The Grand Lost Harvest

Lo and behold dreaming myself blue and dead inside the belly of my own whale. The intense sweat of a nightmare held up on yield signs, skeletal remains, jailers. That credibility has worn itself down into the timid pink of gums, bursting at the seams with its own carelessness. It was the empty pill bottle on the front stairs that caught my attention. I saw that the cap had been removed and it was empty, laying there the tone of an ugly crayon. Today will be too cheap to stand on. Today the lions hidden behind the chain-link fences in this neighborhood will finally swallow me whole and speak of it later to the newspapers.

FIRST POEM WRITTEN DIRECTLY TO MY MOTHER, RIGHT BEFORE MOTHER'S DAY

"Don't set out to become a cosmic
lesion upon your own damned life. Be more than you could have possibly expected."

Without you, I never would have known this.

The levitation that bestows a doubt, slot-stanced foolish there: Deliberate in heaving
on my sorry crib. A hereafter stitched into green windowcloth, my tongues intend to choose
offal in serenity. Brassia beating smoke all throughout a greenhouse. The nodosa extinguished
with absurd brevity. A garden you helped to form inside of me: the garden that cannot help but grow.
I heard Hendrix beat Dylan on "All Along The Watchtower" steamed off cat-piss with Brooksie in extraordinary poker light, leaving enough
to learn I was only 12. Stalled a climbed tree with my belly a wobble or stutter short. I catch of each branch. I am here for the interview. I am hoping to get the job.
My muscles bend quite the same as your own. I have celebrated your birthdays. I would loan you my scissors.


While there is a beg your pardon or a plea,
a take-me-out-of-this-before-I-begin-to-pop,
at least I didn't have to wear leg braces or teeth braces and you had no Autistic children.


Of the mother twice aware I can only shame myself in saying: I did not set out to become another cadaver on a cooling board.
I did not set out to become a cylinder spacing myself between.
Illegitimate in ways I have not been, I see myself facing inward.
There is a day for us. Gold will become of dirt.
The shores are staying apart from the sands. And so I salute your arms,
the pieces of you that can still hold onto a liver, lungs, spleen. Into life is enough to say thank you,
a short newspaper clipping of resolve. A gift ten times any other.
My unassuming "I love you" and an "Each day is your day."

Her Endless Urea

The boy dreams in the way most people shoot guns or ride in cars silently on their way to dentist's appointments, a lost gamble look in their eye. He dreams of suffocating a man made entirely of copper. He commits the murder using one of the pillows from his bedroom. He muffles the copper man's last cries outside of his own bedroom, places the pillow onto a silver altar two feet to the left of his mother's door, turns around and knocks at the center of the door four times. "I'm finished, Mom!" He is proud of himself, his cheeks are warm and a trace of sweat is developing above his eyebrows. "Come in," his mother calls from within. Inside the walls are copper, the bedsheets are copper, his mother turning into some sort of statue. She is coated in algae and her tongue wags on the outskirts of her lips. "I'm so thirsty," she whines. She has evacuated her bladder, a wide snake running from her belly-button down into the mattress. He pictures a bedpan two feet below her, a single lily planted in its center, dead or dying from her endless urea. It is warm outside - the laundry will get damp on the line with this sort of humidity. "Jesus," he thinks, "my underwear will be wet." She stares at him. The entire scene is grotesque. He is terrified. He grows up to be a mediocre scientist with one son of his own. His son grows up to be a janitor. Our dreamer eventually hangs himself after his wife leaves him. For now, however, he's just a little boy, dreaming violently.

THAT I BUILT A CATAPULT

My bicycle had been stolen & I still hadn't told
my father (the one who gave it to me).
My glasses were partially devoured by my dog (Cricket), and,
oh - I guess this was nearly a year ago.

This was the brown carpet time.

Fogged windows in July. Plant food and soil.

Grandma raised carrion in this house after Papa fell
dead under the pear tree, midway through a delicate piss.
I would have loved to be there, to let him die
away with me nearby. I was out trying to locate my bicycle.
After his death even Grandma's oldest friends said she wasn't the same.
Her eyeballs fit differently into her head and her hands changed
in tone and complexity, sprouting four new fingers.

Flesh in bleach, Bible slow-boiled.
Paper made of bread, water, and salt.

I'm confusing myself. Back to my grandmother's house.

We lived in the ceiling:
We stayed asleep indefinitely, laughing
desperate villages into tinder, to catch and to burn.
To make kindling of a century.
This way we couldn't be caught unaware of those who
fell dead and dumb where we lay naked.
This way we wouldn't be the sissies without
revolvers or breaths left to take.
This way we were more awkward than those
before us, sang lighter, stood less often.

Shaved our pencils into novels.

Slaved over hot tempers.

We sucked out murder and marrow,
sharpened our teeth as if in a fever.

Grandmother never noticed,
busy hiding my bicycle on a different
planet each day.