In a hospital bed

You

Never cared much for poetry

And I

Care

For it and read

To sleeping you

All asleep in a hospital bed

Hoping my soft recitation

Seeps in, holds you like cloth,

Like I can not, have not

For a month

In a hospital bed

Greektown17

On Saturday nights it's all

Sirens and calamity

Two dead birds

Again

.

.

Pushing

Remnants of a house on VanDyke Street

Seasons first snow on new coal-

burned boards.

Sure, the winds blew in before

Now what's left assumes the other.

Collecting white in the carcass ribs

And on steps that don't go nowhere,

They go up two feet

To the remnants of a house on Van Dyke Street.

Oct.17

‘It's ok to go through droughts,

You tell yourself,

While getting older.’

-He tells himself

And feeling younger than he should.

Lermp Rompy

:A forest without trees

You without me

When life makes more sense than

It makes more sense backwards:

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.