swearing oaths
boiling in the urn AH
WHAT'S THIS BLUE
**** Warwick man dies
crossing highway
his grocery cart
full of
whipped cream cans and cereal boxes
and a tattered baby's quilt

read New York Times op-ed
said text messaging takes the care out of conversation, allows people to speak to many others, make open ended plans, find the best possible party, lay, ***
said that our generation does not love itself, the young women and men are just juggling each other, trying not to drop or get dropped
why doesn't anybody care anymore?
texted Sharon
she doesn't get it either

I got your text message this morning
at 12:49 AM
as I was barreling down Interstate 90
surrounded by caravans of trucks
who flit up and down the easy hills between Erie and Toledo
like sheet metal moths in the lamplight
I could see, feel, taste nothing
outside of my hulking lepidopteran companions
and the white dashed line I'm pulling in
racing to the sinker at the end
and that's you

Three children sit behind a dumpster
outside of the Pier Pizza Parlor
unaware that they are children
Seven years later walking past Bridge Square
a girl remembers

**** we're out of cigarettes
and my mom's fucken car is locked. man.
and joints rolled with single ply toilet paper
burning through precious *** in the seaside woods where Indians
used to die

She, curling hands,
flattens a photograph of three kids in swimsuits and baseball caps
crouched under the rainy eaves of a waterslide
lighting a one hitter and gazing at their tiny dying world
now like a centerfold
it's covered in lubricant sweat and spittle
after too much time under the wrong beds

She sits on this small fountain
wistfully blinking and ******* down the cigarettes she wishes she could lock back up
kneading her dead legs and wondering
if it's better to have a past smudged by erasers
or mottled with bruises

Bill died on a Saturday, early in the morning.
An old man, alone, but not lonely,
or was it the other way around?

As I put on Molly's dress,
my father wondered aloud how many times Bill had zipped it up for her.
I thought to shudder from having so many dead hands on my back,
but instead I felt warm.
Hands are hands.

When the waves roll up
to our feet
standing on the shore
I know I will go with them
Wherever they will lead me
alive or dead won't matter because
once I roll away
I will just be another fish drifting somewhere between the
sand and the cold air
I love you too much
and this place too much
to try to stay

Flying over whitecaps
and the uncertainty of opaque depths,
suddenly the blue dropped away
and I was speeding through the sterile mud
between the cornstalks, where wheat once grew.
You had said that you knew a place
and we stumbled back through the woods,
falling and thwacking our way through tangles of branches.
When we got to the river, all we found
were junk tires, a tree, and a ******.
Stalking off with a cigarette in my mouth
and one behind my ear,
I found myself back alongside the cornfield
and staring in
I discovered that the green of the corn was as cloudy and evasive
as the blue of the ocean
and guarded as many mysteries,
but they are quiet mysteries
and the pain that they hold
is a quiet pain.