Tinder nests

Crows bustle on by past jet exhaust clouds, sky blue as daddy's drowned face. Cracking blue. His few remaining hairs floating lake vegetation, his fingers outstretched.  Wheat thistle digging your gums, blood swirls. Swallow. And run your fingers against the rust, rough orange blistering death eating holes into the frame. Pale yellow paint, flat tired Pontiac, tarp half folded over torn vinyl roofing. Daddy's rage and regret smoldering here in the land of shit and wheelbarrels, the grass is all dead here and will not grow again. Press your palm into the spring peeking from the driver's seat, you are his only son. Tell him, fuck yourself, daddy. Close your eyes and drive away, the Pontiac running for the first time since daddy's fist fell open in brackish shallows. So says Nietzsche, that mean fuckin hermit who couldn't bite his tongue while you grit your teeth. Mean fuckin hermit was right after all. Daddy was dead before a one cricket rubbed bow to string. So close your eyes in that shit-smelling dead field and with sweat dripping into the puncture in your palm, dull pulsing ache, and grip the wheel right where the sun has split it open like a fist, and drive into the midwest night, drive until there are so many lights you can no longer see stars. Pretend you ain't got to open those eyes. Pretend the crows ain't godless philosophers, shrieking in the unrelenting noon.

Give thanks, oh ye whisping willows

Shutter sputters a fine November morn, stout young collared boy and ponytailed toothy grinnin girl, hair tied with marbles of transparent red plastic, the crisp air cutting through their play lakeside, thousands of tiny curls cresting on brackish blue, thousands of tiny footfalls pressing grass, photo edges left to yellow with autumn, color drains from the tips. That's what autumn is like. A fierce November wind slashing the cheeks of the boy and the girl as they rush across the shore of the lake, running away from life.

Transcontinental

Barefoot on rocky roads, walk too long and it don't hurt no more. Transient pain, ha ha. Thumb out, long greased hippie hair, maybe a long-barrel revolver, dreaming of wide-brim hats casting shadows on unshaved smirks in out west desert towns, bang bang. Just tryin to get out west, mister. It ain't easy under the sun. All white like dancin' sand dunes, just tryin to get out west and buy myself a wide-brim hat, mister. Might I borrow your cash for the hat, and I won't shoot you with the long-barrel revolver my granddaddy gave me, mister, ha ha. I was there after Vietnam spittin' and full of venom, just got caught up with one of the two crowds, you know? Now I see how easy it is to shoot someone, bang bang, just like out west, which is where I'm headed. We had one thing right back then, ain't no different shooting the life out someone in a war or in this here sedan. Just had it backward, you know? They're both easy peasy. Been on these rocky roads a long time, you know? It don't hurt no more. Calloused, ha ha. Well the last frontier is gone. No more savages, and I ain't got a buzz cut but I'll sure as shoot you. Rite of passage for those headed west. Only thing keeping me from the task is the playing field ain't even. What with it being noontime and yet you don't got a gun and we need some open desert for the ten paces, neither one of us got a hat brim. Ain't fair if I can see your eyes. That ain't fair at all, you know, mister? Memory's like the scars on my burnt up feet, and I don't know I got room for more scars.

Madre negra

En la noche embarazada, puedes presionar la oreja contra el suelo y escuchar el latido del corazón de la mañana.

Sea level, above, below

No mountain angles incising horizon like ice picks left behind from climbers in their final, delirious, burn-eyed footfalls, no iced caps melting against cloud, drifting, parting and coming back together, lovers one. In the swamps, we must resign to cut our hearts on alligator teeth and sink into our muck, warm and nonetheless comforted in the mosquito rhythm of home.

Muddy delta baptism with q&a

How do you reply when I say that you've disappointed me. That the sky is no longer a mystery, that ventriloquism isn't enough of a distraction with the strings showing in spider spindles, sparkling with the dust (floating lightning bugs in the quiet room). That if an Emerald City sits at the end of this chipped and sun-bleached road, I won't bother to look behind the curtain to see the scared and injured little man hunched over wet stake-scarred palms, because I've pictured him many times before. That at some moments I am indignant, my best moments of imperfect rage, wanting to drown the whole goddamn world so only I may see stars and it will all be fucking quiet for once. That these are the moments I feel closest to you, in the sins we share, the moments logic seeps through our fingers like the sediment that remains when the water clears.

Porches

Rattle wurring ac box washes over the black velvet midnight, screened safely in and the leaves grazed by moonlight the way ripples knead the shore when the sandpipers sleep in shadows, and suddenly I am sitting in another porch, no lights past dark at the summer beach cottage for the sea turtles are searching their way home and even the glow of mom's cigarette might be the guiding moon, beaconing out into the gulf horizon we cannot see past the screen. A tear in the porch screen of the first house we shared let the dog run and disappear into the black velvet night. We mustn't make the same mistake. We cannot let the things we wish to keep in rush out through a faulty mesh.