it always seems like honking makes the city
bigger than usual

on most days. you told me you wanted me
to tell you when the reign of seafood was over, but

first, witness agave leaves ablaze,
wads of green

spikes browning deeply to
curly wafts gathered near

your face, like smoke unmade
from a once and future king’s

spice filled censer served a la mode
from a roadside stand, sturdy walls

glazed in ozone
and pocked with abalone bits, proprietors

sworn to grill soft shell shrimp, tiny
appendages, pincering mandibles, all

consumed by the infuscate water disappeared
down the sinkhole growing

inside. your soft neck blows about me
(do you remember what i was talking

about about like ten lines ago?
oh, your face and smoke? again? ok, thanks). i tile wood

floors with coins rather than tiles, so really
it’s more like harboring a villain

than anything else, or perhaps like burying
ligamental chunks of you

for to grow in the blood
red clay and bewitched moss

my house rests on.
all in all, i think it’s just got to be

your touched destiny
and me, and then some

out of the loop obelisk guts
we CTRL + S’d for eternity

in talking cookie jars
shaped like thieving bears

whom get their stinking paws off on
my collection of unfulfilled promise

rings melted down and recast
imperfectly into planet shaped musket balls.

you’re told

to sit still until birds call out

your name

in the rain

made gloom,

informing you

your table is ready.

you’re told

when you visit the sea

the waves are saying something

that sounds

suspiciously like

“we miss you”

over
and
over
and
over
and

even though i don’t know

you, yet,

i think this
gestures across the two of us
could be as true as all that
gestures above the two of us

If we were entirely made by thread, I’d be the red yarn.
There is something about rods and cones
that doesn’t seem to like danger. They work like facets on diamonds,
sample lipstick at the grocery, white letters on stop signs;
like the word “caramel” when I say it.
God, I just want to be important. I just want to be someone real.
The early autumn leaves have me thinking deep crimson hue is only okay
when it’s fifty miles early and I should’ve expected it. People don’t like that color:
it’s like being hit in the face with a shit-ton of bricks, and nobody wants
to be met with something real.
What’s the fun in being real when you have to prove it? Let’s see,
I have a dog. When I was four I stepped on a nail and had it taken out with tweezers;
when I was seventeen I glued cigarettes into scrapbooks. When I was old enough
to call bullshit on Andy Warhol, I made a choker out of tabs off Campbell’s chicken noodle soup and a severed G string from my guitar. Sometimes,
I sit in bed and wonder how to shed eyelashes
and the effects of antidepressants on women taking birth control.
World history probably warned me about this:
being a bitch is like manhandling a group project,
everyone drowns you in praise ‘til you fuck up. I’m waiting for you to smoke it off.
I’m waiting for you to stare at the sea ‘til you’re positive there’s something there.
Under all these deeply damaged layers of artificial material and cheaply-crafted plastic,
there’s something there, and I can’t believe it’d take a bachelor’s degree to see it.

there are subtle sweaters my mind knits you.

they are purple when you walk
red when you take your shoes off

when i find printed socks i weave them in,
and drip sweet old sesame oil between the hairs and the knit.

there are subtle sweaters my teeth build you,
after i brush them too,
when i don’t speak and it’s mostly in february

what is it about the letters f ‘ruary’
that squeezes in love
through the cushions?

Already in August the bees
had gone to ground, 
burrowing for rain. 
Already we knew
many things of winter,
the frozen doorsteps,
the slush on Third Street.

The mower’s blade,
unsharpened since my father’s death,
startled two who rose and stung—
the light of pain, the annoying
thought that I was wrong—
being there, a blaze
of flesh, a man.

We have our flannel
and our heated rooms, 
hot water and the hour of sleep
before we leap 
into the day, things to fracture
and collect, things to heed.
The bees are still, memorial,

the winds of Illinois 
only they can hear. 
Already they knew
in August the squalls of snow
off Lake Erie, the dents
men make 
as they perfect the land.