The dusk comes soft and slow, all hat in hands and temple manners. Always it goes, gentle with its touch, shy about the center until every exit is covered. Then it takes cover and unfurls it’s standard, the herald of the coming night, swinging from every branch clinging to every eaves. I keep my own counsel, the steady curl of smoke, the field of ash...
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Leave it for another day, let the night get away from you. Wait until you have a minute to think, look at it under natural light. The fix is in, and you can’t repair it. The fix is in, crime only answers to crime. The sky turns in its blues for grays, the fade to black there in the cut, the imagined reasons evidence awaiting...
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Every night the words unwind, a fondling of the moonlight, kissing the hem of dusk. All my life ascendant after sundown, living in the landscape of the night sky. The moon mouthing beatitudes and vivid kisses, these eternities in the space of saying, the way you spell it out. Lascivious dreams and rapt enchantments, beats and bars and the deep and far. Old songs and...
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Maybe it’s the way the shadows keep stacking up. Maybe it’s the spill of unexpected rain, the hush and hiss of passing traffic, the tell of the back of the cat. I sit between smoke and song listening to the loot and loiter of the storm. Old bones and ancient ways, the dust that gathers, the fire unfrayed. This coffee cup purgatory, the sacrament cool...
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The light endows its luminescence on every slip and skin, cutting through the dusty constellations clinging to the beating of each breath. The fire fed and admonished by the breaking of each breath. So much scuff and tussle, the invoked hues and commanded posture, the press of hands and shine. The hour leans and the shadows loom, this brush of sense and flesh, the memory...
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It’s the hour of the wailing train, the hour of the seething night, the boys down the block drunk and singing corridos into the street. The words come despite the clock in my lap and the eye on the phone, the hours all old and alone, walking around in the yoke of habit bitching about the ritual. Books and hand me downs and talismans. The...
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Here I am again, the altar of god’s last ulcer. Here I am still smoking in the rain. The old words made of wolves and wood and the elders stirring the embers of the stars. The old words only seedlings, sewn of Babel and sea salt and the passage through the burning sands. The breath is always rushing off, the tongue always playing catch up....
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It’s not like I run the numbers. It’s not like I know the odds. There’re the habituated states of grace, the mind hitting all the marks, the senses all coloring within the lines. There’s the general presence of time on the go. The wished for seat at the piano bar, the eyes that find you from across the room, and the feeling that you finally...
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The sky takes its time to make its case, streaks about the atmosphere, gray swathes of condensation and the all but gone slip of moon. The foundation shifts and cracks, a temporary face to slow the bardo witnessed, the transitory always traveling in waves and breaks. The thumb bluntly breaks the frame, more evidence between the landed lead and scattered brass, the placement of the...
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Would that there were a route or license, someway to settle the approach. Would that there were a prayer or switch, something to shut it off. The image keeps reoccurring, sliding from flesh to flesh. The vision is always at the edge of seeing and imagination, the signal rerunning all the roads and ways. The power and the precipice, the picture on the wall. Relentless,...
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