.cactus flower


Eyes closed I don't know
that you are sleeping.
Eyes opened I don't know
that you can see.
To begin anew too much like wishing,
to end at last to much like escape.
Over night the cactus blooms,
flaring pink and yellow
straight from the mystery of dreaming.
Change is constant

from the rising of the day
to the chilling of the flesh--
that insistent fever
bound inevitably to break.
The rising tide where I close
your eyes, the dream and the toil
give way to ash and polished stone.
The stars we only know
seem from long ago,
the night now lost
these blinding, writhing streets.

These last breaths rise,
a polity of chitinous angels
reclaiming the flesh as birthright--
so fierce and slow the motions
concealed beneath the earth.
The light passes, a problem of
sudden geometry. The rough
world averaging out curved smooth,
so hard to cling to when certainty
slips, despite the dawn,
there is the silence of the answer.

The shine takes each face, brightness blurring distinction, slurring the very act of naming. Fires rise, lit by sparks spat out from the core of the sun thousands of years ago, delicately flickering, flavored faintly with the eternal. Identity something kept folded in a pocket. Identity something forgotten in a cab.

Summer begins as fevers, it ends as feasts. All the color refracted and nursed from every surface a clue aimed at origin. Genesis scribbled over everything sensed or seen. We sift and sort, unfastening the hinges, leaving the stuffing laying on the ground in muted heaps. We mistake differences for borders, and name everything as islands, forgetting the rollick and groping of the sea.

So I say come away with me. I say we can forget our histories, leaving our shoulders to worry about the warmth of the sun. I lead you through your confessions and my obsessions, speaking as we will of things we can not possibly know. Here, lapped by heat and the devil's wandering wind, I draw this mood like a sword. Here, bathed in blue flames, I tell you your life story, drawn from the core of arctic ice. I tell you what to call me as we willfully forget our names.

The faint but pressing weight of a changing sky changes the context of the unspoken conversation, from face to skull, from rail to steel. All the tossed molecules of breath and soon to be breath, spinning and gleaming in broad arcs and measurable waves before the words woven with them. A haze of heat and scent cut and edited by the whipping winds. The change takes hold, a forgotten itch crawling beneath your flesh, burrowing up a shoulder, down an arm. It is the structure, and these echoes of architecture we imagine when the structure is absent.

The imagined reliquary, its strange alchemical relation to unseen powers, the maker and the taker and the jailer all called. Lights go out, and the porch dwindles slightly, the tangle of shadows that rise up from the suchness of things. The steel of the old deck chair, red with paint and rust. Brick work and cement and the scented confusion of potted plants. The root work expands, believing in a system of plenitude that is slowly being boiled away. We were once, and are no longer, yet still we believe memory is the same as evidence.

Smoke trickles from my lips, mingling with breath and the giddy tension of oxygen starvation, and I watch your eyes through a haze of my own making. Your eyes with their canny sharpness and their desolate starlight shine. Your eyes with their hints of ardor and calamity and calm. Your eyes like weary travelers, like the hush of a forest canopy, like the feeling of falling just left in a dream. I look away, too close to that precipice. I smoke and listen, waiting for you to leave with the day. Waiting for the honesty of another plodding night.

Some nights the shadows gather, some days the sun won't call. The grind of nameless days, the set mathematics of seamless obscurity and alienation that grants you false names and forgets both virtue and vice, the claim set upon your soul by liars and cannibals all work you like freshly sharpened teeth. Like stakes destined to answer that fudged question of eternity. Semi -colons and exclamation points, the sparse punctuation of your failing equilibrium. Dead eyes and riotous streets, poems and vacillations and all the other metrics left bereft of any soul. Sleep is lost, and wakefulness a debt that never seems to settle.

Sweat clings, the remainder of work, the effort spent all but invisible now, clouds of smoke and vapor. Salt and dust and scant reminders of insects that thirst for blood. Itches rise from ashes, to remain only vaguely scratched. A whole miasma surrounds each morsel of time, me blind to all but sparks and tailings.

It is a causal relationship, casually ignored, like the violent deaths of distant strangers, acknowledged in words and parsed feelings, quickly leaving the mind. The birthright abattoir, tallow and poultry sweepings, the slippery slope toward mechanization. The world slides away from us, our imaginations hewing ruin from bounty, creating notions of heaven upon heapings of hell. Threads and tools, this literature of wanton error, of forewarnings and victories and marginal surprise. The trouble with idealism and realism remain the same, even when the knowledge is thorough, the encyclopedia complete, ignorance and immediacy seem like wisdom when no one remembers the definition of wealth.

So we fight and gnash and toil, we name call and perform our rituals of sacrifice and ablution. We choose a side upon some false partition and howl with fury as we dismember all our tomorrows. Vivisection masquerades as election, and we throw our voices whole-heartedly into the hope that will be our graves. Each day a pyrrhic victory won in a war lost before we were born. Each night the slow preparation to cannibalize our souls.

She went away, leaving with the autumn tide and the guardian moon. It was a leaving that left me longing for a phase, a changing of places that would wind up all the same. The intermittent re-enforcement common to all romantic thought. Then longing grows longer, widens the wander until even the most magical of daily notions snaps. Soon enough every sentence I hung on her was tensed past. Gone was the only word that mingled with her name in any fresh moment.

It is an ordinary story, one that the splintering sense loves to talk upon. Seasons with their give and take, time with its tumbling gear work, the day and night and day again of this withering grind. All of it blessed by this fabled sadness, the spilt milk, the crumbled cookies. Was once but will not be again is the refrain that rides us to our graves. Half of life is learning to wake without.

What breaks us is this telling, the learning of conventions that makes us, after so many happily burned bridges, forgetting ever knowing how to swim. Story begets story begets the form that we allow of a story at all. Telling what we know can be told, we miss the tiny stories bursting into bloom all around. Her story was never in the leaving, that was only me. Her story is where ever she needed to be. The tale belongs to everyone: we only share part of the words.

Is it in the slick endowment of flesh, the tide of fever that abides the balance of blood and humors, the stippling of sweat through sheer cloth? Is it in the ebb and flow of bone and muscle, the tussle of these wrecked continents, these hard consonants and feather soft vowels? Is it the ghost that rollicks through fine tethered features, the perfect roll of some haunted mannequin? Or is it that residue of dreams that leaves the floor mirror slick as it crawls like some horror movie trickle up those strong and supple limbs, seeing the innocent unopened bottle you taste the fist of the full on reeling drunk. Eyes and shadows, distance and the musk of containment, love as certain as that turn table hiss and pop, as sweet and sure as the memories of favored machines. Technology played backward until all need is unspooled, exposed. Glistening as only its own shine, there in that cherished ache of naked air.

The fever rages despite the hour and the obvious faux pas, mindless of the meter, heedless of the rhyme. Her eyes burn, the color of bad dreams and forgotten songs. Her eyes blaze that much brighter unseen. There is no reason in the depth of the draw of her natal sway, only alibi built for kingdoms of mayhem and slaughter. She is that road laden with all manner of intent, direction all a blur, the journey all that you can feel.

This misery should be wisdom. Lessons should seep from you brow like the hot beaded sweat, blinking as if from the bitterness of tears. There is murder and hunger mingling in that ache you attach to her dancing heels, the stitches of a shadow too heavy for motion to bear alone. Like love blunted, like lust laden in chains and thrown from some foggy bridge into the salty rollicking depths below. The escape is nothing until it is framed in these concussive elements. Desire just so much friendly fire, wounding all the same.

Knowledge is meaningless when grappling with such overwhelming fictions, the groundwork of it taking more than you thought you had inside. That lost love, that missed ship, the slipped punch a feinted jab with a heavy hook it its wake. That one habitually expected lingers in the dusky periphery, coloring meaning into the margins, a residual sentience staining each realized moment. The murky truth of her never known or met, each kiss wild with myth and chemistry. Knowing that there is no honesty allowed towards those that have swallowed the fable whole, you luxuriate in the impact of your blunt and ugly lies.

Her beauty penetrates, it arrives like a wound, like a spike in sensation. Just seeing her you curse, knowing somehow her existence demands your breath, owns that reflex to speak. There is an ache that arrises-- blooms in spring, fire from the earth. She radiates past the boundaries of photograph, beyond the stilled instance of your wishes and your witness. Seeing her resonates with-in you, that sense of a soul as matter overloaded with extra energy jumps states, that hunger in the whole empty world that seethes outside the bounds of your existence. She is proof that there are distances that are impassable, like the sight of stars so far away that they have long since disappeared, like notions of possibility abutted by the brutal honesty of the living world. Her beauty is evidence of some better, lovelier place, someplace so far away that you must learn distinguish the difference between recognition and knowledge. The curse forced from your lips as if from a blow, as if your body must move, acknowledging the pain of a wish to pray.

The weight shifts and the fire is drawn deeper into the ashes, sifting through the tired webs of breath and lung. An exhalation births coils of smoke, rising gamely, writhing in the seething winds. It is a meditation upon the transitory. It is a meditation upon the motion of life between the worlds.

Dusk settles and the storm just misses, and the trees sway in the full trot of the rising air. Smoke curdles and it flees, aloft upon these faint transitions in the atmosphere. The resting state of habitual commotion. This moment as it blends into the next. Tap the ashes into the ashtray, draw the flame, imbue the leave. Clouds of dusky cinders leave their remarks in the flayed flesh, mixing with this drizzled spirit, the mind alight in the change of matter, release and repast in this shifting elixir of subject then object. Particulates dancing in the fume and wroth of life leaving a little, while laying in state.

The street lights sense the night well after it has begun. The crawl of traffic, the dash of appetite. Whet the flame to dowse this burning. Stub out the butt of the tiny changes tradition demands. To wake right here, having traveled so hard to remain in one still place.