What would we be but bones and feathers were we the wings beating? Where would we end up but the ash heap with all the world gone to burning? It all wears down, the color of your hair, the stitching in the seams. The cooked and rotted world heavy with heat and thick with fickle flies, in it for the thrill, in it for a...
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The heat always stays its own story, the sheen of salt and sweat, the weary and the wear of it. It clings skintight to clothes and stories, seeping through every telling, making itself known. It whispers to you oh so it’s the summer, or oh, they’re in the south of France. It adds that inferential portent, the dripping before all the squeeze and slide shows...
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I’m a stranger here myself, however long I loiter. Here when the earthquake came like the beating of urgent wings against the windowpane, here when the earthquake was ripples bucking through the rocks, the bridge collapse and the baseball game. Somewhere waving with the trees, somewhere weeping in the dusk. I move I drags and starts, slow motion and jump cut, ache and negation and...
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Another warm and windy day beneath a blue bias sky, the frame of sameness seeding the myth of continuity, the place dissolving into stubborn names and entropy. An eye for envy and trouble with the plot. The long cons weight the sway of the lie, that described horizon where you going to long at last, the quick patch of the syllables torn clean from cognitions....
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The day grazes on the easy blessings, the bright of sky, the bent of branch. The work of root and wing, the crush of sun and the glib turn of the winds. The aches and woes soaked in the daily breading, kept to the back of the workings of a busy mind. The distractions and compulsions that map it out and keep it moving. Then...
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We don’t always wake to the world around us. Sometimes there’s a returning to the flesh, an exchange of essences and understandings before the real begins to ink itself in, the names and numbers and the miles to go. Poet or butterfly by the by, we wake with claims and answers, our forms trading, our intentions amok. From the known derivations to the concessions to...
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The sundown bursts through the porch slats and the rings of the ladder, hanging atop the back fence as the fireworks sizzle and report, the field a series of percussive echoes thumping across the distance. I squint a little, leaning forward to below where the sun seemed to go. One less blinding fire, one less gracious star to abide. The walls tremble, the window glass...
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The day taken by its restless ends, a slide of blue above the travesty of the atmosphere knotted with the heat bleeding off the asphalt, the embouchure of each breath at once a testament to and a declamation to this enduring epilogue. The losing doesn’t happen all at once. Little by little the purchase is chipped and chiseled, the flesh flayed and the husk scraped...
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Night falls and the web swaddled bulb draws a crowd, a mob of arthropods floods the porch and walls, busy with the work of the world. I await a signal, a sign of the prophecy meted out by a perennial friend as the expectation expires the way they usually do, in clear, cold facts. Fireworks abound, the dog gone crazy in his now daily way,...
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How the day paces when the sunlight gets long. How the shadows reach as the day drawls on. The trees all mesmerized as they sway in the sky to some tune of sun and soil while trash dances down the windy street. Feathers bend, boughs break, the clock just keeps turning over in its grave. God shows up late in the day to claim creation....
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