According to science
by the time I hit flames
my velocity
will crack the floor

But there’s no room for science here

My family waves
(and by now I’m in flames)
blank goodbyes of I told you so
Dogs with rabies
aborted babies
and all those Disney Villains

The Fat **** who kills his own meat and is sleeping with your mother
never knew you
For you
So Loved The World

I

Side street in a yellow town,
Nothing happens but a heavy breathing man.
Careful steps to Linda Linda’s home,
This day, thinks he, is a barn owl’s song-

Something else moves the wind chime,
Something else shoos the leaves.
Linda Linda if you will.

Did you lock your keys in the car again?
I walked.
Just be quiet.
I willed.

But dust covers furniture as love eclipses better love
When wetted too much down where divers don’t dare,
Dropped. Left in mud.
Linda Linda did and dared.

II

Whale 1 one looked at Whale 2 and sighed, swimming off.

III

Owl,
You *******.
Where love is once now love is mud,
Look what these doctors have dared and done.

Whales,
You kindly kindred floated friends,
You saw her last
Sinking moment

And you’ll see my last eye cried dry,
Something else moves the yellow tide.

And ******* You,
Smile crying, drowning and fat now,
It was probably
Just as beautiful as you wanted.

Perhaps it’s the chemicals
In the mulch
Or the heat of the sun
Or that it’s Friday
But I want to grip monkey bars,
Just once

Hovering over
freshly baked plastic
and burn my ***
Or scream that I’m it and
slap some chubby bully kid-
run like the cool wind
Thank gosh I am quick.
Impress Kylie with my
Kickball Kick
Or cry on the swings-
the playground’s gallows,
When I learn she is moving

come the fall.

Leaves roll in,
dragged in waves across pavement
Queens of the universe
speed by
late for classes in some far off world where there is no recess

But my time
is kept
by bright bells
The clanging of metal,
distant shrieks,
Tall red beams and
lines of dumb ducklings.
It begins with a voice
And ends with a sliding slam of
a Silver Chrysler door
It is sustained by light thunder
Of feet pounding woodchips
Leaving dust in the seams of jeans
My mother bought me at Kohl’s last week.

You’d think she really was
Mud sticking and stiffening to the Loud Lady’s toes,
And her sigh sticks in mine.
Don’t let them do this to me and I didn’t

But I did. God’s great pillar carried us west.
They dragged her like a fog.
The men who cried **** spit and grinned
and the smoke grew sorrowed with girth.

How I long to breathe in Black Hill breath
to drown in the Belle Fourche
and swallow the palest Crook ashes that float,
Chewing the body that I left and let-

But there is no redemption in the tops of towers.
No spiral of justice. No figment
of grace in these sooty species.
No Bear Lodge witches that the Loud Lady cried

So surely that
You’d think she really was

I like how my lips
fit that hollow
by your collar bone

I could sing an anthem there
or whisper sweet
sweet nothings.

I knew a girl
Who bathed in the jungle
While I caught tigers on my tongue.
She soaked it in some animal’s ****
I sat and prayed to God.

I played her egg to Beny Moré
Now all that’s left is some Cuban drool.
Swimming, screaming
“Cómo Fue”
I did my naked dance for a baboon.

She’ll take good care
Teaching her fifty beaked ***** friends
How to completely ****** the mood

How to
Shrink me small
As a glance
Eating twisty ties
While I frown.

An unnatural mass, eaten delicately
In a dim lit den,
Made me dazed
lightly breathing
Gripping the cancered drive thru receipt.
In my softest

Seeing
your balancing voice
by blue Gulf seas.

Great scientist
who taught me
that love is a fossil
And that darkness
is the absence of soft blue rings

turned statue
With the weakest of arms
Wrapped in wood-

And in the afternoon
descending
I wished my eyes
would clear
And that my stomach would hurt
so you could discreetly slip me
Pepto Bismol from your purse.