Deer pilfer a red nut under a re-flip reed.

Obsidian hawks
hang from lamp posts,
lining the Gothic
architecture of our hearts,

the shadows,
turning me yellowish
gray, leak out
life
in the strangest way.
The
silhouettes sway
and moan, listening
to the wind whisper
through their
hair, the stories
of dreams
being embalmed.

These lanterns want
to keep me awake,
longing in the retro-
red, belonging
to the sweet,
the concrete dead.

Bright star,
you look
like garbage
to me.
And these sickle
souls bleed
on everything
in between,
blue moons,
left with traces
of where their halos
used to be,
a halogen lamp
reverie.

Obsidian hawks
mark the page
where the ink
met the river
and decided to
run off,
saving room
for prayer,
or maybe another
layer of meaning,
something,
at least
seemingly true;
I wouldn't know,
but, vultures they say.

Detachment doesn't follow from distance
and so for a few cents a minute
we send our sentiments half way around
the world. Hurling hellos,
goodbyes, in dialects that
don't yet exist.

We find utility in comfort
and comfort in utility,
all the musicians
have delusions,
after double heart
triggered reality tryst,
they split,
making two languages
out of it.

The leaves fall in September, during the festivals. They dissipate, reintegrate into vivid little vespers that bob and levitate on gusts of wind that leave one bristling. The ferris wheel looks like an electric celestial ferry, set ablaze and bound for distant dimensions, man with mutated mohawk green, eyes wretched, livid and obscene, was the maniacal who manned it. Glow stick ghouls, with faces smeared americana snow cone red and blue haunt the parking lot, purple precipitate that hisses as it hits the pavement the product of their incessant chanting, pulling fuzz-lined warmth from my marrow. Under the stadium lights, women tighten their scarves as tiny, cerulean seahorses shimmer and dance with the ebb and flow of their jewel studded breath, retreating, giggling like immortal birds fallen from the nest.
Love is paper mache; a pop culture artifact. Like a stuffed hare that seems to have lost its ability to come to life after one loses their virginity. It has long legs and keen ears. It's very fast and would be quite handsome as well if it wasn't so **** helpless. It has been bred into the fibers of contact, the filter we set on lust, the way recycled cans make castles on lily pads and dead skin makes dust. We are swirling around in its whirlpool, if it wasn't drowning us we would be dead by now, same goes for the mad, mangy men who will count their teeth with their dimes and pick at their scabs, finger their sores, the retired professor who was too clever to have ever been faithful, the mockingbird that sings on my windowsill every morning in French, the mailmen and the dogs who bark at them in Quebec. An obsessive complex affords one the privilege of straightening the line, counting in time and putting the rabbit en route.
If it is the case that detachment follows from distance then I am one cactus length away (average, or medium sized cactus of course) from destroying the moon's mezzanine, housing all of the dreams behind ethereal, Egyptian, colored crystal that a pagan god stole from a black hole, never intended for you or me.

It's been one boring, restless, ***** of a drive through this sunken state. I click the windshield wipers off as they smear verdigris across my polarized vision, the FM stereo crackles and hisses in dissonance
with moaning, squealing brakes. My four cylinder fishtails ever so slightly as tattered tires nick and skid through puddles of *** the cumulus left behind after ******* the sun, which is crying now as it falls to sleep. Driving mechanically, I let my thoughts wander as I meander along I-4.

*You and I, we've never known what it means to perfect our chapters, to get into each little cavity, or between two immaculate ribs. We'd like to simplify all of that to one line, to reduce the dimensions rather than revel in their story. To see with six eyes or live as a termite within the wood grain is really all the same. But you know, we haven't finished yet simply because we are not finished yet. Some of us yet insist they hold on to the rotting shreds of a dying breed, a generation gone gangrene, their fingers in their feces.

But we know how we want it to be. Humanity will be different for you kids, we promise.

Rigid, with tears trickling down my spinal column
and escaping any other way they could,
crushed up chrysanthemums in my hands,
without moving a muscle, running away
any other way that I could.

One meaningful conversation
with my father in my whole life,
it was after I drank half a bottle of gin
one night in Cincinnati.

He raised me the best he could.

Once, in a dream, I ordered a ****** mary
and now I wonder if that means anything.

If it means anything good.