reypulque

I dance limpingly along from song to broken song, the hobo’s reel upon the sinking stones, the fool cavorting in the lowlands with the waters rising. I take the sticks, I take the stones, lumping along in these lonely bones. The pain, the wounds, the days a waste of smoke and prayer. Ashes brushed off as the next station is taken. The past elongated with...
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It’s all about the ashes falling all at once. It’s all about the pavement changing color as the rain ensues. The cracked tooth static fuzzing up the embouchure, the fucked lungs, and the glacial rate of change meaning something different as the glaciers come thundering into the sea. Gray days and the goodbye sun soft and golden where the sun gets through, until it’s up...
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You get a fix on the instruments, a place to hang

the calculations, something to mingle with

motive and map, the slap down tabling

the winning hand, the algorithm laying it on

thick to keep the machine busy, the star

at last found to further the reason

this sojourn continues sojourning along—

all these heroes minted to get sent stepping,

the stories still warm around...
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For a moment it is the combination of

glistening constellations beading

cosmological swirls in the black coffee

surface eternity and the enchanted noodlings

in my ears, that singer you favor

as the sciatic clench and the dead flesh

ache consume the remnants of my attention

the lyric and the litany awaiting

this next frustration, the next

rat maze dead end to your weak

thesis, this...
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Again the thoughts go traipsing through the squalor, the spent senses, the used up feels. Again the glasses are smudged and the vision is poorly, the strain to see almost worse than the strain to say, the assorted pains and the day to day. Written off at last, extinguished in every realm. Nothing but the growing pain, the looming void.

Just another game to play,...
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The bets all placed

the steps now staggered

reeling from feel to feel

moving from face to face

this absent dance,

this scramble across the parkway

the lights flashing out a four way

stop on some rainy yesterday

the slide unto impact,

another day saved for dreaming.

It won’t return, that

gleeful bleeding mortality,

that triumphal turn

fighting back from the incessant edge,

now fly...
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We start out where the day is spent, night fresh treads and the course of decorations. We start out with the cigar burning odd and the flower startlingly noncommittal. I pass around my unwanted jokes and unpersuasive poems, notes that never make it up the row, missives that a few cruel teachers might read aloud but mostly they just throw away. The night already knows,...
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The nerves all run at a burn, the air stirred with ink and static. The dark and cars have taken all the spaces. Ascension II is sizzling through the atmosphere, smoke is climbing up the sky. It’s clear enough to give witness to the wanderers, cold enough that gloves ought to have been given a thought. Saturday night comes along at a reckless gallop, people...
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Held too close

like the words of a ghost

speaking clearly in

the crown of darkest night.

Left too long

the armrest of the open

driver’s side soaking

the whole arm for

the elbow’s sake.

Bereft at the direction

the hearts says look

and the eyes oblige

despite the limits of the organism

and the capacities of the instruments.

Eventually it is all pieces

weighed...
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The heart is reckless mechanism. The heart is an essential worker. The heart won’t leave well enough alone. Carrying torches and keeping time. Beating the blood red, threading the sky through through the flesh, stitch by stitch a tuck and a tich. Holding the flame and carrying torches, spelunking through the wheezing depths of the soul’s long dark night. The heart climbs the mountain, the...
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It comes at the uncertain spin of the spell, the benediction by owl or crow, bright atop the tattered crowns of fall. It comes with the weight of the season, tinsel and turkeys and the faith to follow stars. The crisp air turns without a word, at once stilled and startled, the ancient aspect always revealed on sight. The moon treads the boards, climbing up...
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I tire of the calculations. The probabilities and the place in line, the countless reminders that I don’t count, the proportions and the dishes served best cold. The numbers don’t add up, at least not the way I add them. In tens and threes and multiples of nine. In ones and twos and black dog blues. There’s never number enough. There’s never a way I...
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