i remember that night on your front steps
smoking cigarettes and talking with your mother
while
i cradled your heart and
you cried on my chest

i remember middle school english class
and your first thong,
pink and white and blue

i remember we made that bourbon summer
last until december

i remember bottle rockets and champagne
the morning your brother died

i remember carrying you home
in the rain
the day after you escaped from the hospital
and you cried then, too.

i remember lying on the cold ***** tile
of your mother's kitchen
whispering Neruda in your ear
shivering & sweating with you
that night we took ecstasy

i remember the first night
you let me slip an honest prayer between your lips

i am a citizen of the terrible landscape
preaching to savages
hair-raised, growling and
sniffing each other.

& the wind has
not a penny to spare
for the frightening world

i am the thought provoking senator
of this state
i dance naked on broken wrists
and beer cans full of tobacco spit

my mind is crazed
on cartoons and
my lungs absorb my own
existence in a cigarette.

i am perched on a roof
the green dusk sky stretched
out like a beach towel
above me.

thirty-four stories up
and i hold the moon in
a cradle.