We are all nailed to posts in the fields of our lives
And some of us sway back and forth in the wind
Like the chimes grandmother made from old knives

We search with doubting eyes for the perfect wives
Exes with whom you never thought your love would end
We are all nailed to posts in the fields of our lives

Our exit strategy involves smoke grenades and swan dives
The clapping of our black shoed feet a drum to mend
Like the chimes grandmother made from old knives

We Stuff our chests with filling paper derives
Our hollowed bodies suffer no strength to send
We are all nailed to posts in the fields of our lives

Scaring crows that steal the fabric of our lies
Clawed hands and teeth and fingers we cannot bend
Like the chimes grandmother made from old knives

Don your pumpkin head and haunt the field of your lives
Until you have no more joy or fear or sorrow left to lend
We are all nailed to posts in the fields of our lives
Like the chimes grandmother made from old knives

Toy soldiers drip from my brother’s fingers while he sleeps,
We carry memories under our fingernails like courtiers to the dead,
But we’ll all wear that plumage on our shoulders like lions

One day.

But we fold the edges of our tombs together and set them in the earth
Like fences, to keep the wolves out,
Or a blanket to sleep under.

We all wear our father’s bones around our neck,
The way my brother does,
While the earth is orchestrated above us,
Cemetery like a stage,
Biding time to whisper,
Are we alive or just lying?

Do we wander or  
Do we race along like wind up cars,
The way my brother does,
On the road to awe.

The old man is made of the hearts of dead spiders from the woodshed
I am my father’s matador
A small spark against a great fire
Showed me you can build a house from broken glass
Better swallow ashes to stay warm
Spiders crawl up my arms and throat
From the firewood in my hands
We rub mud on our faces to see each other better
I write FATHER on his forehead with my finger
He writes SUNRISE between my eyes
I cling to memories from beneath my fingernails
Like closet frozen marionettes
Gun shots crawl out of his jaws at night
And grow like fruit at the end of his fingers
I pick them and leave them on the breakfast table
He keeps fish hooks between my toes so
He can pull me up by the line
But I’m still watching the sunrise from his shoulders
I know he’s made of rain
When he pours me a bath from his bones
A child might play in.

I am five years old
And my mother is dead
Or she might be, I’m not too sure
I am sure I’m in the closet
The one near my parents’ room
Filled with my father’s jackets and spare towels
Bubbling mold, silver dollars falling from my father’s pockets
Rain on one of my mother’s china dolls
Coat of dust, ash, an undertow
Her hands are like white powder
Looking glass, tornadoes of simple blue
Cat’s eyes I’ve won from my dead mother
She was a girl once
With flowers on her dress
Now she haunts this closet
And the things I’ve lost with no regard
They litter this empty room
I’m holding her next to me in the dark
Together in the belly of the whale
She tugs on one of the woolen sleeves
Of my father’s jacket
With her lacey white hands
She wipes the blood from my face
And the breath of escape my mother gave
As I held her for the last time

Take a right at the light that hangs low
On the street with the run down churches
Like a row of coffin womb-breakers
Then you drive on the road that leads through
The empty town in the cold of the north
Where the snow falls like bubbles from the dead
Then dig holes at the end of the road
When you find dried white bones near the house
That is still and is white you will know
You have found where I lived when I died.

This city is haunted
And the dead roll snowmen by streetlight
Holding their translucent hands over the bulbs
When they hear the living cars chug through

Here, music plays to itself
Jackaling the wind
Holding wolves by the ears
The dead give their sculptures
Strawberries for *******

The living laugh and point
To the shoe tree
The dead have made with old sneakers
Their children climb and live in
At night

Under this tree
Joining them in the frozen mud
Turn to ice
We travel on the wind more easily that way
Splitting our bones
Like vultures
This city sleeps
In flames

I hang my failures
Like ***** sneakers from
An old oak tree
In someone else's yard

I sneak in around two in the morning
Just when the shouting stops
And the man leaves the second story room
With the pink walls

Sometimes when I am sneaking away
I can hear her crying
And I hang another failure on the tree
For safekeeping