No town homes in my hometown
We throw up and we throw down
Drinks pour up, tears pour down
No outlet in this port town

Glass crumbs and shards
elephant-skinned sidewalks smeared with tomato paste
the streets remember
potato-tipped death machines
starchy falsetto bullets
the cracking
window
skull
smushy hamburger meat brain
meet bullet—meet steering wheel—meet
                                ster
e
                     ­                                                 o

my little brother stays in a shelter
on American and California
where babies
sit themselves
change
is a dollar short
and DST
stands for daylight shootings time

Grandfather time
please stroke your shredded wheat goatee just a little longer
postpone apocalyptic
soon the children will hop skotch on chalked body silhouettes
and jumprope with bungie cord intestines

But not him
my little commando
he will find a way out
depart from home plate
three strikes carved on a flaming chariot
soaring through the sky like barbasol jet streams
the great
                                                           ­          escape

Each pad sinks deeper into the soft
smushy, slush that was once hard like
Oak paneling in an old farm house.
The snow melts into calm reflecting pools
but constant spring is not a blessing
to the pink skin underpainting
of the great white bear.

He is not in a gold rush,
or a hurry, but he cannot swim forever.
The rising tides will bring the whales
closer, and only leave oil
and Caribou behind.

What shoes should you wear
when the ice goes renegade
and leaves you all but stranded
on a liquid isle?
Polar bears do not dock their boats
in Bernard Harbor,

so check your snow shoes
at the door and be prepared
for pirates. For when deer
jump eight feet into
pools, predators
should still know how to hunt.

Drink dead moths darling, in smushy twilight. There's its grave in our closet against the milky Red sky. Dreams of a young man in a splinter of Night, submits his shadows for reasons, some Sell their dues for new lives. Incredible yawns Child- is your hero a leaf or the tree? Is it a Haunting First Nation People omitted by Sulking owls for breezes. Yore the mountains Can't long now, helter skelter near or afar, some Sell their poisons, others chisel their bark. And the hide is entrenched now, it's nearly six in the dawn, where the white women wake to the Weeping hearts read in palms. If the desert Should call us, back to roots that won't grow, Take your devils and walk with me in a plastic Flower grove. Wolves and a memory, calls for Many too late, sorrow switches the time stamp Where forever we played, and tonight no one Watches, tonight we the buffalo cry, and some Chase silver-dollars for the truth in their time. In their time, in their time. Someone far far away. Lest our treasures grow weary, as we forget how we played, some sunny day. Some winter day, far far away. Farther and farther from the things we once slayed.