Anatomy of a sleeping man

Some nights are a jacket as thin as the hairs on your arm, cold moon-silvery wind stabbing easily through. The first dawn you watch alone is a speckled wood frog, her organs petrified in ice since first snow, thawing pale green under the sun in April. Your last day will be too warm for coats, and the frogs' croaking will stuff the windless air, and the moon will hang like a discarded eggshell, hollow cell memory, the ghost of frostbite. Dreams are like that. Black fingers, a silhouette of touch.

A great depression

Ticker tape parade for our boys come home, an embrace in the debris like paper ash falling from upper floor offices. Wandering the streets in a predetermined pattern, and then gone, the pavement still warm from boots and the sky like cooling flesh. In their wake a fallen comrade, a stockholder fallen from an upper floor office window, a leg of his dress pants riding up his calf beyond a silk black sock's cut. How the sock spoils the mood of a homecoming parade.

Blue collar militiamen gather in the hills

Coffee settles on the blood like vultures on a tightrope. A shadow of a boy's heart steeped beneath the black bitter, confusing love with boiling. Like a cloudy night, a ghost of stars around the edges, industrial town sheen on the dirty brown sky. Black swallowing mineshaft, not the wing-spanned scenario the canary had imagined herself in but shit, an honest living. Potential collapse always vibrating the veins, that sense of an elevator sinking, clang, clang. Confusing fear of the dark with the dirt in your lungs.