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.

It is in the way things unwind, in the way the world seems to burn just when I begin to miss it. It is the words or the fumes, this sense of loss that imbues everything with some sacramental preciousness. The act of thinking making something still so dear. I miss friends, I miss the dead, I miss deeds, I miss speaking. I am so adrift in this little blurring between is and was that I am missing things I only wished for, thinking that it feels like reviewing movies no one ever made. The strange glistening of insect wings in this dusty fluorescence. They heavy-handed scent of spring scratching at the heart caught in my throat. The safety imagined from some scant carpentry. Doors, a ceiling, windows made to watch the workings of this world.

So strange to praise beauty, to honor that which attracts. It is like praising the sky because you like it, like praising your tastes and feelings. Pulse and plumage, weather and feathers and the telltale toll of time's passing: all of these lade the taste for beauty. Evolutionary imperatives towards art and patterns, the hunger of ancient genes that simmers beneath all these words and rituals, the need to breed and bond and treasure whatever can not last. I watch as one might watch the horizon for ships or riders, eyes heavy and riven with the dusk. Neoteny and symmetry and that bright sign of wit burning in a clever eye--. The stretch of shadows measuring the distance between day and night. All that I am so distinct from and grateful for, epigraphs for the host and the haunting, the breadth and depth of so much longing.

That lost moment arises in strange and tangled moments, the feeling of a kiss, the electric memory of mingled breath and certainty burning in the soul you keep forgetting you believe exists. We haunt our own lives, as distant from our skins as the dead stars and crumpled myths, walking cold streets with decades of ghosts clattering in our wakes. Time and tenderness natural adversaries as you feel the fever within that far-away flesh, full of lonesome notions and hard learned truths. The light increases as distance gathers, a life of shrouds and shadows blinded by the thought of something that almost was another thing entirely. How in these colder holdings choice seems synonymous with failure, and loneliness the self itself. How that moment lives still, the scent of her hair as it brushes your face, that thrill of being both found and free. The threads of ten-thousand tellings of the same old story, pulling the strings upon the lapsed puppet of your unfathomable love.

The air beneath the tree is thick with the crush of apple blossoms and the heavy whirr of bee's wings, flying out their unwieldy patterns, their unlikely flights. A drizzle of dour serious honey bees, seeming so precious and rare, dusted gold and motorcycle black, working each limb, each blossom. The thick bounding flight of bumble bees, as big as grapes, as black as spilled ink, with their wild machine buzz and arcing dives and spirals. A small comfort as eyes weigh the pollen count in daubs of tears, the heady scent of apple and pear blooms sweetening the dust air. The sun slipping through the tree limbs bright and ragged, feeling a little like nostalgia, like memory trickling down the skin. The threadbare traces of lost fauna. The sound of bees a-flight.

Spring shows its hand a little early, what with the birds all a twitter and swarms of glistening insects creating clouds in the sky. Peach blossom pink petals caught on the wind, awaiting some buzz or luster. Kids caught in the dumb scrum of childhood, laughing, squawking, spilling through the street. The corner boys play gangster, practicing their sad thousand yard glances. The night cleaved with sirens and misfires, mosquito bites and the endless prowling of cats.

I feel the press of shadow, the bloody plunder of nerve tangled years. The eye blink passage of our slow drawling lives played out beneath the illusory eternity of the ghosts of history’s stars. Myths and constellations clutter our foul reckless mouths, prayer book reasons spat into these impossible distances. I feel the tide of breath flow through me, the crashing cycle of life’s waves breaking in my blood. I feel as if I might catch a blown kiss, if the wind ever wrights itself within the storm of this life.

I ache in right angles. Original sin dots my irreverent I’s and Christian T’s. Reading slipped sentiments that I could never write. Writing these silent drowsing plagues. It staggers, the resolution of impact. Bones aligned with history, saving all their telling for that insistent grave. A mouth full of gravel, marbles lost where I did not see the game.

I don’t know why I watch the moon rise, suspended here from smoke and sparks, as it floats and glows through cypress and palm silhouettes. I don’t know why I cleave to its slow gloating glory as it gathers itself in mists and bounty. I don’t recognize that terrible tone that accompanies it, the blather of myth, the chatter of hunger. I don’t know the cause of these brutal longings, the tip-toeing of a bruised and weathered heart. Bound to the ground and the shadows, this perverse sense of wonder, the calm of wander, the pull of distance as of yet unfettered, I feel the pack track a-shamble. I feel the trail disappear, murdered by a child’s promise. That lonesome trace of the divine.

The last day dozes in the grave you made it, dug with small surrenders, with hidden sacrifice. The scent of loam, the sound of the shovel, the depths that you have yet to plunder: this is the wonder that bottom holds. This is how far there is yet to fall. A sunken sun, a broken heart, a dream with seams that pull apart. The charted stars seem too close for a future that will never start.

The night abides odd visitors, chalk marked fence posts and the layered prayers poured into the gutter. Your every oath is a mouthful of marbles, cold and clattering like the repartee of pavement and teeth. Such a poor repast and the hunger does not leave-- the tension between ache and appetite blinds every sense but sight. So the moon is a crescent and Venus rests within that shiny crust. So the clouds gather like like-feathered birds only to leave in the vagaries of slumber. You crowd every eaves with the press of this absence.

This loneliness outlasts all the other feelings, the joys and terrors that weigh down the wires. It is slow and it is patient. It has sold each soul for this awful endurance. THe hours creep away into the thorny shrubs, they fly and flee in every weathered direction away. And it is only you, tethered to shadowed pavement. And it is only you, chained to the clamor of dust and the blank kiss of plastic. Its wings stretch, they gather you in their blue embrace. You speak, or you don’t. Knowing there is no-one willing to know the difference

The way the rules are written, in blood and scent and flesh, we are drawn along intersecting lines, our hearts parabolas flung at mortal speeds with glacial arcs, the transom of meager moments the whole of our selves suspended. Attraction wanes as repulsion waxes, these seething satellite's ellipses tattooed in these smiles and snarls. Beauty weighs in, its staggering mass belayed by its whispered manifestation, its whole argument contained mostly in our limber and willing souls. Strange how distance completes this circuit, how these laws coalesce, emerging intact from the argot of contingency, from the wavering tongue of chance. Strange how knowing the forces at work upon the structure does so little to remand the stressors. How puppets twitch just as fervently, witnessing their strings. Drawn in with-in the yellowed margins, the plans never stop the roots and blooms from believing they are free.

The world grows small and cold and dense. Eventually everyone’s story spills from our lips. The compass bucks and spins, pointing in affectation, never in direction. It is hard to tell the truth and not laugh. After all these years, it is next to impossible to break character.

A lipstick kiss, folded in a letter I should have kept. Creased and unlikely, an admission and an escape. A few blue words, sweet as spring, as deft as birds. A heart traced in the steam of a morning mirror. The wheel of sky has scarcely turned. Bloody muscles twitched and slipped their seams, gravity tightened its hold. You escaped, in a streak of heat and light. You escaped, leaving me standing in smoke and the yawning jaws of night.

Life dopplers forth from that crowd of limbs and pulses, it extends past the pond of all that stretch and heat. Those slick mingled figures we once wore-- mouths a jumble of tongue, tooth and breath-- endure like those atomic shadows, cave paintings made from one world ending. My hands upon you past any asking, permission radiating from your singing flesh and dancing spine. Those moments past words, when passion and motion created that strange math of romance. You and me, one and one making yet another one.