The blown speaker thinkers
and the small town ****-its
still live on concrete,
still think little of it.

The green glass windows
still break at violent angles,
the night time swallows
but the kids still hang there.

Our front door is wood; heavy and thick.
It is too small.
On three sides, panes of cold air
filter lazily into the room.  

It is opened
by a brass thumb latch
that clicks,
locked by
a sticky dead bolt
we keep tethered
to the apocalypse.

Open door policy,
survival strategy,
fear of the unknown.
We have debated semantics,
but we have never locked the door.

The highway wore roses.
Two lanes wide beneath a sky
that was blue,
a sun that was unforgiving.

We were there
on the grass
outside the gas station,
the first thing we had seen in fourteen miles.

You didn’t say anything.
You just stood there,
all inadvertent grace
and unknowing impetuousness.

“Beauty is an emotion,” you said.
“It is not a characteristic; it is the quality of eliciting that emotion.
You know it is beautiful
by the way it makes you feel,”
you assured me.

We were back on the road smoking cigarettes
when I knew I didn’t want to love you.
We were back on the road,
And the highway wore roses.

The static clings to her dress
and it is a thing without a name
that stands between us in the hall
without a shape or a face,
just a silent mass tsk, tsking, invisibly,
our way. The static clings to her dress
and the rest of our lives
is just a thing
beneath a half-drunk porch light,
between four beers, three cigarettes,
and the grave-
the static clings to her dress
and I’m the only one that sees
how she winces when she smiles,
it is a thing without a name.