as honeysuckle grows tight on the fence & the scent of jasmine burns in my nose i can hear a child's laughter on the hills & watch your cheeks burn hotter than the sun when you tell me about your **** addict mother
how she lived in the econo-lodge dumpster for a while painting cryptic symbols & mountain landscapes on the outside walls still wearing the unsteady boots she's had since her life in colorado but she was scared of someone checking in it while she slept so she didn't sleep instead she conversed with the wimpering wind & used the toy telescope she stole from your baby brother to sing to the stars so she didn't feel so ******* alone
last summer you say she camped in the graveyard behind the methodist church in town & spray-painted the headstones as they climbed up the hill together because she harbors too much pride to be just another tweaker with her hand out
she's on guard against wickedness at all times & no longer sells her love to method-acting men who don't love her at all but she doesn't wear ******* anymore either because her last pair were so soiled with *** she burnt them in effigy on their last night of action
you say you miss her & wish she'd get sober but she's never been sober & that's why your brother was born with a stutter
she has warrants for her arrest in two counties & surrounds herself with withering flowers because she feels dead inside already when she sinks her face into the stem of the bulb & inhales she thinks she is the one thing in the galaxy god doesn't have his finger in her stomach churns with hunger flies hover around her & light on her big as black crows resting on a dead tree
you say you haven't heard about her in going on a month & ask me if i think she's still alive i say i saw her just last week i was a pensive beetle perched on the wainscoating she was stumbling out of a parked car at dawn to take a wilderness **** down by the river
her smile is no longer a pretty thing i noticed as she crouched to release the stream of early morning maple syrup ***** knocking on the biological door she said she's slept in her bedroom-car so many consecutive nights that she distrusts houses says she's scared of walls & ****** outside so many mornings after that she's terrified of bathrooms claims an allergy to porcelain she even feigns an aversion to trains but we've all seen the tracks on her arms & the pits in her cheeks like she sleeps draped across the railroad at night tempting the cycloptic executioner
but she doesn't sleep at all & she doesn't dream of you or your brothers or of the days when she lived in a house her tattoos have all become crude wax crayon depictions of sunflower blossoms needle drags & match strikes she wraps & braids her hair with gnarled fingers & bottle caps she finds on the riverbank she bathes in hysteria at midnight & washes her swollen eyelids each morning with dew she fights paranoia with the ghosts in her throat & stupor with stones from the dark bottom of the river she is a frail bag of muscular potential living in a finger-painted 97 pontiac sunfire with a splintered patchwork windshield & she is never coming back to love you