A Line Drawing Of A Thin Man

It's weird, walking around
a combination of acquisitions
tucked in shallow breaths
next to the swollen mid-century
      - modern in the past -
         - tense in the gut -
           blue in the face.

stolen from a vat of ephemeral sound
echoing off candy wrappers,
          stuck in cobwebs,
 gaskets and cork-brick bubbles.

They are the things I had to save!
I am here to serve nostalgic clothing
from another life, VHS tapes and
    the water stained-and-nailed
Farrah all teeth, in red tits
to a new nose and different pallets

scary in transition,
                faults and relief
 I bend to bring the box to the car,
    a line drawing of a thin man

Twice, Two Dead Birds Now

Twice, two dead birds now
found fallen
outside two homes I carry
the older pair to a shrine
shoe the chicks to the yard
alongside three live bullets George found
in the Detroit diamond mines.

"... clear omens" I ponder
rolling pennies from a jar in an early June
calico wind questioning
the answer being something hard for a child to understand.
"... no, you can't come with me."





Children are future
kids are the worst, gimmie the birds and their wings
... shrieking on and on and ...
onto blighted neighborhoods
out to
succumbed silence
and drawn down power lines

"... and the way they smell!"
Hot.
unrefined, like
the hour before the golden hour.
In a flat land comin from the Valley City





house haunting in Detroit
passing a cemetery
pressing two dead baby birds
 - hair not yet feathered -
"just what the hell you think you're doing near a foreign river?!"

bowing to new horizons,
or trying to.

Acidmind; un céleri

craned unnaturally, finally
relaxing my neck
now understanding,
the spread like black-brown blotches
of last week's spent coffee grounds
staring the snowmelt,

I'll probably always chop celery wrong.

Blades of Glass

Contemplating the blade of grass
grown and growing,
sssSprouted neatly        
-pressed as
glass through uncareful fingertips-
into last years nerves
with patient indifference, endurance
beyond determination, a walnut left unturned
among clumps of green and growing bound
             ... and kissed, she tells me,
by that same strange-perfumed air blown from some great place
that now leaves something of herself on me.

And in this way we've given ourselves to eachother,
& also to the murmuration of starling
grazing mad anarchy, through blades of grass
     ... and something as aimless as
linear time, or,
the spring-fit giggles of,
teenage girls-     still bound
memories flooding and swelling at the scent of those.
first. few. puffs,
acrid.
(or soggy winter acorns seen as such)

to be in it... and to know it,

at the first sight of hyacinths, daffodils
... a man, woman and dog
- all distinctly American,
but the dog-
binging on sun like everything else,
unaware or distracted
- the birds punctuate invisible through all -
and her heat needs me to feel it.

in spring, we are.