We start out where the day is spent, night fresh treads and the course of decorations. We start out with the cigar burning odd and the flower startlingly noncommittal. I pass around my unwanted jokes and unpersuasive poems, notes that never make it up the row, missives that a few cruel teachers might read aloud but mostly they just throw away. The night already knows,...
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The nerves all run at a burn, the air stirred with ink and static. The dark and cars have taken all the spaces. Ascension II is sizzling through the atmosphere, smoke is climbing up the sky. It’s clear enough to give witness to the wanderers, cold enough that gloves ought to have been given a thought. Saturday night comes along at a reckless gallop, people...
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Held too close
like the words of a ghost
speaking clearly in
the crown of darkest night.
Left too long
the armrest of the open
driver’s side soaking
the whole arm for
the elbow’s sake.
Bereft at the direction
the hearts says look
and the eyes oblige
despite the limits of the organism
and the capacities of the instruments.
Eventually it is all pieces
weighed...
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The heart is reckless mechanism. The heart is an essential worker. The heart won’t leave well enough alone. Carrying torches and keeping time. Beating the blood red, threading the sky through through the flesh, stitch by stitch a tuck and a tich. Holding the flame and carrying torches, spelunking through the wheezing depths of the soul’s long dark night. The heart climbs the mountain, the...
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It comes at the uncertain spin of the spell, the benediction by owl or crow, bright atop the tattered crowns of fall. It comes with the weight of the season, tinsel and turkeys and the faith to follow stars. The crisp air turns without a word, at once stilled and startled, the ancient aspect always revealed on sight. The moon treads the boards, climbing up...
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I tire of the calculations. The probabilities and the place in line, the countless reminders that I don’t count, the proportions and the dishes served best cold. The numbers don’t add up, at least not the way I add them. In tens and threes and multiples of nine. In ones and twos and black dog blues. There’s never number enough. There’s never a way I...
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scent and skin and giving in
when instinct takes its turn
breath and bone and coming home
when you finally close your eyes,
a twitch while you sleep, a howling
coming hard at the moon.
the fingers pressed into your hips,
the teeth with a taste for your throat,
a worry of eyes in the pitch of night,
a scruff for a heedless fist.
your...
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The short timer sun sticks a finger in my eye, rays of reckoning rubbing negatives into my retina, smoke unfurling from my fingers. Birdsong bubbling down to the roots from the crown, the stories they tell to soothe the skies and ward the stones mingling with the put on poignancy the dusk is always hustling. Vague hints and fool’s prophecy as they put the day’s...
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Everybody dies— what makes you so special?
The fear of the finality,
the sentence ends full stop.
The dot dot dash of the rampant heart
at long last parted with its purpose,
with the rest of the wreck gone
derelict, kicking and clawing,
spurting and oozing as
this vessel is abandoned. I guess
it’s all a little overboard, all
messed up and nowhere to go,...
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Without so much as a word the world turns the dew to ice, frost on the fields, clouds smeared across the sky. The stir of matter slows, only the earth and birds to witness the breath as it turns to steam, plumes of proof that the husk still lives. A squirrel rules the lines and the high branches, barely acknowledging the dervish dogs as they...
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