The gray shakes out from sky to skin, the reach to the rapture, the rattle to the brass. Soft from space to shape, life climbs each step as steam stripped from the atmosphere, as the boundless ladder of blood and breath. The stir of wings, the scratch of an itch, flea bit flesh fresh with open constellations. Each layer another name, every name some spill of syllables, certainty always loafing around the words. Sparrows to fill in the margins, wings to steal the sky. The crow sharpens its throat against the long gray, calling out first wounds and the gossip of dirt and rocks.

The ephemeral fills in the blanks, large drawn sighs and eyes determinedly set upon the ceiling. The drag of existence scuffing up the paint job, the world split into pass and traction, gaps and actions all over the scenery. Spit bitter words and hazy exposition, let the spirit dampen your beard and grease your chin, this voice all but useless in this rushed cacophony. Erased at every juncture, burned like an everyday bridge, there is neither please nor placement left. The wasted witness, the blinded aperture. The bell made of bones and biochemical terror.

It is the place of lost songs and dying engines, the rattle and the wreck, the hole where the direction used to be. The shuffle of things and names, glass singing out from the floor and basin, the invisible animal suffering its sounds. The same old beat of lack and alone, cold hands empty in the fray, smoke and signifiers in the space where the entity used to be. It’s a shake of the box, just to see what noises are left. It’s the claim of a sustain, the held note, the unkempt exposition. So small that the sky can’t find you, so lost there’s no there there.