Driving home from my mother’s shattered arm and mirage-eaten back, I convince myself I’ve taken a wrong turn. I’ve only been on this earth twice. My body doesn’t look different in the dark. I could be living in a man who's lost his loved ones. Behold I see the deer deformed in the same spot that it was last week and know I can twist my shadow toward those deer in the nowhere I’d be.

ghosts lined in
purple            queues
suntan their limpid bodies
         like dusty glass
in the fabulous

eyeholes of
death;

         he delivers
the cardinal produce
                                             of an empire

wider than it is tall,

fat with its
own body

fiends melting
up
their cracking
statues
on the unsweet
asphalt;

hey what's up man c'mon man
what're you doin all alone
all the way
down
here

The tiled sky
wrings its hands over us;
below the children swing,
back and forth,
back and forth;

there will be blood
soon;
simple, causeless
blood;

in our ears
and mouths
and under
our nails

and the children will
swing,

back and forth,
back and forth,

like a surgeon's needle,
like a heel grinding,
like myriad fingers
twisting in hell.

we come alone
to a blank house
and ask
"Why me, why me,
O Lord?"

This skull whines in its
sagging baggage;

            toot toot toot

goes the rabble,
moving their thought
packages along

           the neural airwaves.

electrostatic convulsions
take the heart,

turning it into a neat
neon abyss

                    full of radio top 40s
and cardiological indigestion.

spectral oracles deliver their
diabetic sermons
near the kidneys--
                     It will happen soon,
             they say
                    

and in the brain a dreamer
kicks an unpinned grenade
around and
says:

what has happened
tomorrow
was
happening today and
will happen yesterday;

and on and on
it goes.

calamitous is the
           bend
of the           gum
and mouthtissue

as it curves

ever
inward

towards a
candy *****;

deep is the forgetting;
lasting is the purse
of
regret