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.

Wasteland aftertaste

Cutlery on the sly, metal on ceramic like the rhythm of a joke, keep em laughing and it glides beneath the radar. A garden of phototropic radar dishes, turning in unison to the sun. And the dishes, bowls, really, and the digitized sun waves, a joke that cuts at your meat, which is the source of metastasis?

Platoon boys ruminate on their eventual reincarnation as the enemy

Doing the social dance, like a fuken peacock. Doing the war dance, like some goddamn ferrets. Standing still in ether, like a river stone. Dead and buried to our necks. We'll meet in some stinkin desert land, turbans blowin in the iris-slicin gusts. But we won't recognize each other. No, because the dunes are dancing, too.

Failed collage adjacent to a stocks ticker

(THE INTERNET STARTED)
{what you're hungry for}[About Their Children]
[the skinny on one]
{her profound desire to make}{Substance-Induced}{Cell Death}
{it would be...}["Lightest,""driest,""deepest,"]
{Static Positions} /only 8,501 beds/
[There is plenty of grooming,]
(Reconnect){the noise level}

invisible my presence

Tampa whitewater baptism

Dirt city, malleable in afternoon wind, cemented in morning dew, and again. Dumpster fire at dawn below the highway overpass, grit combusting under press of a firehose. Smoke signaling motorists: "We, mud-caked children cracking in the sun!" A sense of extinguishing lost in transit.