Sort Of A _________ Craquelure

Magnetism by fire. Seams chewed free from the afternoon. Skyscrapers. Long nights with a great friend.

Light steams out my old window face, clears the crucible city and runs home in a rush. Some sonic landscape. A declination of magic makes its own magic. They (those ones with arms and loss) ripple an entire beach, redo spasms of new memory, travel further in. Glinting metal everywhere, surprise meat shudders away, plays the uncomfortable witness.

We made machines. Then machines made time for us. Substantial as knuckles or national will. But the city is a device of time, home to all the souls that ever were--catch them in photographs, a headstone, that mossy old tenement brick. All those nouns squirting reticules of memory.

Who is the sheriff of time: fundament or frangible thing? Pauses, expectation of an event. We got caught peering out of a loophole in luck's curtain. Something crenelated, something drawn. Stand next to words, fake or freak meaning, hamper every permanence.

Shin guard, chin guard. We look away, but always bend back around to original seeing.