Old men fascinated by teen *****
and the hues harnessed by high school hips,
I ask you to look at something corrupted:
yourself, this town, this world.

The town's lumber supplier has died
and daughters fight over dollars.

Greasy haired women, wearing denim,
smoking menthols and bruised with cheap make-up,
stand on fractured sidewalks.

I walk, wearing a Native American-ized fleece,
the Chippewa crush their cigarettes
and blink like lizards at me
because I wear bastardization,
but wash it.

Half the town smokes,
and if you ask the pastor,
the whole town smokes
because everyone's going to hell.


All the girls read John Green
and flip the pages because it's a cheaper escape than a bus ticket.

Plato said that everything changes
and nothing stands still;
these people will suffer,
their bodies will break down,
and they will die --
but what never changes is their hope
in eventual death.

What cannot change is my hope
in something more.

We melt like aborted McDonald's ice,
on top of a blistering, gum-stamped lot,
under the sour heat of the Sun.

I'm boy wonder and you're, 'Boy, how is he alone?'

Olive-skinned cardigan, pearl pores.
Hair like ink and a jaw-line sharp enough to cut an umbilical cord.

Vintage Nikes come to a point,
the swoosh as red as the cherry at the end of your cigarette.

I watch you smoke and choke,
before calling phantoms over.
It begins like October:
The leaves fall, like your friends steps,
the bronze sweeps the air,
like the curls of their smiles,
the air is silent,
like your words as they condense and drop into the mouth of a tanned canyon.

What could they ever do to conquer you,
my dear, fantastic frenzy?