I don't know what he was to others—
   fireworks, lemonade, ants crawling on a picnic blanket—
   but I always knew him at his worst.
He was sleep cycles shaped like carnival pretzels,
   days that bled together,
weeks that clumped like a rat king
   under floorboards in the beach house.
He spoke in clouds
   swollen with diluvian rain,
daggers of lightning
   cracking the river in half,
the language of a muggy body in sticky room
   staring out a window
at absolutely nothing.
   The sort of stuff that makes me think
he didn't know his own strength,
   most of the time.

As always, when he died this year
   he died by degrees,
bedridden in the hospice of September.
   I listened to his death rattle
 of rustling yellow leaves
   and watched the last of the fireflies
crawl from between his parted lips.
   When he went cold for good
I built a pyre out of his firewood bones.
   The ashes fell into the soil
like seeds in waiting, and I watched
   the moon grow so large that it stretched
the nighttime like candy licorice
   and made it longer than before.
My duty done, I turned to go.
   The smoke rose up to embrace the sky,
and at the time, I could have sworn
  that from the corner of my eye
I saw it curl around
   and wave at me.

Within the four walls of this library
sit three walls packed into the corner;
shelves, stuffed full of books with dog-eared pages
and slip-disc’d spines and fraying edges,
and a big white sign, which dangles from the ceiling
like a megabat hung on a cave mouth, sleeping and dreaming,
the word “NONFICTION” is inscribed on its countenance,
adjacent to signs shouting “MYSTERY” and “SCIENCE
FICTION” and “FANTASY” and “ROMANCE”
and a thousand other sorts of words
for myth and fabrication. But in this corner
live the rest, the et ceteras, the miscellaneous,
the kingdom of protists; for instance, care for some ethics?
Marx’s manifesto is stacked lazily beside a heap of essays by Rand;
you can practically see the two of them, shaking hands
uneasily, the will to never understand already forming
in their brains, and others yet remain;
Capote and the Clutters share shelf space
with the Mansons, hiding helter skelter behind
gnostic gospels and silent springs and a thousand
dreams for Freud to interpret (translated
from German for your convenience); nearby,
Orwell sings war songs in Catalan, accompanied
by the universe’s most elegant superstrings,
and the caged birds, singing of freedom,
harmonizing a melodious cacophony with the song
of the executioner. Butler criticizes his performance,
and she probably would have anyway, but Friedan thinks
he has a certain sort of mystique and Dawkins offers his own critique,
going on about genes and memes, extinction and delusion, but
not hallucinations—Sacks makes the distinction; let us continue
to praise famous men, and their children after them,
these naked apes, with minds so ***** that
they’re riddled with the emperors of all maladies; oh, Morris
Kinsey and Mukherjee could tell you all about these things,
maybe over lunch with Schlosser or dinner with Pollan,
minglings with Machiavelli over affairs of the state,
or affairs of space and a brief history of time; but,
if you're feeling too full to eat, or to pray, or to love,
ask Frankl what to do, let him change your life
with words from decades yore as he keeps on
his search for meaning just like every man before, at least
that's the case when these boys’ lives weren’t preoccupied
by artful war or bright and shining lies. And here,
by the holy bookend, lies some old and antiquated glossary
which lost most of its “glossy” many years ago,
for one flip through the pages will catalogue the changes
between what we thought we knew about the stars
and our bodies and doomsday as recently
as your last birthday, and all the things that everyone says
we now know that we know; speak,
memory, remember all you can
about this endless, sundry cosmos, and
the microcosms that it boasts; bury my heart,
if not at Wounded Knee, then maybe at this
library, where comprehension and speculation
find themselves in coexistence, packed into a single
point resembling the genesis, and fear and hope
take dueling forms, those of fact and mystery;
and now all that’s left to do is read,
until the end of history.

I am in love with Nobody
And Nobody loves me,
When I roll over in my bed
It’s Nobody I see;
Nobody cares enough to stay
And hold me when I weep,
And Nobody will dry my tears
To soothe me back to sleep;
Nobody is a friend to me
When I am feeling down,
And Nobody knows what to do
To get rid of my frown.

As I go through my average day
Nobody’s by my side,
Offering his company or
proffering his guide.
Nobody is my only friend
Sent from the gods above,
But now it seems that fate has tried
To meddle with our love.
Tomorrow night, my Nobody
Heads back to his old home;
He has a wife and child, he says,
Who know not where he roams;

Nobody has been travelling
For years from shore to shore,
Traversing through Ionia
After the Trojan War.
Oh, I will miss my Nobody
With all my giant heart,
I cannot bear to dwell on thoughts
Of us being apart.
Nobody holds my hand and says,
“Polyphemus, don’t cry,”
But I can’t stop the massive tears
From welling in my eye.

We like chopping our love into pieces.
We like labeled jars, tiny portions;
we ration bits to our mothers, our friends,
our courtly lovers, clinging and clutching,
no crumbs for the people we don't know.
The truth is, there is one, enormous love.
One fire in the hearth, one warmth,
one cornucopia resplendent on the table.
There is one home in your heart
for all of it.

I was made to be milk glass—
  Lately, I've been more of
a scattering of light,
  a technicolor oil spill,
effervescent kerosene,
  a phosphene
in a running eye,
  fluorescent aerosol
going cumulonimbus
  in a green sky;
a variegated skin rash
  caused by shining neon bile
all festering and iridescent;
  a tattered road map
on the wall of a food court,
  bearing incandescent roads
twisting like snakes
  eating their own tails;
a human being in the form of a
  kaleidoscopic feedback loop
passed back and forth
  between the mouth and the ear
and the mouth and the ear forevermore,
  burning the tongue, the finger tips
and teetering on the edge
  of glittering, glorious incendium—
After the smoke has cleared,
  I can go back
to sleeping on the shelf.

I found religion at the bottom of a cereal box
and ended up saving it in my pocket for awhile, spending my sundays
beside spiritual cannibals speaking of the Supergalactic
and eating on the good word while waiting for the Hand of god
or so-called Miracles; only recently have I discovered
the sacrosanctity of the seed, the egg, the space between matryoshka dolls,
the amoeba before it splits or the amoeba afterwards, baby teeth
and graduates, letters stuffed in pen tips in hands of poets
kneeling with the armless, contrapposto women waiting
inside blocks of marble and boiling pots of Hellenic brass worshiping
in the house of the hesitant spring crawling from the earth’s core
on stolen time;

I say a heretic’s “Amen” to the parting of lips,
the movement of breath, all werewolves on the half-moon and
the moon before the harvest, bless the ant hills full of false gods
that band together in the symphony of the subatomic and glory be
to the Truth! the only truth, that just as all things die in the end, so too
are all things born at the beginning, a fact lost on all those preaching
sacred scriptures in the dead language
of the Impossibly Huge.

For her eighteenth birthday,
a gift from the fates;
she knows how she will die.
Before, there was a vague notion—
A shadow cast by a hungry dragon
who roosts on the branches of the family tree,
devouring her ancestors, waiting and unslayable.
Now, the diviners speak to her in pedigrees
and punnett squares, leafing through a deck
of tarot cards, checking vials of her blood
for patterns in the tea leaves at the bottom,
hardening the shadows at their edges and
twisting peripheral horror into prophecy,
a promise, and she sees it all,
she sees everything, laid in front of her
and stretching out like a golden string
towards the vanishing horizon:

The sharp burn of dread at every twitch
and missing memory, jellied elegies oozing
from the center of others’ puffed pleasantries,
years spent watching her soul
get thinner and thinner, trapped
within a broken heap of matter and flesh,
cursed bone, misfiring electricity,
eroding endlessly, self destructing,
never ending, ending soon,
and, at last, alone, gazing back on a youth
spent gazing forward, ******, and dying
and derelict, and decades in the making—
she asks herself, what would she not give
for the chance to unknow,
to trade the dragon for the slow, soft lull
of the indifferent stars,
and to die whole and confused,
like the rest of us.

i've loved you far too long
for all of that.

it would be like coming home
after a long day and knocking
the snow off my boots
to find a fire already roaring in the hearth.
it would be breaking my fast,
the first warm bite
of something homemade
on that cold winter night,
my hands shaking around the spoon,
my tongue quivering.
it would be a warmth down
to my very core, so euphoric
that i'm not hungry anymore,
and i'll never have to be hungry again.

We walk in tandem well past midnight
Summer tempest mad and young
The air charged thick with salt and clouds
And cherry ice still on our tongues;
Sandals dangling off hooked fingers
Remnant sand between our toes, with
Soles pressed lightly to the pavement
Slicked with rain and indigo;
A quiet laughter seals in spaces
Left unfilled by ocean roars, and
Ancient street lamps flicker hazy
As we pass by corner stores;
Joined together hand in hand,
Two bodies wading through the gale
While lightning bounces off the coast
And off your painted fingernails;

Over Seaford on a bridge with
Wind-swept hair and noses red
As leering thoughts about September
Hover over both our heads;
Porch lights crest around the turnpike
We go in through your back door
I plant myself into your sofa
Like the countless times before;
Stories travel back and forth
As storms wage war upon the beach,
Your lips and teeth move like you have
A homily you need to preach;
The talking turns to my departure
As we dry our soaking clothes
Against the glow of TV screens
With hearts and bodies left exposed;

Staring future in the eye
And met with nothing but abyss
I say with all my confidence
That I know this and only this;
It must have been an intervention
Of some Godly, cosmic breed
That gave me August in Delmarva
And a chance for us to meet;
When I’m settled back at home,
Your cadence just a reverie,
The transience of our acquaintance
Will have no effect on me;
Of all the talks we did exchange,
Not one has ever carved so deep
As when you told me everything
Upon the briny Chesapeake.

the world ended in february; it is getting difficult to remember
a time before humanity, ephemeral in the end,
slipped into the gaps between evolution’s gnashing teeth;
i saw the first ghost outside my window
stumbling in the distance from the chapel garden,
walking about the streets with curling fingers,
reaching out to touch warm skin, and i,
behind thick locks and boarded windows,
dared not leave my house for days; in march i sat trembling
as i counted empty jars in my cenotaph pantry;
after eating cat food and the cat i
carried nothing on my back when i fled my home
in search of a safer haven; in april, i stood
on the tops of hollow buildings and looked down at the street
to see faces shining red, ravenous and without mercy in the ash,
i watched a man open up another’s ribcage
like the doors of a hostel, unsealed at the edges
as if just another canned good from a looted grocery store; in may
i caught glimpses of children catatonic in their skin,
orphaned by pestilence and rotting after
their first death and their second, i witnessed
my mother’s apostasy, saw her gnawing on the bones of the vicar
with a king james tattered at her feet; in june i saw my sister
huddled in the corner and clutching a revolver,
white-knuckled, one bullet,
staring down the barrel as wounds bled and hands shook,
and the seed of acedia—germinating in her chest
beside that vile malady—kept her finger twitching just beyond the trigger; i
lamented the absence of the swallowed sun, forgot what apples tasted like,
stopped telling the difference between samaritans and corpses and
observed that which was once called love turn into a hungry fire
as old and primal as leaning stones, carnal and hard and ugly
and spoiled like all else; in july
i noticed my hands had begun to shake every time i heard my name, and i
trudged through another fallen city, broken eyes watching me as i passed
with a shopping cart of tinned pears, the weight of all their hunger tied around my ankles,
marching towards the end beneath a black and starless sky
i felt it, coming closer as i ran,
and crawled, and prayed, and walked. and walked. and walked. and walked. and
in january,
(before i began to fear the human silhouette
and you started holding my hand to keep you sane,)
we drove nowhere on the highway at dusk,
headlights illuminating the obsidian road, moon trailing your truck,
a sacred ghost, omnipresent, neon signs blinking their greetings
for diners and motels and gas station stops, dissonant music laced with static
pouring out your dashboard radio, the two of us
in contented coexistence, wordless,
the world alive and well.
and in february,
in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the terminus began,
the planet shook for a final time and brought to pass
that which is written—o death,
where is thy sting? o grave,
where is thy victory? the dead shall be raised
incorruptible, and us?
we shall be changed

Detective in the parlor room
asks who killed mr. body?
Corpse cools,
questions asked,
tense stares,
fingers pointed,
clues counted,
truth found,
justice served,
just kidding.

It was the detective,
in the open,
with his bare hands,

and everybody saw him do it.

Suppose it starts
with wildfire;
lightning on
your driest trees
or once-loved campsites
left neglected, or kindling
that you'll never see--
it all burns just the same.

Suppose it starts
with wildfire;
flames beget
a blood orange sky
and magma pits
beside black trees,
and all your kindest woodland creatures
hurt and hide and crawl away--
but they burn all the same.

Suppose it starts
with wildfire;
see your landscape
on the hill, sickly scorched
with trees rail thin,
stark beside lush greenery,
almost lovely in how clear
the story of the suffering feels,
and burning's just the same.

So what if it starts
with wildfire?
There's no need
for water, seeds,
when warmth still crackles
in the wood and
you have pain and gasoline;
light the match and you will see--
it still burns just the same.