I know about the night you drank all of that beer under the moon
And that people were singing or bleeding or something,
But you had a fist full of blonde hair and a bear cub in your lap
So you didn't notice anyway

I know how nothing can come between you and the animal secrets,
But everything is and will always be blood, ***, and a very high fever
Freeze dried and cracking, your hands run empty in the drunken court room
It's happening again, but this time - numb

What if Death is not a reunion, a homecoming of prodigal children
But rather -
Terrifying
****-all
Death

Blackness and hollow silence
Flesh and the lack thereof
Not quite kitchen tables

And really, how softly can you kiss someone without killing them
Or watching their eyes roll out of their heads

We all imagine Sylvia in a different way
Burning her captor's notes and coats and handwritten books in the backyard
Or
Beneath the house where she was revived by dirt and coal and a lesser god's spite
Or
Nine years old at a funeral band jam for the not so **** father man

Not love, but pitchers of honey
Not ***, but The Death of the Clock
Not marriage, but midnight's blood
Not children, but oven obsessions - adulterous predecessors

This is the funeral dress that was stapled into my shoulders
And crucified
On the huge hill cross, where clowns once emerged from cotton smog -
Where bricks smashed foreheads, and we fingerpainted the sidewalk with each other's unruly blood
Where the Summer sleeps off a failed suicide attempt
Two years ago you put a hole in my head
But this is not the hole in my head (present and aching)
This is the black funeral dress I stapled into my own shoulders
The one that was worn too many days too soon
We are all infinitely bound between her death and a single desire for a boy with destructive ghosts living beneath his fingernails

I keep telling strangers about the way your jaw shakes after midnight
I keep telling strangers about the night I scattered glass shards in between my box spring mattress and the trundle bed
I keep telling strangers about your porcelain knuckles - the way you kiss each one individually before punching me in the throat
There's a rage inside my head
Disease spreads like forrest fire and floral secrets
Dead girls dance in October, rest in November
Goodnight

And now I await cosmic punishment
For kissing a boy on All Hallow's Eve

Ghost Ann created her own religion
Where she is free to haunt in the early parts of November
Whiskey fills church corridors and drowns the congregation
Phantoms throw screams through her mind at night
Awaiting abolition

Ghost Ann carries apparitions of past lives
In her translucent, skeletal hands
She's keeping me awake
As I try to move past a woodland infatuation
By way of liquor, herbs, and parking lot graves

Ghost Ann floats above us as we curse ourselves for nothing more than a warm body to spend the night with
The rafters fill with spirit friends and tragic cases of déjà vu
It's been a year today, rings of flowers round his eyes
The All-Knowing knows
And the haunting keeps us young

Last Friday night was one for the books
All of the misplaced soul mates
Found their way home from college confines
We cried in the face of Iron
And drank victory Wine as a welcome to an amber Autumn morning
He filled his front pocket
With our smoked out cigarettes  

Caramel hops in the spilled beer
Glued our voices together
Remembering
Past deaths and all those other kids who left
Are we the survivors?
Finally free to laugh among our best friends
Ink is stabbed into our aging skin
To place a memory on this night
To place a memory in the shape of our swaying bodies
To place a memory in our minds of orange bottle caps and a love stretched too far across the map

There are few things
That can exist outside
Of the Summer

We used up the other seasons too quickly
We smoked the whole pack