Solitary Refinement

I used to know what people did on weekends.
Where people went and who with.
I used to clap hands in dives and
pat backs and match light deprived
dilated iris blacks and catch ember breaths
close to campfire conversations fed
with shreds and bits of the week's shed tourniquets.

I used to know what people did on weekends.
By day or by night and it was cool
to be another particle wave
in the thirty sixth hour accelerator
set to collide and divide my mind
into a bubble chamber of spirals and aerials
alongside everyone else
trying to reach a more stable state and
exploding instead.

I used to know people,
dedicating myself
to the call and null
to the rush and pull
to the shrill and lush
to the bang and the buck,
but like hearts,
times change.
Now I only know me,
the hillsides once dotted with little fires are
so far distant I
cannot see, but know and take
some solace in not being
the last man on Earth
still walking beneath the stars

because when the wind blows right
I can smell the touch of their dressings
to gold and red glowing sticks
circled in stones,
wounds bathing in the heat, and
though I only know me
crossing time in single, determined, steps
I know I am not alone.

Rattle Bone

Tick tock
ting tan
tip tap top
schwit wak
shill stak.

All units of time.

Units and units and
so many units of time
enumerated in the
swish smack of
fluid against
aluminatic solids of
can bottoms and
foils.

I wonder who
my foil is and if
I will live
to meet them.

The thought crosses:
maybe I already have and
was too unkind
to greet him.

But I know
as the bones rattle
in the bottoms of beer cans and
handles turned hobbies and
visions turned
like clock hands when
springs unwind and places
beckon for presence
without a keep to store time

that I have many ways and
many roads still to go and
it's possible
in the inifitum,
the stupefying
space timed lines and
mulligan divergent wood
that I've
still yet to meet him.

Settle Bone

I know I'm not
stable, by any stretch of the term.

I have things to harp about.

Strings to pummel
with pick and tooth and
notes to make and take and
rummage and make new again.

Adoration is
too often worlds apart
from worlds occupied and I
try to dance to drum sounds and
jam to foundry unsound.

I pursue the losses and
fire wildly at albatrosses and
karma sutric, copacetic,
vain glorious
loosed leaf
be damned.

Approachable in
stretches, dusty dirty
desert licked
horse skinned, but the
words of whorls courses
can't make bossness
out of card board and
glue fumes for days.

I am trying to imagine
a universe where
you never left and I never gave
reason to.

A universe where
the wire and finished wood
of the loom made a tapestry
somna-beautiful and we
spooned two souls cocooned
against the noise.

I am so
and thus
and such
that like as
to be
we are and
who we
so are
and so we
through this
maybe
for that
it too
and will
go back
come forth
divide
we were
and in
become.

I know
I'm not stable
by any stretch
and adoration
will not come
of it's own free will,
but I wish

and the wishing
is what I have
and what I refuse
to let slip.

Bones

Driving nails and staples
into the floor of a home
void of occupants
is jarring.

Every hammer fall sends waves,
but not the curling
looping wave forms of sound,
against the walls and from those walls
to the floor and through that floor
to the floor below and from that floor
through the ceiling above and back
to ears already raw
with the echo chamber brilliance of
a halogen in a tin foil nest
so close to an iris
the pinned back tears
hiss away in steam
before touching skin.

As I work
without muffs or plugs
to turn the caves into rooms ready
for chairs and couches and
smiling, wine glass clinking,
two point fiver having,
picket fence dreamers
it is hard to swallow
what wet the air has to offer
over my tongue gone
dry and swollen anxious

because I am driving
the spikes and spines
into the bones of a home and
desperately,  left and right hands
unsteady in the wash of bang and moan,
ears so hard relied on to sort
the real from the unreal
my eyes so often feed my head and
rendered vestigial,
trying not to wake her bones and
pluck the thread thin nerves of
her sleep, because the body of a home
can reject the incursion of human step
in ways violent.  Ways I wish
I did not know.

And so, I work swift and pray
the shadows do not rise and
walk among late afternoon's rays.

Sunny Side Up

Trying to win in all phases of
the game, but still running in place and
slipping up on the sunny side of the street
with busted laces.  Like a redhead kid
with Bond Jaws braces I
smack obstacles down and
try to give dreams chases. I'm
going to take my bad luck down
to the numbers makers and dog races
with my Springfield in the mount and
bit chomped up so long
the pieces go down tasteless.
Going to pick a winner
one of these days, a sure thing
to set record paces or
gun down every last missed guess and
misstep until my misfortune
trips high pair, diamond spade aces.

Block 6 (Day Tripping)

"I had a dream last night and
you were there."

"And you were there?  Okay Kansas."

"I'm serious, you were," drops of rain
are cutting the single pane window
into a Dali clock disco ball,
the turning leaves
four thousand high output LEDs
behind  safety scissor cut streamers of
Autumn dyed silk.
"We talked for hours
before I realized I was
talking to myself,
reading your parts
in a screenplay, but you were there."

The air conditioner is still
in the window, the rain
turning it into a one note kettle drum
with enough reverberation
to rattle our empty house
with the snick and snack of
ghost canines at a Tuesday night rave.

"Let's go do something.  I want to be
where the people are."

"Okay, Ariel."

"I'm serious, let's go."

"Alright," the key ring is nestled in its dish
with a pair of D cell batteries,
their plastic casings stripped away.
They all fit in a hip pocket and
throw off heat as the afternoon
drains away while they touch and
ward off Winter chilled glass flights,
painted and breathy
as dry ice bedded tree formed shots of
one fifty one along flaming boughs, "get your coat."