmer of a picture unseen and unsaid. I smudge the screen, I irk the cursor with my fits of symbols and my empty hesitations, I stack a few phrases long gone fallow in the great unshaped nation of the waiting page. I hit all the hackneyed marks and tin-eared beats I yet inhabit, longing towards that final point. The punctuation one longs for as the pleasures all play out.

Again it is the blur of days and the blues blazes burn, the shiftless lean of dreams, wild beasts and dead friends fill the notable corners of the barely remembered as the going keeps on getting gone. Each day is a drag, the blade of being plunged again and again into this empty identity, the well plumbed depths long ago dredged and done. The scraped knuckles, the sweatshirt shrugged across the back of the chair, details gleaned and hearts turned cold as each witness walks away. The words laid out, the words left for dead. Better has been there and is done with it. Left alone in silence and ill transmissions, another illusion bled out like any baffled bystander, another refugee in a country gone wrong.

Another dusk, as the day drowses in its flights and fevers. Another flock of birds lighting for the blue. More oaths and idioms, more rhetoric and flummoxed reasons, this empty inventory, this list fraught with avarice and loss. This incessant noodling away in the margins, this petulant impulse to pad out my part, the foolish urge to never let an empty be. The spaces stretch between the words, greater than silence, more faithful than punctuation. Time takes and takes, this lingering less and less a small alarm, a light blinking on and off in some cluttered corner. I suppose it’s all the said left undone, these scraps and apparitions a lamp grasped after in the strangeness of waking, the room dark and unknowable, your name a thousand lives away.

the call

Yet another day, the front porch spilling smoke into the shifting afternoon, dogs barking and the music plays on with the show. The wounds and the wear even worse than it looks, this old campaign all carcass and guff. The inevitable seems to still, some event horizon cognition trick, and you fall forever in the flicker of a leaf. Bearing the brunt of dull curse and bright blessing I stall, blood failing as the ghost goes spilling over the sides. The road rises to meet you and then some, another clout for flinching, I collapse into my latest frailties. Spending days soaking in burning gloom, nursing the latest flaw in my cognation. I hear the long call even spent and ruined. I hear the call.

All wrong turns and enduring regrets the day plays out, the house and the habits having had their say, only the wind and the sky left to linger. So it is that we find the low leaves in a shimmer, towed into novelty and motion as it all falls, the touch of sun in the spectrum of the most grievous scintillation. The familiar brush of something in the shuffle, alone in the stimula as the grip of the familiar tightens around the myth, the story always champing at the bit. I slump under the boundless stretch of the inferential majesty, aflame in all the unpleasantness of this endurance. Whatever our luck, whatever our strengths, we can’t outlast the continuity. I smoke what I got as the song carries on.

The quiet earth is cursed with voices. The blazing core, the burbling rock. The teeming grunts and squeakings of the innumerable multitudes. A fool can be forgiven for hearing some steaming jet gossip on by and taking it personal once in bygone blue. The work becomes its own truth however the words may turn. Useless past delusion the day comes due, however I phrase the devil or doom. The call goes on, though it doesn’t mean you. The answer is all you ever had, whatever or whoever was meant. There is ever a sparrow falling.

simmer

The hours drag and drawl, the vision blurs and fades. The world is more at once, this flight of wing and flower, this litany of sudden silk and tiny spiders as the greens elaborate. The words lose the trail, tire chasing life’s fierce ebullience, assailed by the earthly urgings imposed by a yard lush with threatened labor. So we steep in these invariable aches and solemn smudges, caught in that spark before the wish, the streak across a settled sky while someone’s favorite song is selling souls cheap. The words silent for fear of waking up. 

The kitchen light is on, but there’s nothing cooking. The stove sits cold, a wiped down skillet and a dish towel where a few cat dishes dry. The evening pulls its threads, the habits given to habitats, the fire devouring the fuse. The stories stack like bowls and plates in the cupboards, the stories there in boundaries and degrees. The ones I think of as I wish the dishes, the faces I see as I feed the dogs. Object permanence and the retinue of ghosts, Aristotle’s causes in kind clinging with the mind, each memory an apparition and a map. Curtains close and exits and entrances join hands.

It isn’t in the instance to harbor the art, providence found in the process, the hackles immodest imagining that which awaits as the labyrinth slowly unwinds. This sticking of landings, this noodling of scales, another oblivious witness scouring the dirt and the details as the world rots and teems. The evidence sails across the sky, the evidence pushes through the writhing earth, the reckoning of every direction at once. A white rabbit for every hat and every hole. I post up and pace the tangle of shadows and fluid blues, a scribble of whim and impulse in the endless deluge of lore and tongue. The ending just as it begun, the words wasted to leave words unspun.