The daylight turns to wishing and the wishing to once weres, the thought along the arc of each particular orbit. Some sad scratching in the dirt, some bored staring at the stars, all this rough and tender telling left us. You wake when you wake, you sleep wherever you fall, from asphalt to silk, from silk to cinders. The hours take it all, limping along...
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The dogs go off and I’m awake, eyes snapped open to the gossiping dark. The mind races then it idles, finding traction in the little details while the brain is still telling stories to itself. That fleeting awareness of the multitude lurking behind the sense of identity, the name and place and where you left your pants and keys. The barking long gone before I...
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Dusk came early and the mail came late. Smoke was everywhere. My lungs and heart exchanged expletives and goodbyes, their long established grievances given new grist to grind. I rattled and puffed along as I always seem to do, the lickings never stopping the ticking completely. I don’t make good company, but I sure do keep the time. Some of me is shareware, some is...
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They say the fire jumped the highway. They see the smoke will take the night. The wind insists in the wrong direction, the blind dog digs and bangs. The spice of soil cuts the air, the breath burdensome and shallow, the heart as thick as a stump. The trees are dry from years of drought, neglected along with the rest of the visible spectra, every...
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It all comes together as it falls apart. The insistence of the instant, the ripples in the pond. The skin glistening with sweat and kissed only by mosquitoes and the shrapnel of concrete smote to smithereens. There’s always a fire somewhere, there’s always someone cutting loose or falling out. The dreams seep in through the soaked sheets and buffeted air, the blather that they broadcast...
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There’s no telling the tension left between a soul and a song. There’s no tellings the depths once the falling is all that’s left. The thick air of cloud and smoke and heat lingers long after dark, the passing traffic pushing shadows and trailing light. The new moon night muggy weighted with every stone ever sunk into the sea, hot with every torch ever carried...
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The thunder rumbled, the lightning flashed, the pit hid in the shower. The dawn broke hard, dappled droplets of rain and jags of electric flash and low roaring from on high. Strange for summer in California, at least as the old climate leanings go. The bedeviling heat, the shifting shoulders of the firmament, the prophesied trends coming true despite what you’ve been told. It is...
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How bright the day, how hot the night, the long tumble over and under as we are tugged and tossed by the sun. How heavy the heart when the cut turns dull from sharp, the pointless longing stubbed out in your eye. The sky goes from blaze to shimmer, from burn to bitter as the stars simmer on the tongue. The porch light beset with...
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I pass the blazing day in a soaked stupor, the heat melting me down to stillness and sorrow. Grease in the skillet, news on the morrow. The night arrives but the heat gives no quarter, the stifling sky smeared with smirking stars, the hubris changing state as the mortality flares up. Now it’s hot black coffee at 1:30 in the morning, lit by screen and...
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It doesn’t matter that the moon’s not out, I can feel it in the rising. It doesn’t figure that your love is gone, I can read it in the stars. The night holding the heat in its heart as the dogs rip the yard apart and the rats run the roofs. The words won’t come, the words don’t quit, the pleasure in the paradox in...
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