The Springfield Fire Department Reminds You to Be Prepared for Earthquakes

Even though Vachel Lindsay drank
lye and died in this room we
make out for a few minutes when
the tour guide

Benjamin Charles Dowd

This has nothing to do with what you etch into the trunk
with his only pocket knife or that it will take him hours to axe
the tree down, set it aflame. Or that it was

Make a vision board

Watch Girl, Interrupted

Eat more protein

            SCENE

An ill wind that blows nothing. Autumn eats its leaves. It’s hard enough to understand the sequence of things--the king becomes the queen, the queen becomes the joker,

1. 

as great as our best days will be
our worst days will be twice as worse
you can’t take from somebody their right to be wrong i try to love you as much as i hate myself
i don’t dance

THE CORNER PRIEST

"All things considered, you'd best not putter around, frittering hours, but listen to your heart," the guru said (only its real wish is for the market-- to be an exec with a

he said 'i think i work out just as like, an excuse to drink protein, you know?'

ii.
There were too many lizards

MY FATHER PLAYS SONGS TO THE MOON, MY SON PLAYS SONGS TO THE MOON

An absence surrounds the cabin; an absence haunts it.

My father sits inside, playing sad songs to the evening on his own

PRIVATE INTERACTIONS IN A MIXED-SEX GROUP

Together, we separate. We stare at mud or Easter’s grey river, disciplined, young,
mouthy mutts, steadfast as oranges, stable, on pursuit or in

Last Night at the Electroclash

Some one said tech kids are really just
Bros who couldn’t play football. My wingman
Took so much shit in Fallujah he doesn’t even have
Facebook. Hipsters at

(jesus) [said]

i. a penis is not a victory dance.

x. friday is for wine, camels, and cummings.

ix. delilah penetrated samson first.

vii. paris is burning, fabulous.

iii. flesh

Syrup

We are listening to New Order with the blanket over our heads. Your PC under the blanket is our companion. You touch me again and again. It is very early.

Did I tell you about that

You drink all the beers I bought
And push towards me an arm full of bottles
You say, “I want to be alone
With my dreams forever.”

I leave you to be with my dreams
They are all of you

Like every catch before or since, yours is a matter of geometry
and probability. To say this is to admit that I believe in miracles.

Pro-wrestling is this: the work of death and resurrection.

Dogshit

There’s grass growing on the dogshit next-door,
under the library mural of the Indian boy

with the salmon colored short-shorts
someone tagged “pardee panties”

the other

If only she'd thought to smash, earlier, the infinitive to destroy never occurred to her, never in this careful home of her planning.

Some accounting’s underway, composed of chiding, shifts in tone, redirections. Surely one or two rumors eventually craft a context where they’re true. 

I am so many places
              lonely. I think
I savor it, just me & Canada
boundary water speaking.

The water is not deep here
              but tannin colored,
cold,

I could never / be a girl who wears a bikini top in place of a bra / like all the other girls in South Florida, who put vodka / in their Gatorade bottles and were, I think, much happier...

Once, I heard a boxing coach say you don’t punch a thing if you really want to achieve your objective—which is pure harm—you punch through. Since that day, I have often thought of the other side.

We can bump / Gucci and Sosa and Future while we sip lean with Sprite, / and talk Drill like Foucault talks about nutjobs, and talk / dying like Chiraq rappers. Like we’ve been there. We / haven’t.

In the woods beyond the property line, Henry and I find what decades ago used to be a farmer’s burn pile. Under years’ worth of leaf litter and yesterday’s snowfall there are remains, hard things fire could not destroy: twisted and rusted metal and scores of glittering glass bottles.

ENTROPY

I saw you at the library.
You said you’d gone to mars on a ‘commercial spaceship’
or something.

I removed three honey sticks from my pocket and offered you one.
You shook your