Beds moaning in a give and take
some sort of car crash outside, morning’s roadkill
people choking on their breath during sleep.
I exhale words I do not mean to say then swallow them up again
          just battered croaking –

all these sounds spattered like a Victorian print.
I feel the air of another person whistling on my backside:
he will climb vines to get in my bed and eat me.

I hear night-noises, and that is what I think,
there are cannibals at the sill
big green tree-looking men who fit me whole in their stomach.
                My bedroom, like a cupboard
                         and me the same, we open without a key.

Across the street
there has to be a factory of some sort

where women are put into jars for jam and their skin’s the toast –
they get pregnant by ear. One hundred decibels
given by my father’s snoring moustache
and fifty for an ****** that causes leopard print sheets.

               Then, I am in a dream in which
   someone large holds me
closer than a criminal, but we just ballroom dance.

Then, I open those eyes again
                 and dogs bark in southern accents
                 and my house sweats from a nightmare
                 and the hour hands me sandbags
                 and wives finally get to pawn the rifle for thousands
                               but not before I hear a shot.

Rain is
Falling
Outside, a
Downpour for
Three days
And three
Nights.
In the
Dark,
It whispers
To me, secrets
Like an old
Friend.
Cool silver
Over my wrists,
My neck;
Falling.
Shiver of
Antici-
Pation tremble
In my fingers.
Electricity
Hums,
Thunder
Rumbles and
Crashes overhead.
This is where
I am
Home.

I count down
Days on the calendar,
Each it's own reminder;
Rows of red X's march
Across April like
You must march each morning.

The possibility hangs
Like a cartoon piano overhead,
Waiting to plummet down
With its true crushing force.
Hear the clang of
Misfired keys,

And there will be no more
Wildflowers pressed,
Sent away in sealed packages
Alongside smiling photos
And handwritten postcards
Entailing sentiments that only offer

Temporary comfort.
There is no security
In the promise of return
When it's told from lips
That have lied this before;
No solace in hands

That deliver folded flags
To crying former wives
Who prayed like I do;
No hope in eyes
That have seen unspeakable,
In headlines shouting nightmares.

It would behoove my grade school bible teacher to know that I have finally found Jesus.
He sits alone at my neighborhood bar,
and in a fashion that is not unlike the line
at a New York City Jewish deli shop,
he takes questions.
Ticket number 347. “What kind of man will I marry?”
Ticket number 7623. ”When will the end of days come?”
My bible study class, oh,
how they would shake inside their buttoned blouses with envy
that I was the one to find Jesus,
between drinks, between cigarettes,
with beer and peanut excrements on bottoms of his sandals.
Handing out answers like pork cutlets
to mouths that haven’t eaten in years
because they have filled up on the empty appetizer
that is stomach-churning worry:
the gutless and gut-full sin,
of having problems without the hope of solutions
of having questions with silent answers
that it shakes believers so hard in the night they fall off their beds
and they land conveniently on their knees.
They wake up in the morning with bruises and scratches,
external hurts treated with
a mixture of peroxide and stuck-on-you band-aids
that hug tight their stinging cuts until the next day
when the Band-Aid losses its glue and falls off
when they land in meat grinders turning out sausage links
that no one even has an appetite for.

I found Jesus in a bar.

When I see him
I remember Sunday school
and how I stood up on the sweaty palmed stained pulpit and yelled,
“He is not real!”
and now that I am confronted with my falseness
I wonder was I wrong to try to cool the fire of questions unanswered
by answering them myself.

I took a ticket.
I stood in line.
I waited.
The knot my Sunday school teacher tied with my intestines
years ago tightened itself and pulsated
with the influx of another beer
and growing bowel movements that only made me more unsure
of the source of pain in my belly.

I watched
as Jesus nodded politely in between
admissions of sins and proposals of betterment
a gentle, deliberate nod
like his neck was the waist of a Hawaiian girl
on the dashboard of a Colorado trucker,
or maybe like aged fast-food wrappers that tilt forward with the inertia
caused by strategically placed speed bumps.
Each nod, a mini-bow that seemed to contradict
his devotion to his divinity and his authority
over the bleeding-kneed and hungry-stomached servants.

I am the last ticket before the last call and
being this close I can see sweat stains under his arms;
my mother would say they are extra halos.
“And your question, my child?” he says, and
I think I should have been more prepared
or at least not have stuttered like the elementary school student
one stuck playing the under appreciated Pluto in the graduation play.

“Was I wrong that day on the pulpit?”
It was rudely put. I was embarrassed.
He said, “Did it ease the hunger pain of uncertainty?”
He knew it did. So did I.
“Then no, you answered your own question.”
He seemed drunk when he said that,
so I trusted it as a sober man’s thoughts.
Then I walked away full
with knees unscathed.

Feel the guitar
Pulse through your body
The rhythm that makes
You tap your feet
The       S
                M
                    O
                         O
                              T
                                 H
Sound of the bass is the back
Making you close your eyes and sway
The calm that music makes us feel
When we can count on nothing
But the nice slow thump
of the drums

And your eyes are painted on.
The feathers adhere to the side of your face,
Coated in a foundation, with layers of sparkles,
That lead to a cosmic undertone
But there is nothing there
You are an optical illusion
You care for light
And it shines from your darkness
The deepened tunnels in your eyes
Are empty holes
Don’t go down
If you can’t see the bottom
If the flashlight illuminates nothing
Take two steps back
Two more blinks
Two more kisses
“Besoin, besoin”
And away we will drift