How To Be an Acclaimed Poet in America

I never saw them but I knew people shot our outhouses.

I have watched too much reality TV about Kimye and teen mothers. This is why I cannot explain April like a normal person.

you wore a shirt with balloons on it, drank whiskey, stood in front of a mirror, had violent ideation

She says she had a dream about bodies packed together, blue & bruised & left to bleed. 

if I could re-wire myself I would
start again a blank heart with no pictures

i bought an essay with someone else’s money when i was 23
just to feel what it was like to steal words
it was the sickest i’ve ever been

The moon is small and perfectly cut.
Blinking between trees like the cursor
you used on your middle school blog.

Miracles come more seldom now.
It’s satellite interference.

In the far-flung depths of the future, historians
will look back to this day and say, "This
is where it all went wrong."

There’s something about a horse that floats.
Watch her neck hover over the half-door
of a stall, or her sunlit backside rise

my brain is on fire
so i can tell by the colors
that winter is coming

Benjamin Franklin’s wife rubbed his paper fingers all over her body, saying, "I’ve got you now, Sweet Baby, I’ve got you now.” 

when i was born, you bought a hill—
a great mound of clay and bone
and you named that mountain after us.

once I dated a girl w/"good is dead"
tattooed across her chest she turned out to be right
but not the way she wanted to be

I think about small green soldiers searching for Crater Lake.

Because you find it interesting and want it analyzed without the burden of being analyzed yourself.

A Ford Explorer firetruck and a cul-de-sac basement had a birdbath at night.

Deconstructionism

is just a fancy word for
skepticism
which is just a foggy word for
nihilism
which is just a

grandma was real creole
man
BRIGHT bright

OUTLAW LOVE

I can listen to “Thirteen” by Big Star and pretend
I am thirteen back in my flamingo
bedroom and a boy
would come to my

After the credits, I vacuum. I vacuum for hours and hours.

Transcendental with Reincarnation 

I was a bank/ cashier who stole /a five-dollar bill/ I was Laika/ a stray selected/ no more than bark/ part-husky/ part-terrier/ canine space orbiter/

By now you tell me how I feel.
You tell me
what I will do and how I will act.
You do the creating
for me,

I can't in good conscience watch a sixteenth season of Big Brother.