9.

Nine crimes held tight over hind sight, split and felled ferocious dreams, seeing and seeming and stealing all three of every trinity, every fellowship and every beauty.  

closing the frontier

The car keys on the counter

signal the possibility of leaving

but this time we will sit and stare

at one another in the full daylight.

The sink drips and the linoleum

hasn’t been scrubbed and sometimes

the house picks up dust

that won’t be cared about until

new owners come and click their

tongues and wonder at the previous others.

Such is life.

So, sitting we observe the last curves

of each face; the last stretch of each arm and leg

the last tone in the last note of each other’s breathing

and there is regret, always, at losing someone.

This regret is a whole hillside

a long plain partitioned by rusting wire.

whose land is whose now,

so many years after the homestead.

Each space is a potential kingdom

until we finally abandon the well-digging.

dried, ended, a reverse migration. 

Somewhere in American history

it was decided that the frontier would close

when there was no more land and we,

the people, press up against one another

and twist inward searching.

The new exploration is a pilgrimage

into ourselves and companionless

we fear starvation and disease. 

There must be one more place

just one more stretch of prairie

one last island

somewhere.

word of the day

It’s funny that ‘firmament’ means the sky,

the heavens floating present peaceful.

The sky is as permanent, that firmament,

As any earthen landscape lies.  

Oh wow. It's been a few days.

Ever feel like "the daily grind" in fact exists? Writing has been like "pulling teeth" lately.  Guess I need to "pull myself up by the bootstraps" and decide whether or not I am "man enough" for daily divulgences, hiccupping clean.  "The task at hand" is rabid with new tricks.  "Waking up on the wrong side of the bed" means you rolled around in your sleep, peeping into the nether world of awesome possibility. I dream cast constant, hitting the crests of infinite cumulus, the powdered fists of the first fighters: those seraphim fantastic. And back "down to earth," the real hurt, raw and infused with chemical ruin.  Captured again by alarm clocks, living just one day in the full round and back underground tinkering with all the dirtied leftovers of the brain.  Rusty crusted pieces of furnace and fireplace; old laundry; broken glass and doorknobs to no mans land.  Welcome to my backyard.  This isn't Narnia, no little half-goat will show you the way but if you wait in this open space a direction will be revealed: a narrative arc of a one-(wo)man show.

Us three

around the storm lamp
on the edge of lawn chairs
in the basement
haphazardly stocked
while the world goes
bent against us.
we wouldn't know
what is normal anymore-
memories betray us
so long underground.

(untitled)

An engram inside the body

Is a memory based in sense:

the scraping bruising brining

things that last pickled

and repeated.  These

engrams collect until

the whole world is an

allusion.  Eventually, we

are people moving

in a long exposure-

vanished, an idea, 
the blur of residual heat.  

I need to stop watching 'band of brothers' over and over again

An abandoned parachute

Tangled in the edge of the forest

once was a full jump

carrying a uncertain son.

Which direction has he gone?

And with what weapon?

When the wind fall

Plucked his rifle like picking

An apple. 

So now the parachute is a silken

Ghost pleated neatly,

A tent draped and breathing

Like puffing snake skin.

And no son, and no weapon,

The grass a buzzing place

beneath the open sky.