You didn't notice the girl gazing at you
like desert stars do
when you lay with ancient light in your eyes.
She was toying with her hair
and you missed it.

On my sixteenth birthday,
my uncle gave me a balsa wood airplane,
or rather, the wood
that comes together to make one.

While I started out strong,
assembling most of the fuselage,
it would go unfinished
and stay a skeleton.

Most of its life
collected cobwebs.
My uncle drinks whiskey
in the pool at night.

I think of the airframe
still waiting to be put together,
waiting to fly
to the other side of this.

Friendly, the German Shepherd,
was big and he had rashes,
now he's ashes.

Daisy growled, never howled,
had puppies with Shiloh
who died on the patio.

Angus, the Siamese cat
got lost in the rain,
was hit by a train.

Peter the dove lost his love,
when during a fight,
she went to her sister's house
and flew in bad weather,
straight into a propeller


now she's feathers.

I am alone again, flying over Eastern Tennessee in my small plane.
Below are fields, fields of weeds and cows and horses.
There's nobody to save me if my engine declines to turn.
Punching through the soil of the sky,
above little houses scattered like sand.
"What the hell? This isn't an airplane, it's a cardboard box."
I can't fly this. It won't work.
I need to get out.

Stars on top of stars on top of stars. Blankets of silver snow. I unzipped my sleeping bag, the one I got for 15 dollars at a yard sale in Monterey. I brought my knees to my chest and thought about my friends and California.

Emily was living in a small apartment in Arcata, with a little garden out front that had dandelions and mint and some tomatoes. Everything in her apartment was either bought at a garage sale or on craigslist. Her mom gave her everything else, which was really only the bed and some silverware. I liked her little brown teakettle the most. “Isn’t it cool? Five bucks at a garage sale in good ole’ Moghetto.” She adored these things more than herself and embraced the simple life she held, her bike, garden, and lack of almost everything entirely.

She had taken the semester off to travel, but she never went anywhere, just stayed in that garden all day, boiling water in the kettle for God knows what. There wasn’t money to go anywhere, and what she got from painting fences or apartments was easily spent at the market on chicken, nuts, hummus, eggs, or rice. My God it was wonderful to see her move around that miserable apartment, showing me every little thing she had.

You're all out
with friends,
and terrible music.

That's the first stanza
of the first poem here.
The next is different.

Stay where you are,
we don't need you or
the simulated *** you call dancing.

When you've grown up,
like I'm trying to (sometimes too fast)
you will walk out of one of those clubs
and see the clouds have cleared.

Then, after you've discovered that you have a body,
you'll see it as a tool,
like a hammer you watched your father
swing a dozen times in the shed.

That's all it is:
A tool for your spirit.

Everything was like the mind of a hummingbird;
I had nowhere to be but there,
and I had everywhere to go.

I thought after I had my own place,
I'd finally have girls in my bed,
the kind that read in coffee shops.

But after too many failed apartment getaways
and 2,346 miles of stories
that could brim a hundred journals,
I'm in my old room
with the same songs and
the same parents, with
the same questions
about the same girlfriends who
have new boyfriends
with new cars,
more money,
more testosterone.

But they won’t walk out of a job
with both middle fingers in the air,
towards the road.
It won’t even enter their minds.

Some miles were so long, it took whole years before we realized they were behind us.
I examined the maps you painted inside my airframe.
You were trying to tell me you were lost
and you didn’t want to be another midair collision.

Jennifer repaired me shortly
after I crash-landed in the starflowers.
Crashed it again in the snow,
outside Murfreesboro,
and she wasn’t there that time.

If I had told the people who made this thing I was going to be reckless
with it, they probably would have bought a snow leopard, or a horsehead just to keep the conversation going.

But when they went ahead and made this life happen,
they rushed thinking he was going to be a
college boy, a frat boy, an intelligent mass of cells,
who flew over the mountains instead of into them.
But what my parents got was a little *******
who stirred up anthills, and stood up nice girls
and poured gasoline on the make believers
to prove the flames were real.

This letter was taken out of one world
and hurled into the next, with you, theoretically.
I know that sunflowers make wonderful goodbyes and some airplanes crash
and typewriters hurt when they write back.
His airframe was created in 1991.  
You should have known when you messed with the inside
it wouldn’t work the right way again.

I have had some things going on in my engine
that are not entirely fixable.
That is what makes us human. Our parts get better.
The problem is we turn gospels into information manuals.
And that is why I still end up at gasoline stations at 2 a.m.
searching for a bearing that says
“Follow me. I will take you where you will be happy.”

But we don’t get that, dear.
We get a paintbrush and a typewriter.
You told me I was wrong.
I told you
not to talk so loud.

She is sleeping in her bed,
in her little house,
with fireplace and kitchen,
garden, and faucet.

These flowers on the walls
were not there before.
A lot of things have
appeared since
the last time I looked.

This is a letter
to tell you that the wolves
in my dreams have devoured
the last piece of integrity I had.
I have taken the hot air balloon
out of my body to escape the feast.

You can't see everything through a telescope
you got for 15 bucks at Talbots.
But I know what that's like,
to be 21, 24, 36,
or 49 years old,
being expected to understand the universe
through the lens of a plastic toy.
I can hardly see Jupiter from here,
or the girl in the house across the street,
taking off her bra.
I want my money back. There is no use for this.

A couple
sits on the grass,
cradling themselves
in each  other’s arms
like two canaries
perched on the branch
of a maple tree,
whistling a song
that’s been on repeat
for the past twenty years.
My German shepherd Samantha,
tilts her head to ask me
“Wouldn’t it be nice
if a tree fell
on top of them?”
I gently pat her
on the head and say,
“Yes, that would be lovely.”

Clothed in unwashed rags,
my body was 20 and inebriated by the journey
I had inherited for myself.
I was on a bus on 101,
heading north to visit a friend
who had been going to school in Arcata, California.

Passing the spectacularly long grapevines,
I wrote long, unending sentences
and hummed them to myself as if they were prayers
from droplets of light above.

And in my long periods of silence,
I thought of what I would do when
I finally arrived at the northern coast.
"First, I think I'll take my shoes off
and dance around a little bit
and dip my feet in the sand.
I'll howl skyward, with my only friends,
my body and the spirit of the sky,"
and I did.

We uncorked the earth and decided that life was not so bad.
We smoked a good amount
and listened to the Local Natives and City and Colour.
I was happy as a *** could be.

Emily dropped out of Humboldt State,
22 years old.

She paints fences
for money and
takes the train into the hills-
finds fireflies,
sleeps on the sand,
empties wine bottles,
can't pay her rent. It's 345.

Her apartment is small,
400 sq. feet.
Had a guy sleep over last night
in the kitchen on a blowup mattress.

She wrote about it in a journal,
the one I gave to save her
from rain, fog, and moments
like this.
Flickering sky,
distant glitter of valley stars.

I'm fond goodbyes
and waving people away
as if from the bow of a cruise ship
while confetti showers fall
with the horn blowing.
Or similarly,
the method in which
a boy loses his ballon,
by setting it free entirely.

Adam was a geology graduate student at Stanislaus State, but dealt **** out of his house in Modesto. You wouldn't think that's what would be going on in his darling french tudor home, gray, with a cherry red door and vine crawling up the plaster walls. It looked like something out of a fairy tale. But we smoked a lot, in almost every room except his roommate's. We were unafraid to talk about anything: girls, friends, family, politics. That's how I liked it. When we disagreed on something, he'd say, "Oh that's just the ******* joke of a media we have." He would make some tea and sit on the couch and consider his six year-old German Shepherd, Titus. "So what the hell, how've you been Matt? Don't mind him, he always gawks at people like that. Still writing?"

I want to sit in this
bathtub of warm water,
with cigarettes and puff
the smoke into the water spout.

The water will suicide
back down
and I will get out
to dry off.

Then I will go into the kitchen
and make tea.

I flew my plane over these little hills
and thought about my life. I saw all the cities,
Arcata, Eureka, Redding, and an incredible
violet glow along the northern coast of California.
21 years old. I landed in a town that was lively
with families and college students. I sat at a
café near the ocean and the sand, cold from
the winter air. I no longer felt empty
when I saw a pretty girl holding hands with
a handsome young man. That used to disturb me,
but in that moment, I was satisfied
with the Milky Ways of my wanderings.
I read my books until midnight
and decided to lay on the starlit sand.
Golden flicker of lights about my kingdom.

You've had enough jobs
in liquor stores, gas stations,
and Chinese restaurants.
But you want your journal
to stay full and you're worried
that the stanzas will stop
after the jobs are done.

Well I was just like you,
afraid to talk to the girl
at the punch bowl.
But in the life after
I was saying, "*******"
to grocery store managers
and wrecking pickup trucks
on starlit Tennessee dirt roads.

We were the kind of kids
that would get erections from lighter fluid
and get suspended for it.
But no matter.
I found mountains to climb
and plateaus to destroy and
repair myself.

I took a look around
and stuck my nose in a flower.
At last, I have found the right words to say.

You are the last dandelion standing
in a garden on fire,
and all you have left
is to take the pills
and make love to the flames.

These are the moments when you stop
and think why you're not out there.
You know you, as a human being,
weren't meant to be in this cage
that has locked you up and sent you down
the throat of this monster that is made up
of empty wallets, musky interstate motel rooms,
and maybe,
if you're lucky,
an empty job that taught you more about yourself
than any public university ever could.

This is, God I'm sure of it, incredible.
And even though I never believed in the stuff,
if I could, I'd have given up long ago
and told my ma' that I'm taking off.
I'd release this heartache from my body
like doves, and let them run.

While watching "Little Bear" in the morning my grandma would often consider the obituaries and mutter things like,
"Marvin! That old *******, I didn't know he died."
She would sip her coffee,
unable to see a glimmer of herself in others.

Dad comes home from work
and we drink beer on the deck,
droplets of light
gazing at us from above.
We are gods to them.