Sunday, December 29, 2013

The Outsourcing

Now I have joined you, fair fortune,
a last wandering descent 
through a netherworld of 
fast-fallen summer days, 
blank as an avalanche against 
gray-swept hillsides of years and youth,
in a thousand June backyards struck 
beneath the weight of soft ambitions.

We have been found wanting,
fallow, misshapen souls
floating the tree-lines and jagged roofs
of our dread cutout wilderness,
our blood which stains the blade
in the rust and tarnish of black centuries 
and off-years, moments spent 
wandering lost behind 
the Interstate noise-wall.

This saltwater in our ragged lungs,
it stings like the thoughtless fury
of phalanxes of dark-faced hornets, 
an outpost along the edges of endless outskirts.

These days remain in malformed erasure,
not even static to bless the bones of the weary house,
or the tangled sheets on a sour-stained mattress. 

We, wounded immortals, 
who flung rocks against the barricades
and expected all of Babylon to drop 
to quivering knees at our approach!
We who clasped hands with spirits in sleep,
only to release them in curse and spell-craft
in the washed-out sun of regretful dawn.

I find I still have eyes to see with,
fingers that still grace skin,
or the torn vinyl of the frozen car seat.

Our lives cracked like a luck-starved mirror,
at the very tremble of half-touched hearts
in the weight of all these ashen mountains.

These were the finest hours,
traced with thin gold lace and amethyst,
but now they're burned through
by candles tipped against the windows,
the wax rotting away the the thread,
the glass warping and melting 
in miniature inferno.

And the spires and stacks of this 
aching nest of city streets
sliced the sky like solemn knives,
beaten back by the arctic glare
of a billion aching stars,
of light pollution lingering around 
the blinking code of radio towers.

You whom I've known since childhood,
you whose serpent's breath 
and doubled-over mirth 
had swept me in your tempest,
do you not stand today amongst
the graves and gallows of a 
haunted continent,
and shout at me from
topographies unimagined?

Dusk catches us sleepwalking again
and follows us home,
showing up in the dead hiss of 
tape recordings or the howling shift 
of images lurking in the VHS.

Sometimes, beyond the flames
that lick and jump in anxious fervor,
there's a face without expression,
wrapped in solace and in shadow.

Breathless and struck, we still continue, 
with memories strewn behind abandoned.

Ask: what will map our silent crossings when we're gone?
Last night the crows fell like a shroud on wings
of brutalist charcoal, 
and swallowed the barn whole in their icy cries.
This doorstep is peeling away like a false awakening,
a wake held beneath the churning waves of spent woodgrain.

Oh, how the painted yesterdays sway with drunken footfalls,
entwined in heady mist of spilled wine and hoarse cheers,
as we, scythe-like, mow apart the autumn age of remembering.

There is no more distant wavering shoreline,
no lapping surf to hide your clawing wants,
they are leaving in a line towards the veiled orange gloom,
and they will not soon be returning.

Whatever was loved is permanently sunstruck,
statuesque and paralyzed, left to devour away 
on a tide of furrowed countenances,
of heads glancing backwards in sorrow recognition,
of hands dragged beneath the surface of a love 
that never found its shining season,
and lays drunk and dazed, half-alive,
in the vined ruins of a disappeared evening.

Saturday, December 21, 2013

Solstice On Twin Mountain Road

Old friends, winter has arrived 
pale and shivering 
on our splintered gray doorstep,
brushing bits of snow from his sorrow cloak 
with red-raw, gnarled hands,
black eyes gazing inward
through frosted fields of stalks and wire,
and contrails traced through 
the piercing yawn of Christmas skies.

Let's wander these wooded labyrinths 
beyond the house's reach,
the thrum of the far-off cars reaching us
like trapped spirits lingering past our vision,
and press frozen arms around the limbs 
of the trees we find most haunting,
with their freight of abandoned
squirrel's nests in a rafter 
of brown-clustered branches.

We'll watch that somber evening blue descend 
like a sudden silence each evening, 
and mark the house-lights
through the evergreens across the meadows,
bathing the scarred earth in golden shadow. 

Saturday, December 14, 2013

Sofa Set On Fire Beside A Derelict Warehouse

A tattered sofa in gray-burnished winter
collapses softly into itself near 
the boarded-up warehouse, 
unmoored in a nest of untidy shadows,
yellow stuffing hemorrhaging through 
the split seams in filthy cushions,
stained by generations of unnameable 
ghost drinks and fluids,
discarded decaying in the faded entropy 
of the Queen Anne's Lace,
with the styrofoam scraps and the shattered glass.

The seizing electric flames lick chemicals 
from the combustible surfaces,
sending pillars of exotic spectrums 
and vivid smoke skyward,
through frosted dusk air,
to evaporate into a black starless void. 

Saturday, December 7, 2013

Haiku 5

In fallow meadow,
the rust clings to the withered blade, 
a pagan embrace. 

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Haiku 4

A thin latticework
of ice on the dawn windshield,
as winter descends.