Boxcar Chaser
April carrying madness. We’re 2
streetcars with desires & with a need to
smash down on tracks and finish. You were in
the white woods before me, luxuriating something
fierce. Moving from pillow to shower to sun.
Back to someone’s home. Move in with
me. Bring those dream hymnals. Poets make everything
bad, make me remember that my mother will die one day
& how we stop adding love to life at 30. You’re
all allergic to my body. Praying hurts
today. Horror show in the silent
thicket. See me: see my shoes up
over the ground. Eloquent. Being new was
a fever. You found me singing something electric.
I gained 20 pounds enjoying
a party. Wake me up when it’s
over.
Wake me when it snows. Vibrate
for the weekend. When you
dream of where you are then we’ll
know it’s time to go.
PURGE NIGHT
If I ever tell you I’m going to the mountains, know
how much I want you there. Drinking something hot
and huffing on rivers. Imagining everything was raptured
but our 20 fingers and all the shrapnel from all the summer rain we watched.
Pathetic, 2018
She lives in Brooklyn, so I go to Brooklyn.
Sharing a wall with her father, I
quiet my breaths with pillows.
Daybreak shock-white out beyond
her castle’s mountains, city of snow drifts. Face
roaring in her corn-fed mane again. Something blissful.
Maniacal. February blossoms against the firewall.
Almost close to years shed like snakeskin
around the bed, but with our boots filled with fire
we’re a mess of morning.
Walked ghoulish tracks to
her after working all night
skipping stones across lines of
longitude. I think she prayed
over me when I was dead
in my liquor storm.
Rising ferocious against the ferocity
of the tundra. How it unspools in the
bearded largesse of the Sound. Better poets
have danced on it. I shot them all full
of my drugs. To kill a mockingbird. To kill
a thousand horses.
That sound, like metal. Parade
Day. Sleep to wake up in a new life.
Moving Day (after Jim Harrison)
When the eel-haired
young girl came on the first
day of the summer mega-moon to
take my rooms, I was still hovering,
handfuls of my life around me. Prayer
circle. Crime scene trash, my offering.
Take the monsters around the corners of
the rooms when the sun’s down, I told her,
have everything but what I did here when
I was alone. Hold the Christmas silence. Time only
goes forward, except when you’re drunk and the walls
sing all the old songs with great fury.
Close the door. Everything smells like rain.
She took what I handed her.
Vacuum cleaner. Two lighters. Painting
of an old woman in black. A stranger. Paint heavy
thick, a night upon her. Sideswipes from strange
ghosts. Your inheritance.
Here, she placed something small in my hand. In
my car, alone, home a century southward, I saw
what it was and ate it at a rest stop. Parkway sludge
sleepy beside the murder hours.
Angelic. Motherfucker buried me
wordlessly. Pirouette new milk
and stars on a high
arc over black water. Delaware on one side
and everything else there ever was in
anyone’s heart on the other. To be too stoned
with no one to tell.
To be at the end of one thing and
not quite at the start of the next.
All bodies gone under time
What happened to that world of yours.
We’re drinking again and it’s terrifying.
Poems unwoven. We were never
honest about being alive. I miss waiting for the
bus with nothing but silence and
trees. Why can’t we ever stay somewhere safe.
Back At College in My Mid-20s
between classes
i’m in the parking garage
with pb&j and all your granddaddy’s unfiltereds and
old murdertown music radio and
i’m looking down
at all the couples in love
my big song going up ghostly like
when did i become
one of me
and not one of them
