You ain’t no butterfly.
Forget them wings.
Ain’t nothing but worksore,
blister and things.

Ain’t nothing but cane -
we ain’t nothing but cane.
Come out that cocoon, baby,
come stand in the rain.

Come out from the womb.
Come down from the bed.
That Sickleman needs us
in the barrow instead.

It’s fifteen below
And a fat buck lurches,
Spindle legged, four pointed,
And cardinal -
Fishtail and brake.

I don’t trust this road.
I don’t trust these tires.
I don’t trust these ditches,
Smoothed and driven with snow.

I’m a six-layered pig at the wheel -
Unsleek unchic -
But I’m warm, **** I’m warm,
And the road slides like pinstripe
On white gabardine.

And the waning moon,
The waning moon,
Low in the rise,
Gibbous and garish,
Scabbing a cloud,
Spills the whole thing blue.

I don’t trust the red eyes of mailboxes,
Always willing to dive the grill.
I don’t trust the farmer
That lives on the hill,
Behind the blue spruce line,
Behind the blue flickered window,
Counting on futures,
Clumsy as mittens,
Still as the finger drift
Thudding the glide
Like dull scissors
Snagged in gridded giftwrap guides.

I still taste the coffee
Down under the tar.

I trust my smokes.
Yes, I trust my smokes.
I trust my hat. I trust my boots.
I trust I’ll never find my roots.
I trust the jumpers, there in the trunk.
I trust every single roadkill thunk.
I trust every knuckled ill-advised ride
To tell me yes, oh yes, I'm alive, I’m alive.

She chucked herself from the library,
Five stories blind and hung briefly.
I heard it from a friend.
                                    Laura’s dead.
She found three dead boys,
Hung from cable
                                    and that broke her,
He said.

We threw empty sixteens
From the roof where we gathered,
Spoke each a shattered dream
rushed upon the pavement,
One,
Upon another.
The sidewalk gleamed
In all the shards of Laura,
Green and Amber, Blue and Clear,
And ever farther than the eyes of her,
Splashed out in every blink night town,
In every flick night river where
Everybody drowns.

Come, O Love for down the vale,
Where moonlight frocks the lovers’ tale,
Where moonlight mulls the staves of trees
And shreds the fuschia from the leaves.

Come, O Love for down the vale,
Where cleave and stumble long prevail,
And woolen grass reveals the press
Of all that slept there shorn of dress.

Come down the vale for it is known
The miller’s grain was never grown
Here below long-shadowed stone.
Come, O Love, and come alone.

Put down your labor’s winnowed sheaf.
Lay down in heaven’s gentle brief.

Whiteout on 250,
shallow shouldered,
deep ditched,
though straight as dope
and piped icing.
The wind knows the way
but canters,
canters and drags
this crate south,
south into the beams
of some some other
sad **** bent to the clock
and near death for a dime,
for a mortgage,
and some other
******* adherence.

To give us naught but bleak display,
To say, to say,
Love has never tethered moon
That way,
That heather never blooms but brays
To drop the stars in sage and grays.

And in this flash hewn verdance sent,
Aghast the sea in violet vent,
Abhors the ******-singed regret,
This skirmish lost though never met.

And where upon a furrowed leaf,
The miner enters as a thief,
To take the blood but not belief,
Was not the time to span a grief?

But given naught but bleak display,
That tethered moon has gone astray,
And pulls not tide but skin away,
To slink beyond a son and pray.

It is the peeling that breaks me.
It is the skin once a thin bastion
against dirt, against mandible,
against the boring small things
that blister the flesh, brown the pulp.

And as I slide a blade into the onion,
wincing in the sting of sulphur,
these fumes of disdain, it yields,
again and again, to the rocking steel,
humming unto the butter and pan.

But it's the peeling that breaks me.
Thin papers loose as sunburn,
loose as ribbon unwound
from the core, loose as young men
bound for the shore, loose as a living,
a living no more.