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.