the stalker
It is the hunger best whetted by distance, the ache that bleeds into myth and archetype. You imbue these planes of weather and light, you wear the bombardment of these particles, you more than shine: you radiate. This is not the truth, but the observation, as much about this location as it is about the moments that you wore. I place my eyes where yours watched the camera, seeing as I am told. I stare straight through the blurring of time, watching for that moment. I watch as you reveal our secret.
I can see the stitching on your shadow, I watch it stretch as you cast your flesh against the light. I can hear the traffic and the birds in the sky. I feel your cold and know your warming. I listen to the whispering of your mind.
I know it is you, by the weight of the light that sustains me. I know it is you, by the way you fill each frame. Your eyes are alive even in reflection. Your eyes are alive even in the moments that you have lost. You can see me out here in the empty inference. You know me in the way you know the night. I hold on, the way a breath is held while diving. I hold this revelation, just beneath the surface. I watch you in the subdued silence of a still photograph, knowing that you will see me waiting.
It is the hunger best whetted by distance, the ache that bleeds into myth and archetype. You imbue these planes of weather and light, you wear the bombardment of these particles, you more than shine: you radiate. This is not the truth, but the observation, as much about this location as it is about the moments that you wore. I place my eyes where yours watched the camera, seeing as I am told. I stare straight through the blurring of time, watching for that moment. I watch as you reveal our secret.
I can see the stitching on your shadow, I watch it stretch as you cast your flesh against the light. I can hear the traffic and the birds in the sky. I feel your cold and know your warming. I listen to the whispering of your mind.
I know it is you, by the weight of the light that sustains me. I know it is you, by the way you fill each frame. Your eyes are alive even in reflection. Your eyes are alive even in the moments that you have lost. You can see me out here in the empty inference. You know me in the way you know the night. I hold on, the way a breath is held while diving. I hold this revelation, just beneath the surface. I watch you in the subdued silence of a still photograph, knowing that you will see me waiting.
anima
When I close my eyes, what fevers may find me? When I fall asleep, what miasmas will I breed? Sickness descends, like all the crows coming home to roost, like the golden parachute of these wages of sin. Brutal fabrications and moments of untarnished delight meld in confusion and clarity. The complications of this lapse into synesthesia, all dissolve upon waking. No memory, no story, just the dull ache of some forbidden substance. The blood gossiping beneath the flesh, your absence a weight bending the schema of my bones.
Scratches and sores, the skittering of insects, the ill-omen of rats. Something moving in the midnight brush, squat and feral, known only by the sound of the bend shrubs and broken twigs. A stairway unlit, echoing with some remaindered voice. The notion of crime, of liberty taken out in meat and misery. I feel feint beneath the rictus of the rage that wears my shape, as if this fury could finally extinguish this last conceit, this ridiculous name. I feel that press of determined limbs and clever lips, that argument that lives in the timeless tides of these cells. For a moment in the darkness, you resonate.
It is the place where joy becomes nightmare, that cusp of want and will, that precipice of ache and lapse. I need your tongue for tasting, I need your skin beneath my restless hands. My breath condensed on your belly, that fervid alchemy of sweat and touch and vapor. Words spoken so softly they nest in your hair, in the caress of light and shadow upon your nakedness. These insistent dopplerings, the form of loss and desire anchored in time by the stitch-work where a soul once was bound. These indistinctions between the remembered and the imagined, the way you wore my damnation like a blessing. The way you wore my empty when all there was was bounty.
When I close my eyes, what fevers may find me? When I fall asleep, what miasmas will I breed? Sickness descends, like all the crows coming home to roost, like the golden parachute of these wages of sin. Brutal fabrications and moments of untarnished delight meld in confusion and clarity. The complications of this lapse into synesthesia, all dissolve upon waking. No memory, no story, just the dull ache of some forbidden substance. The blood gossiping beneath the flesh, your absence a weight bending the schema of my bones.
Scratches and sores, the skittering of insects, the ill-omen of rats. Something moving in the midnight brush, squat and feral, known only by the sound of the bend shrubs and broken twigs. A stairway unlit, echoing with some remaindered voice. The notion of crime, of liberty taken out in meat and misery. I feel feint beneath the rictus of the rage that wears my shape, as if this fury could finally extinguish this last conceit, this ridiculous name. I feel that press of determined limbs and clever lips, that argument that lives in the timeless tides of these cells. For a moment in the darkness, you resonate.
It is the place where joy becomes nightmare, that cusp of want and will, that precipice of ache and lapse. I need your tongue for tasting, I need your skin beneath my restless hands. My breath condensed on your belly, that fervid alchemy of sweat and touch and vapor. Words spoken so softly they nest in your hair, in the caress of light and shadow upon your nakedness. These insistent dopplerings, the form of loss and desire anchored in time by the stitch-work where a soul once was bound. These indistinctions between the remembered and the imagined, the way you wore my damnation like a blessing. The way you wore my empty when all there was was bounty.
solitaire
The sounds are few and repetitive: the blather of the television, the whirr of the fan blades, the riffle of the crisp deck of cards amid a clean shuffle. The cards are laid out in that same old array. One, then two, then three, and four. Seven piles, adding one per rightward progression. The top card in each pile dealt face up, all the numbers and suits. The simple hierarchy of cards revealed in dim light. A tired game played on reflex, a notion of containment and continuity palmed, then parted. Completed or abandoned, then played yet again.
The ritual goes back as far as I can remember. Solitaire played as I lay on the floor, half watching the TV, half watching the cards. The game is a ritual of limitations, possibility writ small, the hand played as it lays. The wager is subtle, reveal all the color, expose every face. Ascend to the realm of aces, there is the win. Shuffle and deal, glance at the story before you. Childhood living room family time, rife with the shuffle of cards, everyone together, playing alone.
It is the conceit of the Devil's realm, the business of trying to pick the pocket of God. Trying to choose the outcome of a set of events, trying to discern a particular future. The gamble that exists in this yearning towards control is the reason some hold cards and dice akin to witchcraft and divination as being sin. Card games pre-exist the decks of prediction, despite the myths they print on the Tarot decks. The world is a gamble, full of unseen paths and sudden changes. The odds on knowing tomorrow's face are too slim to create that intermittent reenforcement high, so we analogize life into the confines of our games. 52 cards allows us enough probability to be sinful. 52 cards and you can feel the odds.
Spades and diamonds, hearts and clubs. Red and black and the narrow strains of these four royal houses. I deal the slick fresh deck with dry fingers, the rough edges imagined, the outcome moot. What do I lose, what do I gain? Time cost, time managed. The victory is equal to the failure. A habit meant to bide the wiles of idle hands. A ritual meant to ask little of a future that doesn't exist.
Not much to make of the lives of the lonesome. Tics and tells, conversations spat at shadows and memories, the outlines of that Statler Brothers' song. Games made to fill the gaps left by electric light and closed doors. Dropped shoulders and spilled milk, the ripples of each instant touching a thousand unexpected points. I add these reflex complications, mitigating uncertainty. An assured mix of the predictable unknown to paint the dusty walls. A deck of cards and an empty room, the tuneless hue of the dwindling measure of time.
The sounds are few and repetitive: the blather of the television, the whirr of the fan blades, the riffle of the crisp deck of cards amid a clean shuffle. The cards are laid out in that same old array. One, then two, then three, and four. Seven piles, adding one per rightward progression. The top card in each pile dealt face up, all the numbers and suits. The simple hierarchy of cards revealed in dim light. A tired game played on reflex, a notion of containment and continuity palmed, then parted. Completed or abandoned, then played yet again.
The ritual goes back as far as I can remember. Solitaire played as I lay on the floor, half watching the TV, half watching the cards. The game is a ritual of limitations, possibility writ small, the hand played as it lays. The wager is subtle, reveal all the color, expose every face. Ascend to the realm of aces, there is the win. Shuffle and deal, glance at the story before you. Childhood living room family time, rife with the shuffle of cards, everyone together, playing alone.
It is the conceit of the Devil's realm, the business of trying to pick the pocket of God. Trying to choose the outcome of a set of events, trying to discern a particular future. The gamble that exists in this yearning towards control is the reason some hold cards and dice akin to witchcraft and divination as being sin. Card games pre-exist the decks of prediction, despite the myths they print on the Tarot decks. The world is a gamble, full of unseen paths and sudden changes. The odds on knowing tomorrow's face are too slim to create that intermittent reenforcement high, so we analogize life into the confines of our games. 52 cards allows us enough probability to be sinful. 52 cards and you can feel the odds.
Spades and diamonds, hearts and clubs. Red and black and the narrow strains of these four royal houses. I deal the slick fresh deck with dry fingers, the rough edges imagined, the outcome moot. What do I lose, what do I gain? Time cost, time managed. The victory is equal to the failure. A habit meant to bide the wiles of idle hands. A ritual meant to ask little of a future that doesn't exist.
Not much to make of the lives of the lonesome. Tics and tells, conversations spat at shadows and memories, the outlines of that Statler Brothers' song. Games made to fill the gaps left by electric light and closed doors. Dropped shoulders and spilled milk, the ripples of each instant touching a thousand unexpected points. I add these reflex complications, mitigating uncertainty. An assured mix of the predictable unknown to paint the dusty walls. A deck of cards and an empty room, the tuneless hue of the dwindling measure of time.
blameless blue
It feels as if I missed the fever, still flush with the season's heat. The evening chokes past, the sheen of sweat caught in the blameless blue of the muttering television. Everything lit for a reason, everything burnt down to its resident ash.
The shadows clot the doorway, the shadows paint the walls. Night crawls in on all fours, the bitter dregs at the bottom of a half full cup. The stained windows walk the floor with passing traffic, stabbed with the missed story, charmed with the blessing of passing time. The ceiling stippled with whispers and figments, lit with moments and persistence, somehow sinking like a stone.
Tell me the reason for the riddle. Tell me the distance to the day. The hands cupped awaiting bounty, empty save for the sensation of waiting, holding that trembling moment that has already gone.
It feels as if I missed the fever, still flush with the season's heat. The evening chokes past, the sheen of sweat caught in the blameless blue of the muttering television. Everything lit for a reason, everything burnt down to its resident ash.
The shadows clot the doorway, the shadows paint the walls. Night crawls in on all fours, the bitter dregs at the bottom of a half full cup. The stained windows walk the floor with passing traffic, stabbed with the missed story, charmed with the blessing of passing time. The ceiling stippled with whispers and figments, lit with moments and persistence, somehow sinking like a stone.
Tell me the reason for the riddle. Tell me the distance to the day. The hands cupped awaiting bounty, empty save for the sensation of waiting, holding that trembling moment that has already gone.
Jupiter in opposition
The whispered phrase, the bitterest rival now immolated for a moment, lost in the tide of stars. Heavy you hold court, massive and trapped always before ignition. How close you came to burning, how stolid settles your crown. Swarmed with frozen followers, you wear this crowd like robes, like the birthright of the made up ruler we gave you for a name. Here I am, star struck dumb, caught in the tide of reminiscence, writing to a crippled sun. Here I am, glistening with heat and salt, and my own dismal truths. The cascade of night, where you dimly caper. Just another wanderer washed out by the fires of another California sky.
For the ghosts of kings and glamourous beauties buried long ago. For the wrecked ships sunken upon sharp reefs, still bloated with stolen treasures. The sinking of all of our hopes, hewn from limb and stone and vision, ideas alive only in the wrought crafted remnants. The way we left our souls behind when there weren't words enough left, or a means to hang them out, drying outside of time or voice. The ancient mistaken menagerie and gilded over-blown ancients we cast into the sky from our campfire stories. All these prayers the rising vapors of tales bent towards that one that got away.
From this earth, I look skyward, witnessing a night streaked with airplanes and satellites, seared with meteors and headlights, tainted with the scent of fire ecology. From these golden hills and asphalt flattened fields, I watch these slips and tethers of our travels around our typical star. I am the color of the atmosphere, the bandwidth of water and of carbon. I am heavy and witless, and named into another series of tribal myths, the meaning of which I will never really know. I am clouded with insects, and aching for blue smoke or a red kiss. I see Jupiter at its farthest, and fall further into the growing stillness of another summer lost.
The whispered phrase, the bitterest rival now immolated for a moment, lost in the tide of stars. Heavy you hold court, massive and trapped always before ignition. How close you came to burning, how stolid settles your crown. Swarmed with frozen followers, you wear this crowd like robes, like the birthright of the made up ruler we gave you for a name. Here I am, star struck dumb, caught in the tide of reminiscence, writing to a crippled sun. Here I am, glistening with heat and salt, and my own dismal truths. The cascade of night, where you dimly caper. Just another wanderer washed out by the fires of another California sky.
For the ghosts of kings and glamourous beauties buried long ago. For the wrecked ships sunken upon sharp reefs, still bloated with stolen treasures. The sinking of all of our hopes, hewn from limb and stone and vision, ideas alive only in the wrought crafted remnants. The way we left our souls behind when there weren't words enough left, or a means to hang them out, drying outside of time or voice. The ancient mistaken menagerie and gilded over-blown ancients we cast into the sky from our campfire stories. All these prayers the rising vapors of tales bent towards that one that got away.
From this earth, I look skyward, witnessing a night streaked with airplanes and satellites, seared with meteors and headlights, tainted with the scent of fire ecology. From these golden hills and asphalt flattened fields, I watch these slips and tethers of our travels around our typical star. I am the color of the atmosphere, the bandwidth of water and of carbon. I am heavy and witless, and named into another series of tribal myths, the meaning of which I will never really know. I am clouded with insects, and aching for blue smoke or a red kiss. I see Jupiter at its farthest, and fall further into the growing stillness of another summer lost.
I am the ruined road, I am the murder ballad. Too many years spent living in other people's worst moments, their traumas and trials, their bleak despairing almost endings. Too much time spent trying to reverse the inevitable, talking the early enders out of their early adoptions, moving that brutal edge back with slow persuasion and impromptu wrestling matches. Meeting me on the job use to mean something went very wrong with your life. I am the knot in the rope, and the lesser of immediate evils. It is hard to live in a world that isn't burning. It is hard to explain this wager when no longer placed on mortal stakes.
the short form
I am failing, the words are falling, the dull report of spent brass on the gutter, the tailings of smoke that follow the blaze of a star as it falls. I clear my throat, I try to speak, but all the things I have ever said have dwindled to so much exhaust, and all the things I want to say seem too slippery to sink a tooth into. I am old enough to know my weaknesses, so old I have forgotten the strengths I used to think were me. There is the mirror, and there is the world, and neither are inclined to tell the lies I would love them to. Each lapse, each pause, every halting step, each breach of momentum is practice. We rehearse that last lay down more and more as the years press past. Loss is the gift that keeps giving.
The more limits I find to my cognition, the less capable I am to hang words on these feelings and thoughts, the greater the impact each moment has upon my senses. The breadth of beauty, the depth and distance of these exquisite wants, the crowded room feeling of a heart touched by ordinary kindness and common decency: all strike me hardest while my heart stumbles and my mouth dries and crumbles into numb silence. The words that once poured forth unbidden now hide behind imagined shapes and tensions, the press of a pain both mild and enduring.
This is the way of life when it lingers. Live long enough you will learn your limits. Live long enough and every least sliver of luck is weighed as a blessing. I stumble and I fall. I learn the difference between the density of the cement and my bone, the tensile strength of my skull and that of steel. Life likes to remind us with our fears and our passions, with our nightmares and wishes worn on its sleeves. A tender kiss, the lean of a hip, the heat of steel, the speed of lead. The blows become swifter as the machine slows, the ground more intent on harm. We rehearse the count out, practicing the simple act of standing again and again. Head swimming in dumb trauma, stars buzzing about like humming birds at dawn, wrapped in weakness and infirmity I rise.
I am failing, the words are falling, the dull report of spent brass on the gutter, the tailings of smoke that follow the blaze of a star as it falls. I clear my throat, I try to speak, but all the things I have ever said have dwindled to so much exhaust, and all the things I want to say seem too slippery to sink a tooth into. I am old enough to know my weaknesses, so old I have forgotten the strengths I used to think were me. There is the mirror, and there is the world, and neither are inclined to tell the lies I would love them to. Each lapse, each pause, every halting step, each breach of momentum is practice. We rehearse that last lay down more and more as the years press past. Loss is the gift that keeps giving.
The more limits I find to my cognition, the less capable I am to hang words on these feelings and thoughts, the greater the impact each moment has upon my senses. The breadth of beauty, the depth and distance of these exquisite wants, the crowded room feeling of a heart touched by ordinary kindness and common decency: all strike me hardest while my heart stumbles and my mouth dries and crumbles into numb silence. The words that once poured forth unbidden now hide behind imagined shapes and tensions, the press of a pain both mild and enduring.
This is the way of life when it lingers. Live long enough you will learn your limits. Live long enough and every least sliver of luck is weighed as a blessing. I stumble and I fall. I learn the difference between the density of the cement and my bone, the tensile strength of my skull and that of steel. Life likes to remind us with our fears and our passions, with our nightmares and wishes worn on its sleeves. A tender kiss, the lean of a hip, the heat of steel, the speed of lead. The blows become swifter as the machine slows, the ground more intent on harm. We rehearse the count out, practicing the simple act of standing again and again. Head swimming in dumb trauma, stars buzzing about like humming birds at dawn, wrapped in weakness and infirmity I rise.
lapsed love letter
There is this cracked foundation, these fissures reaching out through the firmament into the stony soil below. There are the dusty limbs and the rancid sweat, the broken vessel and the strummed guitar. There is the ache that radiates from all this naked beauty, the blessing of distance and numbing of want. Moths and mosquitos beat at the screen door, orbiting the battlements manned by raccoon and cat. There is halo, cast thoughtlessly across the night, waiting for you.
My hands are sore and my eyes are tired. I can feel the arthritic bindings in my knuckles even as I type. I smell of strong coffee and work sweat, of old wounds and bitter mysteries. The furies will not let me be. A star-chart calendar hangs with the webbing on my walls. Soon the skies will be flayed by the Pleiades, the moon will start its last quarter before Ramadan, and Jupiter will reach opposition. All these recipes for staring. All these maps made of old wishes and turning worlds.
The light flickers and begins to fade. What is there to a lamp that it needs to fail with such prolonged drama? A couple of wires, a socket, and a switch. That and the ice cream twists of an high-efficiency bulb I just replaced. Modern technology is the mythology I believe in, this story of copper wire and plastic pipes. Of bandwidths crowded with rings of radiation, the radio-bands flickering like auras around all these spattered sources of power. After unplugging and plugging again my expertise is spent. I turn off the light, letting the mystery wait until later. I let shadows crowd all the empty space I fill with missing you.
There is this cracked foundation, these fissures reaching out through the firmament into the stony soil below. There are the dusty limbs and the rancid sweat, the broken vessel and the strummed guitar. There is the ache that radiates from all this naked beauty, the blessing of distance and numbing of want. Moths and mosquitos beat at the screen door, orbiting the battlements manned by raccoon and cat. There is halo, cast thoughtlessly across the night, waiting for you.
My hands are sore and my eyes are tired. I can feel the arthritic bindings in my knuckles even as I type. I smell of strong coffee and work sweat, of old wounds and bitter mysteries. The furies will not let me be. A star-chart calendar hangs with the webbing on my walls. Soon the skies will be flayed by the Pleiades, the moon will start its last quarter before Ramadan, and Jupiter will reach opposition. All these recipes for staring. All these maps made of old wishes and turning worlds.
The light flickers and begins to fade. What is there to a lamp that it needs to fail with such prolonged drama? A couple of wires, a socket, and a switch. That and the ice cream twists of an high-efficiency bulb I just replaced. Modern technology is the mythology I believe in, this story of copper wire and plastic pipes. Of bandwidths crowded with rings of radiation, the radio-bands flickering like auras around all these spattered sources of power. After unplugging and plugging again my expertise is spent. I turn off the light, letting the mystery wait until later. I let shadows crowd all the empty space I fill with missing you.
You break the pane in a sheen of sweat, in a halo the color of distant sound. You radiate across all points of the plane, every angle blunt wonder. Each glimpse hunger and desire and loss rolled into a timeless patois, whispering in the ears of would be lovers, arguing towards that one mild bite of the forbidden. Every sight another shameless song, all those ballads belted towards the cheap seats; every song that ever played while John Cusack stood aching in the rain. You are cigarettes and kisses, salt on the rim and constellations spattered on your skin. Stars fall and the lights go on and off. Still you shine, illuminated by the roil of your soul, lit by the fire you light in these sorry stranger's eyes.
a home abandoned
The root of identity is to forget, to be blinkered to the width and depth of things, to be a stranger to the bounty, and a ghost to the host. The untold multitudes in each measure make a cacophony the self would not endure unscathed if the curtain were always open, if the light were always on. So we are born, and slowly buried in the dismal business of being. One voice, still and witless, talking in the burdensome dark. One voice, all peals and echoes, clamoring about the halls and rooms, littering the eaves and the streets with its name.
I begin at the end, as I do so often. Boil away the argument to the hiss and pop of the needle as it circles, leaven the reasoning with whatever words are left laying about the floor. The forgetting of being is not the broad amnesia of the staggered wounded, or the creation myth reinvention of a rise in self-estimation or a change in station. All the ephemera of origin and clan, of blood and tongue and childhood fields and forests are remembered closely, are part of the loss. Perspective is unique to place and circumstance, not just this one, but this one this way right now. That singular station, knowing the nightfall all around and the light shining inside, that is the lonesome price of self. The muse once all music has ended, the journey begun in jest inevitably ending hilariously in earnest.
It is a tired and ordinary notion, the stuff of bleak poems and suicide notes. The will to speak failing so fully that the voice inside shouts down the songs of the world. The heart beat falling down the cellar stairs, the rapid footfalls, the cinema slow rattling of the door knob. Screams and laughter that wake you from unsettled dreaming, the sea-sick feeling that the dreams of prophecy have become sentences bound to be served. The flocks, the swarms, the wished for storms. The sense as sleep comes again that you are a house empty save for habits. A home abandoned to bitter ghosts.
The root of identity is to forget, to be blinkered to the width and depth of things, to be a stranger to the bounty, and a ghost to the host. The untold multitudes in each measure make a cacophony the self would not endure unscathed if the curtain were always open, if the light were always on. So we are born, and slowly buried in the dismal business of being. One voice, still and witless, talking in the burdensome dark. One voice, all peals and echoes, clamoring about the halls and rooms, littering the eaves and the streets with its name.
I begin at the end, as I do so often. Boil away the argument to the hiss and pop of the needle as it circles, leaven the reasoning with whatever words are left laying about the floor. The forgetting of being is not the broad amnesia of the staggered wounded, or the creation myth reinvention of a rise in self-estimation or a change in station. All the ephemera of origin and clan, of blood and tongue and childhood fields and forests are remembered closely, are part of the loss. Perspective is unique to place and circumstance, not just this one, but this one this way right now. That singular station, knowing the nightfall all around and the light shining inside, that is the lonesome price of self. The muse once all music has ended, the journey begun in jest inevitably ending hilariously in earnest.
It is a tired and ordinary notion, the stuff of bleak poems and suicide notes. The will to speak failing so fully that the voice inside shouts down the songs of the world. The heart beat falling down the cellar stairs, the rapid footfalls, the cinema slow rattling of the door knob. Screams and laughter that wake you from unsettled dreaming, the sea-sick feeling that the dreams of prophecy have become sentences bound to be served. The flocks, the swarms, the wished for storms. The sense as sleep comes again that you are a house empty save for habits. A home abandoned to bitter ghosts.
