making room

My father's father sold tombstones
door to door, with lines from
dime novels like _this is a just reward_.

When the girl sings, I see
the strings in her voice
the velvety tendrils,
winding and fluttering
the spaces between us
trembling with crimsons
shuddering with saffrons
blazing with the teal of Sunday
church bells

1.
Waiting are they? Let them wait. This is the last of the earth!
Codeine. . .bourbon, I am
Content.
It’s just that I
can’t sleep. Boats
are knocking,
boats against the past. I
worry. Don’t
let poor Nelly starve: I understand,
my worn tongue reeling,
why the ...

It’s not the perfect photo,
this latest of you and me.
The light is bad, grainy and too-dark, but
the pub was small
and mirrored
and just what I’d imagined
when I’d imagined England.

And a shriek was heard
And the flowers of blood
Began to drip blood
And all the flowers
Began to drip blood
And the enormous crowd
Came to collect the blood
And all things dripped blood
And the sun grew red and dark
And a little boy walked beneath it ...

I
The taste of your mouth and the color of your skin,
skin, mouth, my dearest fruit of these swift days,
tell it to me, were they always at your side
for years and for journeys and for moons and suns
and earth and weeping and rain and joy
or ...

Remember, my soul, the thing we saw
That soft summer morning:
At the turn in the path, upon a bed of scattered stones,
A carcass lying raw.

*Obsidian Butterfly: Itzpapálotl, goddess at times confused with Teteoinan, our mother, and Tonatzin. All of these female divinities have fused in the cult that since the sixteenth century has worshipped the Virgin of Guadalupe.

I’m going to paint the walls of this room over.
They’re old now and they clash with the décor.
But the days are short and there’s no light,
no tarps, no plastic covers
And I’m sure I’ll get drippings on the pale hardwood floor.

The Fall

“This snowfall is my final fantasy. Once
America the woman was coming on my dick,
her flag pin a pinhole to a world without strife. But then—”
he sneezes. “Let me begin again. Terrorism.
The weeping willow lowers her hair and head in sorrow.
The fireman and his wife
die ...

There Lived a Red-Haired Man
There lived a red-haired man
Who had no eyes or ears.

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

Always a little better than he pretends
And a little worse than he wishes, my friend,
Saying words that should be written down,
Displaying a smile that is often a frown.

As soon as the words strolled
Across the doctor’s lips,
She realized the cold waste -

When Nelson dies,
All two hundred and six
Of my broken bones
Will ache for you.

Bright Star starring John Keats
John Keats rests his head as angular
as two racially white blades of hay.

Life Story starring Jeff Goldblum
The mystery has a name, Jeff Goldblum.

y November you already thought of returning,
rubbing Vaseline into your palms and the crevices
of your cracked heels. No napalm rained down in a foreign land,
no birth dates streamed across the screen to push our brothers into war.

There’s a house
a half an hour south
of town,
built of stones
my father hauled
from down the road
in his old Ford
Fairlane. He built it for
my mother when she asked.

The Great Drying-Up is coming.
I can feel it in
the way I’m beginning...

It's the little things you remember when you die.
The children. The moments. Your face after
achieving multiple simultaneous orgasms. The orgasms.
The presidential campaigns, the incipient volcano
underlying the western half of the continental U.S.
It's the little things that make you wonder.

People change. People estrange. The wear and tear on the asbestos flange
took my grandfather at seventy-five. My grandmother is alive,
and turning eighty. The moon landing is forty. I am twenty. Ten, five.

An untitled work.