I will make a fangle of mechanisms,
a creature with iron snouts
and concrete aortas.

Its fevered howl will wake the duplexes
perched on sloped land,
built from collected tins and bottle caps.

Boys sooted in grief will balk like ravens,
chew sweet dip, and spit,
but never reach the foreman’s gate.

They’ll crave a tavern with antlers as chandeliers
where a black flame burns
on the brim of a zinfandel.

But tonight they’ll gristle through streets
to a stale room
where fluorescent lights blanch a young widow’s skin.

Basic cable ministries will flick and dim
in the homes of the wigged ladies who wait for them—
the howl keeps them

breathless, each of them fearing
the slow swallow from a snake’s mouth
to its furnace.

I made small talk
with your ex-lover at a train station.
I reminisced about dinner,
and I gave him advice on shoes
because he was barefoot.
He kept moving a pen
from pocket to pocket,
the pen being a nice one,
perhaps a gift from his father.
He spoke of sparrows
pecking at him in nightmares.
I commented that the 5:15 was late,
and it disturbed his thoughts,
his face like a geezer startled from a nap.
He never asked about you.
I did mention autumn,
which reminds me of you,
the bare trees trembling
like your legs
on the night you left me.
But before I could complete my thought
the birds had already diminished him.

The godless set fire to the redwoods
before marching us to the hills.

Black birds wake on jacarandas
without wings.

Their caws raise Lazarus once again.
A young girl's skin wrinkles into birch,

and suddenly trees surround me.
The eyes in the bark

denounce my flesh and limbs.
The mulch tries to swallow my feet,

but my wings lift me.
I'm dancing among fiery ashes

above the boulevards of igneous rock.
Particles of light halt into white heat,

cleansing me of flesh.
All that is left is spirit,

quiet and unknowing,
lost in whatever's between the stars.

The careful moon maunders through the glass ceiling
on these long nights

when I try to alchemize my visions into ships.
I imagine the mist moping among the larches—

the dewy bark that wakes,
looking for shadows of loggers in the grey.

On cold nights like this I sleep beneath a sheet, sweating,
dreaming of China’s violet sky exploding with hues

of a butterfly’s paper wings.
The summer air crackles above the pale girl’s tent—

a counterfeit ankh hangs between
her naked, sagging *******—

and she sees the future in the reflection of her eye
on an Opinel’s blade—her iris wheezing into shapes.

She tells me there are gales ahead
like ones in schoolbook etchings of Poseidon.

Boys will choke on salt, she says,
or the ice will kiss the little princes to sleep.

But she coos how they look like dancers at a ball.
How many boys will be lost? I ask the girl.

All of them, she says with ***** on her breath,
but this won’t stop you, will it?

In my favorite dream yolk sizzles on a cast iron as mother sings.
My older sister laughs, cheeks full of sourdough and jam,

and father’s wet hair drips onto his paper—
the ink of little letters smearing into bare branches.

The dream helps me forget that rain never ends where I wake,
where guilt’s proboscis feeds on hardened veins.

To whomever’s my son, please don’t put me in an elegy
where the memory of me will rot like wet wood.

We drift
on the winter sun’s glints,
where the horizon is a musician’s lips
pressed tight on a horn
repeating a note in 12/8 time.
When I met you
I thought you said you were a parasol,
and I imagined you
spinning upward in a painter’s daydream.
At this moment
we find each other where things are lost,
or—let me put this better—
where we’ll never find each other again.
We’re caught in the memory of shade
as we drift
beneath the ligatures of nimbus,
or in your words a mean-loooking sky.
All bliss drips into each of us
at this moment
when we don’t feel lonely.
But I won’t share what I protect.
These confessions
are for someone else I haven’t met.

We were once black furred wolves
fleeing through pines
towards winter's dark mouth.

We mocked the wooden ravens
who trod one-by-one to temple
to hide from constellations.

Danger haunted each nook,
but we were drunk on moonlight,
taunting the eyes that stalked us.

In a pale clearing
you asked, Wouldn't it be romantic
to die beneath the stars?

But morning came before death.
I looked at my watch
and vaguely remembered who I was.

Sit, sneak a look at what’s left of nothing,
a tree alone, a blur of nimbus and fire above no one,
a diminished frequency of fury.

Sketch my black coat.
Two bucks at the Goodwill, it confides in the dead,
celebrates mother with a seance.

Ah, do you hear that?
The coffeemaker is the Atlantic. It wants to wear hues,
to be a limbless body in someone’s dream,

gestures with white light,
and never sleeps as it studies the moon.
Let’s not talk about that anymore.

It feels like spiders in my ear canal,
yesterday does.
Stay a little longer. But don’t look at me.

Look at yourself in the mirror,
and I will grin back at you—ah, feel that?
That’s what it’s like to wake up as Mark Landis.

Before bed I poured my joy into a jar on the stand,
and when it was full
flecks of light glided around our bodies.
Her ears sang a lo-fi lullaby
as her eyelids caught each fleeting note.
When you look away from me
what are you trying to hide?
Our wild skin cooled on cotton
as our minds dipped
into fragments of what pains us.
Get close to me.
During the moment I was sad because
I imagined myself as an old man
forgetting most of it.
We didn’t invent a new thing,
just a simple thing so simple it was beautiful.
And when you finally spoke
only the sensation of touch was left of me.

Under white bulbs
Dr. Black studies me through the glass.
I will be figure A on page three,
and how I purchase jazz CDs will be section II,
which will have footnotes
on 21st century Latinos in White suburbia,
the economic decisions of lost boys,
references to Dr. Earnst’s
Entitlements of the Capuchin,
and droll digressions on such and such and such—
dear Erwin musing on the thirteen times
we happened upon each other in life,
the most embarrassing being when I wore a pig mask
to what I thought was a masquerade
but which ended up being my own funeral.
One day we’ll vaguely recall the white sky on the morning
we met through an imaginary friend,
a girl who we forgot to name.
Does it matter, if it never really happened?
I just remember when you were a child
you looked through the glass for me,
and when I wasn’t there you waited through the night.

Before the clear day
I forgot the sky was blue
and stubborn,
refusing to be anything but blue.
Trees are afraid to fly,
not because they might fall to the ground, mind you,
but up into the sky.
To them
the blue veils the horror,
the strums of starlight,
where nostalgia is a padded room.
My uncle was like a tree,
and my mother hated him for it.
A stranger once started a conversation by saying,
“That’s the thing about trees.”
And I felt like I’d met him,
but rather than worry I just looked up.

We know not what we do
as we wail and wince,

alone in the woods,
sheltered beneath the hot lights.

I close my eyes to hide
and gibber to be unheard.

The black in my head trembles.
The nothing, liquid and thick,

longs to be the silhouettes
of things forgotten.

Ancient stars once called my name,
long before Yahweh.

Like a burst of Milhaud
they reached through eternity to me,

longing to be seen before they die.
I am made of stars.

I am the quiet that sings,
I am the dust that cries.

I speak the gospel of visible light,
and with it I create everything.

A boy claims the tabernacle shook.
He's right. It did.