My grandmother likes salami, God, and bougainvilleas
I like to think she likes tenuous pink things-
but then there’s the salami.

One day she taught her daughters to string neck-
laces from bougainvillea petals
like-ponies-in-a-junkyard

I think I chewed too much bubblegum in mass
because I picture God pink
an ethereal globe of a poppable pale pink.
And for some reason, I like to think Brother
Charles saw that too

I bet my lungs are somewhat pink:
more pink than my berry red blood
but less pink, sweet and/or hairy
than a cotton candy poodle.
I forget if they were strawberries or rasp-
berries too

There are things that are pink
but then there are things that are pink
and shadowless.
Like subterranean lungs,
God, the future, and
the smell of flamingos in the dark

The future is still pink and
somewhat fruity
like a lukewarm strawberry milkshake blushing,

or was it maybe just the taste
of my pepto-bismol stained lips.

One of those ponies was my mom

Becalm,
befool,
become before

No honey,
***-knee,
honey hunt me.

No bees.
No bees to be, please be.
Be me. Be you. Be who

Be me?

1 yellow prophetic dandelion,
do they know one day,
one breath
or maybe one be(e)
and they will fall to pieces?

I heard I could tie all my veins and arteries together and they would circle the earth so I thought if we laced ours together we could reach the moon
and watch stars blaze like one hundred billion cigarettes in the dark
skinny dip through purple orange green supernova explosions
curl up in a crater and watch the world spin like a cumbersome ballerina then we’d dive back down from the moon to the mothership
and unbraid our veins, separating mine from yours.
But without those vascular knots we’d start drifting apart just like Pangaea.
We’d both begin forgetting how we ballroom danced through constellations together how our fingertips wrinkled like walnuts outside the atmosphere
how we sunbathed under the incandescence of blue supergiants

Rocks know a lot more about time than clocks
Drive to the top of a mountain
Cinnamon gum
Noseblood
And rocks a lot older than clocks
Tell the older us we say hello

I am stuck between red rocks and a very hard place
Rockclimbing to rockbottom
I am a time hunter, rock hunter, pigeon hunter
(Let me tell you something about pigeon hunting:
Shooting clay pigeons isn’t as much fun when the pigeons aren’t clay
and their bodies shatter in midair like pomegranates in September
with red jewels sprinkling the sandstones
the sedimentary clouds and the fastfood signs)

Remember that time I tattooed the sky?
I wrote “time is a l.e.d. light” in a sacred heart
between the stars and the freckles and the ladybugs
none of their mothers were thrilled

Now I know time is a rock, a very heavy rock
A rock is a star, a star is a rock
And me? I am a rockstar
But I have all timers. Alzheimer's? No. ALL TIMERS
and a monolith growing on my sternum

Firecrackers. That’s what I wanted to talk about.
And when I say firecracker I mean fireworks
the way fire works his way between me, time and a rock
What is it with rocks?
Rock and roll
Rocked by doubt and rolled by time
Rock my world, please