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bone smoke

- Scott Krave

woop woop everyday the commonality of this city lives under two suns, one of fire and one of glass. it smells like Mexican snacks and sweat, both well branded as the auto worker decides. running in place with green shorts and accidental ass cracks, steam coming out of our ears and keys smacking our thighs. I would eat more but I'm only hungry for days like this. no coincidence in the similarity between a peacock and her blouse, cut and feathered and suggesting flight while unable to achieve it. I would rise to the bell tower to pluck those jet trails

for her like flowers. our host reclines and we lengthen our sleeves and snug our caps. the gang in fedoras follows their leader away, admiring the rainbow twisted backward atop her.

civil war trash talk and Canadian bacon stripped back to reveal the sore underbelly of self-contempt because when everyone laughs like gazelles jumping free from the jaws of predatory descendants things fall out of their hinges and there is a dreadful squeaking that begs for oil

drip it down the spine and hear ease dawn heightened by safety precautions is an oddity of an odyssey when succumbing to Paris and cold pizza, the crucible a spongy melodrama all roads lead to the bank but shadows of flight can fall on any rotten landscape seascapes too its tattered lace is not physical and the process of establishing proof is shoddy at best, Pythagorean rigamortis is easier to verify even though its definition is imaginary, nothing but a dragon carved into a cathedral wall

we pay for the supply of thought we want and forgive our memories of tags on some brick in Baltimore that we saw when we were 8 while on a tour of civil war battle sites that keeps popping up in dreams, all gore and glory and statisticians’ nightmares

5/25 3.06am we are full of regret and all of that time, motionless, slipped under our pillows like wishes upon Venus in the hardly night exchanged for inflated confidence, listening to the train roll by in the distance every 2 hours at 20 past hauling the immaterial image of sanctity

I tried telepathy dozens of times with as much proof as fits in my head, diminished with aged doubt, my messages that I could never speak but pounded out with eager passion as fogged breath on a cold window never escaped my skull no matter the intensity of my scattered night bulbs, no matter the heightened pulse of prayer to existence, no gods in my softened stare but those of heart the isolation of cargo pulling around the corner and hushing by, like a morbid goodnight kiss to the forehead that remains poorly understood, only encouraged my realist fantasies, nothing so simple as reenactments of the mundane with new dialogue and outcomes smacking of artificial sweetener

looking through a window through a window to the sometimes silent glow of metropolitan mania and fluff about a single act of status quo kindness set me on dreams of dim roses in the perpetual budding before bloom and modest broad leaf offerings of limbs as ladders and the advice of a communal dog exuding wisdom in silence and action

zeus sometimes I get the feeling that where I am is like a zoo, not in that it’s chaotic ( I never understood the ‘zoo as madness’ thing) but rather that there are people around, all calm, observing something and maybe letting out a murmur of satisfaction or inquiry there’s a damp smell no matter the humidity or frequency of rain but it’s hardly ever raining because people don’t really go to zoos when it rains I imagine that’s the best time for the animals no observers no distant murmurs leaping over the moats or muffled through the plastic observation windows

we live in a zoo that is the curbs of collective arteries where people feel lonely or loved or stoned and sometimes where people die nothing more than a nuisance to the keepers with flashlights hanging from the belts of their uniforms coming to cart us off

grace it takes a lot of skill to drop something gracefully most attempts fail and end up looking like the dropper thought s/he is just better than the item being dropped, like s/he doesn’t need it anymore or is disgusted by it, like it’s a used tissue

everything accelerates downward at the same speed, more or less, exceptions being plastic bags wrapped around the waists of plastic men and wishes blown off eyelashes so it’s all in the face, where we say what we mean without filter, without any analysis of potentials and when we make a face contrary to our true reaction, it cuts through the air crookedly and lands in observers as truant of sincerity the face is joyous yet shy, humble but sharing with the world all feeling that makes us want to be in on it

grace in gravity is a key dropped from a window into the hands of a new love

from a law firm in a skyscraper the dabble of soft red in the corner is pretty humorous it shows that s/he has a playful side most are distracted by the topographic glass dripping in yellow mustard and a color called ‘neutral’ missing the point a prank played 150’ above the Charles what it needs to be understood is more white men

gay or straight, they agree on this ‘how many thought about whether the ware was compostable?’ I thought this as I used it, before I threw it out with the rest the supreme court is a silly place they decide to uphold or overturn laws put in place by their peers they’re always contradicting what they say they believe and no one seems to notice that under their robes there is the distinct sound of some small animal being strangled ginsberg’s is a parakeet scalia’s is a wolverine because he just does not give a fuck about anything once I saw a picture of him trying to hug a grandchild, but the look on his face and the veins popping in his hands

suggested that he was about to devour that child’s essence, douse the body in gas, light it on fire and launch it from a trebuchet once in high school I was forced to debate marriage equality against a lesbian my co-counsel took up the task with conviction, however fake I mumbled about the bible and Jefferson, looking either ashamed or stupid, inadvertently also arguing to reinstate slavery, although I don’t think anyone made the connection if I were clever I would have shouted insanities heard in the name of god, had a seizure, woken up transformed and surrendered very loudly to a world of loveliness

I didn’t do that, I never could have instead I received a failing grade for not faking hate I try not to think about the rewards for bigotry in the bay there are, roped up, bobbing, small sail boats that’s all I want my reward to ever be so to the lunatics who believe I deserve anything special, take note

sagging everything sags in the rain a dripping paunch, dragging down each raised corner of a mouth just a little bit forcing things to squirm upward which are otherwise at home in the deep we use new takes on old strategies to defend crowns from blackened blood these are things we are never explicitly taught like flattery it’s just picked up to varying degrees depending on how important it seems to each person

your hair like wet sand sags in the rain everything sags in the rain this much is true let’s let it weigh us down until we see what it’s trying to show us when it evaporates and the worst parts of us evaporate with it

from a dream if I had any more to give you would already have it I had a dream about writing poems on the brims of hats to be used in a game of apples to apples, one was a bright red fedora with a black band and the name ‘bartholomew’ scribbled inside the words were romantic and sad

and deep deep deep, hidden behind a suede couch you didn’t understand what I was trying to do the wicker soaked up my ink and your looks of confusion like a shag carpet soaks up spilled wine it has all the potential in the world but in the wrong hands it’s just wasted our father was there and you talked about compounds and flashpoints I bought another beer to keep my mouth occupied I hummed ‘happy birthday’ in the back seat on the way home

4/18 9.40am to slap someone in the face to make them, in response, quiver to some degree, shaking the shafts against the artfully shaped birch bark to dye all your coverings orange as a sign of halftime friendships to feel the grass brush against your heels when you run or against your flanks when you fall for a holy squire to rewrite lessons, assigning normal words acronyms to aid in the completion of corn mazes to entrust is sometimes to abandon is to bolt down shopping carts fleeing from parking lots, sensuous actions folded under the top corner of a page where the number is printed is to scrape mud off the bottom of your shoes onto a public steppe

it follows that in due time the afterparty will have ended before you get an address from the forlorn lovegirls working the cracks in the floor, lipstick adhesive bonding stone of varying coarseness one assumes that the twisting is normal, engineers are smart people, the wind is an ally which only harms those on the coasts and in the longitudinal stripe through the national gut one assumes that cock fights are more brutal across boarders and that it’s ok to yell at small children when they’re officiating

slide some tights over those postwar walls and slather them in affluence killing itself muzzled because it will tear the shit out of you but is under no threat of being put down kremlin chakras brought back around to finish under a 5 minute mile and break red tape with a chest more puffed than a jungle bird, if jungle birds have pride foolishly trampled and tossed into full blown cake making courses: here is where to hide the file, this is the frosting flower with the cyanide capsule, how to spell with gunpowder and why taste is still important

I am not a slam poet I always have thoughts and then lose them something about spreading and screaming my poem from a pit I swear, whatever it was last night was fucking great, sent tingles down my spine to collect in my Achilles tendons and lift me off the ground a bit not literally, but there was a push upward I pretend and sometimes something real happens I am not a slam poet and I don’t pretend to be I might vomit after reading in front of people if I don’t vomit I’ll probably just have to sit and say nothing and shake for about 10 minutes before I can swallow something other than sand

now would be a prime time to define courage to you through some metaphor about truth or death or heads poking out of the beach but I can’t because I’ve never experienced it it’s the fricative nature of courage that makes things difficult it’s natural but learned and improved upon through repetition forceful and swift with a tense pressure similar to anger or fear hands dug into sand which moves like rivers of paint crawling down walls until it dries and slowly cracks as the foundation shifts

stately grave a group of about 20 young people walked by, all probably about 18 and all overweight to some degree they stop to capture the state house I start to sweat in its golden heat I mimic a bird song to become closer to history, to become prehistoric, fossilizing myself from the ground up and carving my epitaph on my stony legs: all I am is capable

now Patagonian sexual anomaly on prophetic submergences Boston, quiet, please right now, when the sky is clear and machinery runs raucous through glassware, when temporary tattoos blur into birthmarks of hubris, is when it rains most intently, the kind of rain that always falls on graves the kind that makes you miss someone piecing history lessons together with chewed gum and flashes of memories, memories adjusted to make you more noble and always enlightened in the moment, no matter your dormant fault, what shines as a finished item in an untraveled wing is crumpled and full of typos, intentional and full of symbolism when they are set in place, but after a time, having lost all

meaning and just looking sloppy like bad translations infectious waste dyed orange and given two drugs, one the crack of Europe’s dead monarchs and feudal lords, the other a daily jolt with pesky withdrawal finding meaning among tracks unconscious with rust and scraggly shrubs and the cast off mementos of childhood poverty amid a world of wealth an abundance of laughter and knowledge held in too few hands and never the hands that need it the most

I’m not an impersonator I’m just an imposter that’s what it feels like when I run toward sundown but it happens anyway there is no way to pass myself over the earth at just the right speed so I can watch it for just a little bit longer in hopes that I will arrive at some deep and meaningful conclusion