I look up not knowing
what to expect of the sky or
where the moon would show,
not to say expecting nothing—
that’s just not how the world goes,
my fingers cold and houses throwing
bright Christmas colors across
the blinking distraction of
my periphery, headlights sweeping
the old eyeballs briefly blind,
words working to find
focus, while the mind gazes
power mad in its...
Read More
I can’t speak much for where I am, it’s only where I seem to be. Willing spirit and wanting flesh, left outside the fold for a few common apostasies until it is the mark of the mechanism, this penchant for ritual and automation. There is a fog in the prescience, a blur between motive and causality, the road followed for the writing. There’s a glamour...
Read More
There may be smoke, but the fewer mirrors the better. Only so far to go on looking glasses as the road trends rough, some fleeting missive, some bars of broken old code. All the places blur, the faces a jumble on the time line, the stories only changing hats and swapping spit. Suddenly the conductor is calling out, cities turned to stops, counting aloud the...
Read More
My steps do falter though not in fear, my hands do tremble but not in awe, the ride having grown rougher and rougher in the vehicle of birth over the latest years of discouragement. The vessel struggles and staggers through the day to day, peals of pain and the quickening deterioration, dread set into the algorithm and the old OS. The plummet into isolation and...
Read More
It’s been like this for such a passage, it’s been like this since the bleed at least, this other aim named aloud. The dusk doing most of the work, so when the night arrives all the stakes are already driven down. Hard to tell the lean of being from the falling stars you trail, cartoon sparkles and chirping birds when the hammer smites. Thoughts jostling...
Read More
The clock slipped the count and so I stepped to a little late, the day time sky already set to goodbye, my life left sitting staring down the dusk. It’s the collateral of the calendar, all these days left to boxes, the stars barely stirring as the world turns and turns. All I seem to do is stumble from scene to scene, off script and...
Read More
We wake to the world still turning, the business below the proscenium, the sky projected on the scrim. The routine written on the windshields, the secrets scrawled across our faces. The story carries over, some vaguely unsatisfying reminder from an equation we never quite figure out. Ancestors tales skewed hard to modern attention spans, most of identity the operant of intermittent reinforcement. It was once...
Read More
It’s like waking from a strange dream
in a strange place, wearing nothing
you ever wore before— how you know
there’s a story whether the world
worked it out, this built in
repetition backwards to ignition,
the mirror therefore it’s me.
No phone, no ID, this sense
that the three-second delay stalls
the signal to the senses, your name
a where, a when, a reasoned...
Read More
Maybe it is the descent
implicit in the way the symbols
stack, circles turning
inside circles, the wheel at work
as the end in the action eats
away. Something inevitable
that structure of fitful scripture
the cadence of water
rain making gutters into falls,
gray skies and dripping eaves,
want laying it on while
the battery runs down. The tree
written so often described unknown...
Read More
It’s like a sixth sense
depending on how you count,
the way you feel it in gearbox,
the way you take the tension, you hear
it in the engine, that almost
right smack there in your mouth
organ grinder out of tune
that taste you admit you miss,
the song as it laps itself
a sound like a lonesome light,
the war crackle humming from...
Read More