The sickness sticks
from stem to stern
it thrives from shuck to jive,
a shambles dragging
deadweight through
the bright blue of
the lifelong day
the depths of the intention
buried in the sediment
the one-way ticket
up and spent, breath to breath
all dust and dreck and slow
dying in dribs and drabs
clockwork and wet work and
this turning of the word
thick...
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You read it and you think
maybe I read it wrong
so you find the line
going back a few,
maybe the poem misspoke,
maybe it took a tone
feeling the weakness bearing
all the weight, whatever
the wind or the way.
Maybe at last
you’ve been found out—
just a little meat
a puddle of blood
a few greasy bones.
Another set of botched...
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The flame separates the stick of incense from its soul, smoke curling upwards for a few laps before departing on the ferocious winds. The dull intention and the empty heavens torn silk before the exhausted earth and boundless sky turns again to extra words and clumsy embellishments. The feel of the fool’s nipped heel the whole of my identity, a tattered spectacle, hapless and chained...
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The tide of dust slowly swallows the static and the forgotten. Music seeping through the rat clambered walls, the separate faiths of song haunt the house while the ubiquitous bass thumping down the street. The low keeps diving and the ghosts keep driving nails through my skull, the last contrivance of reason long since hacked to pieces in the basement of my brain. Mercurial turns...
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Break out the boxes and blow the dust off the ledger. Open up every seal. Dig deep beneath each surface, pry loose the floorboards, slice through the trembling flesh. Slow cancers and ancient grievances, love letters and other curses, all that is buried rising with the least graze of the eye. Intention loosed and memory jostled, we wake in cold sweats and anecdotal frenzies, the...
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Most of all I’m sick of the make believe. The small talks and glad handings, the alibis and misdirections. All the people I nod to who I’d just as soon not see again. The chitter chatter while the sickness metastasized and death kept heaping it on. Pretending that I do anything but cause pain and delay the inevitable. Pretending that the words were anything other...
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It’s something that falls between the boundless blue and the insistent sun, the atmosphere laden with heat and restlessness, a wound between worlds forever bleeding out. Neither hunger or appetite but the tint and timbre of every sense felt as the heart keeps circling its favorite aches, the body in painful decline, a knot before every breath. The knowing gnawing away at the aspects and...
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The life that you live goes by in inch and hairbreadths, jostling you along the walkway, throwing elbows while breathing down your neck. The life that is claimed moves in years and miles, a road winding through the mountains with barely a mention of the scenery. It has a flag and a bible and a tradition to defend. Honored ancestors and stubborn antecedents to turn...
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The spring winds spill like cast off angels, tumbling terribly on down, the day so adept at taking its turn. Long, bright sun slick days painted in ominous golds and greens, blue as any impending doom. The low end of the harmony the blackened foundation of the glory of the firmament. Mother Mary wailing at the feet of salvation, the gift of a death unfit...
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By the time I get around to saying it, everything is suspect. By the time it’s written, it’ll never be read again. I don’t see all the colors, I miss a lot of shapes. The form I see is the one on the wheel, the first flash still pressing through. I never know what it might look like lately. The road opens at the least...
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