Dusk came early and the mail came late. Smoke was everywhere. My lungs and heart exchanged expletives and goodbyes, their long established grievances given new grist to grind. I rattled and puffed along as I always seem to do, the lickings never stopping the ticking completely. I don’t make good company, but I sure do keep the time. Some of me is shareware, some is...
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They say the fire jumped the highway. They see the smoke will take the night. The wind insists in the wrong direction, the blind dog digs and bangs. The spice of soil cuts the air, the breath burdensome and shallow, the heart as thick as a stump. The trees are dry from years of drought, neglected along with the rest of the visible spectra, every...
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It all comes together as it falls apart. The insistence of the instant, the ripples in the pond. The skin glistening with sweat and kissed only by mosquitoes and the shrapnel of concrete smote to smithereens. There’s always a fire somewhere, there’s always someone cutting loose or falling out. The dreams seep in through the soaked sheets and buffeted air, the blather that they broadcast...
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There’s no telling the tension left between a soul and a song. There’s no tellings the depths once the falling is all that’s left. The thick air of cloud and smoke and heat lingers long after dark, the passing traffic pushing shadows and trailing light. The new moon night muggy weighted with every stone ever sunk into the sea, hot with every torch ever carried...
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The thunder rumbled, the lightning flashed, the pit hid in the shower. The dawn broke hard, dappled droplets of rain and jags of electric flash and low roaring from on high. Strange for summer in California, at least as the old climate leanings go. The bedeviling heat, the shifting shoulders of the firmament, the prophesied trends coming true despite what you’ve been told. It is...
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How bright the day, how hot the night, the long tumble over and under as we are tugged and tossed by the sun. How heavy the heart when the cut turns dull from sharp, the pointless longing stubbed out in your eye. The sky goes from blaze to shimmer, from burn to bitter as the stars simmer on the tongue. The porch light beset with...
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I pass the blazing day in a soaked stupor, the heat melting me down to stillness and sorrow. Grease in the skillet, news on the morrow. The night arrives but the heat gives no quarter, the stifling sky smeared with smirking stars, the hubris changing state as the mortality flares up. Now it’s hot black coffee at 1:30 in the morning, lit by screen and...
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It doesn’t matter that the moon’s not out, I can feel it in the rising. It doesn’t figure that your love is gone, I can read it in the stars. The night holding the heat in its heart as the dogs rip the yard apart and the rats run the roofs. The words won’t come, the words don’t quit, the pleasure in the paradox in...
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There is no grace to the day’s labors, broken sweat and burning sun. There is no satisfaction in place of compensation, no good hurt to the feeble form. Just another story of chance and frailty, the hands available only these two. There is neither strength of back and thew, or that of will and spirit. It’s just another last labor, a trembling unto death. The...
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The line that’s there is never straight. Space and time assure that it’s up to something. From rhythm to rictus, from fruit to dirt, there are more than roads and travel to getting here. It’s in the way you read it, beats and breaths and good intentions. It’s in the way it sings to you, moving with the burning air through the blood. The screams...
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Heavy is the head that sees the stars, eyes aimed skyward while the road is strewn with rocks and glass. Hard is the stone that breaks the crown upon the tumble down the hill, water lost to gravity, bones bouncing down the slope. It’s in the fall and the landing. It’s where the bucket stops. There’s always someone bearing the brunt of all the sharpened...
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The day dawns like days will do, a band of bright, then all hell breaks loose. The window is still cracked, open to the sky and the wind. The bed even more broken, the dresser and the shelves in their familiar disarray. The time hasn’t flown, it has dragged and drawled over glass and gravel. It has bent the law and broken oaths. Outside the...
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