I’m not by nature a smiler. I generally haven’t got any teeth in the game. I take a bite of every line, take my taste of every declamation and utterance, right out of the horse’s mouth. These days it’s all declarative toothaches and the gaps where teeth used to be. Force is an honest player, it knows all its lines, it knows its motive from cause to consequence. As in the vagaries of bone, teeth always have a story to tell. Time and collisions and where the blunt force shows. The gaunt affect and the skull sharp grin. The show gone on from where the world got in.

Time goes by and it’s counted in seasons, time goes by counted in reaching greens. It passes in life and limb, it passes in ashes drifting toward the dirt. But injury and infirmity are the architects that we build our history around. Fistfights and split lip tooth spit smiles and the stubborn insistence of tooth and bone. One thing then another, then you can’t whistle or spit right. Damage done and grim gutter medicine. The old black magic takes its cut, down to the glisten and the splinters. Down to the gristle and the grease.

We remain as testimony. We remain as evidence. The curve of the cursor, the inevitability of yet another line, the vessel is cracked and it overflows. I speak as if my story isn’t only the sound of my symptoms, the wheeze and unintended sibilance, the stagger implicit in my stance. I speak as if the words were work, as if the saying makes it so. The earth slips east as the sun makes its excuses, crow for crow and star for star. A long ago played horn sounds out above the traffic and the caws. Breathing down the sky into this small cacophony, lit bloom and stolid bone. The flesh blessed and sublime, curling along the reason and the reach. A word spoken close, showing teeth.