Nothing is heavier
I dare say
than the weight
of an oppressive thought
that refuses to go away.

In this life
we are sculpted down
to bone
burned to cinders
and our ash
tossed without regret
into the four winds

I wish I could live.
Be a man.
Find comfort in the sun.

But every cell in my body
revolts against time
cries out against the sun
speaks in tongues
for the sole purpose
of creating an outrage
against God.

Oh Lord!
How did you make us thus?
And why?
Above all
why?

We are made metal
and in the end
alloy with the sun.

Our breath is drawn
to fuel that fire
bring life to a boil
and
if luck prevails
to wake each morning
in comfort
and with a smile.

Perhaps the last sweet smile.

And then I came out

If dinosaurs still were
In my vicinity,
I certainly would be worried,
But also less bored.

Somewhere deep in the skies of Montana
a lonely street corner flickers
casting coded light
upon the distant albino hillside

It was once a great lake
of snow and ice and melt and
unseen by life
It drained and died

and its beautiful lakebed sands
became the hillside
again

to tumble and fall
into valley and time
again

there we built an impermanent road
we pave and pave
maintain
with trucks and slabs of dirt and grain
roaming those Roman roads
again

Somewhere deep in that heartland
the strings that pumped the musculature
of a dying nation
slowly giving way to a violent attack
from within
oxidize and pool
into great tides
to one day see the coast

I am in California
but I see it clearly as a dream
where the great plains meet the mountain face
and the Cheyenne carved their heels into the dirt
for a bit
spirit
eroded into the winds

today the miners spit
at a coffee-town bar
into copper cans
licker than split
Owning the land that shakes
and shifts
redrawing god's lines
with a paper pad and a pen
for a bit

And the dresses the ladies wear shine
lacquered wood and the horses cry
and beside the interstate
the trucks steam and chuff
and their drivers gaze starry-eyed
onward, beyond into the night
beyond those flanking hillsides
to the flat ocean land sponged anew
that left the oil fields in Texas and the tar sands in
Athabasca
set ablaze in the fervor
of a death rattle
American heart
pumping to feed these hillsides
again

for tomorrow we begin.

I remember the summer of 10th grade so clearly. I snuck you into my room and we laid under the covers for the entire three months. We talked about our favorite songs and the way the sun feels on our skin, about how things used to feel. We planned out every detail of our future together and played it out on Sims. You were so beautiful. You took over every room, you were so full.
My sheets still smell like you. Sometimes I play caterpillar with my blankets and it's almost like I can touch you. Like a familiar hug, you never liked to let go. As if saying goodbye was too hard, as if too many people tried to forget you.
My mom hasn't forgotten you. I remember her telling me about how she skipped school for you and how she decided to stay in bed for her entire junior year. I remember her telling me about how you weren't allowed in her room so she made space in her medicine cabinet instead.
Cleared shelves for you when she got her own place, wrote you into every divorce paper, mistook her name for yours. Stuffed you into breathing tubes for her son, tore off a piece of her, a piece of you for him. kicked you out when she found your residue on tinfoil, told you that she didn't raise you this way, said the wrinkles around your lips are unrecognizable and your cheekbones aren't carved the same.
She asks me why I've been scratching at my ribcage, why my fingertips can lay comfortably between them. She tells me that it's like looking in a mirror 20 years earlier. That my complexion is as faded as her high school yearbook. Washed out like a bottle of wine, like the one I held to my lips the night before. She tells me to eat an apple, tells me to pick up the one that fell to the ground, tells me to wash it off, to wash out the mouth, to empty it of alcohol, asks me not to carve holes through it, asks me not to rot like the other ones. Act like my body isn't being taken over by seeds, like my stomach doesn't boil when I hear his voice, like the only butterflies I feel aren't when I kick at my comforter. She tells me that if you don't leave room for depression, eventually he'll get the hint but in this family, if you fall hard enough, there's bound to be bruises.