​in the mornings of my days
with you, I am gloriously
normal. my head remains
connected to my body.
the colors all stay attached
to their respective things:
blue to sky. orange to orange
your skin is freckled brown
which is also of the earth.
we suspect even the long-
lost color of breath will any
day slink back through
the yard like an old cat.
I am waking to the smell
of toast and the crepuscular
hiss of the coffee maker.
light leaks into the world
through its windows and valves.
I will know what to do with my
arms and lips, a simple recipe
which never grows old even
as the cook does. we get tired
of our own reflection in water-pots
but the stainless steel soup ladle
will shine through an apocalypse.
I am remembering how
in an old life I jumped off
rooftops with daisies between
my teeth. the roads were
new and thrown down everywhere;
pedestrians were outlawed
outright. I dismantled things
efficiently and ate off
countertops. there wasn’t a plate
in the house. ‘okay,’ I said when
you asked, ‘but I’m not giving
up on my sadness.’ all the stars
in were listening and winking.
‘we don’t have to trade’
the world said. ‘there is a little house
for your sadness right here
in this house.’ meanwhile an
albatross was trying
to lift my head into the sun.
‘not yet,’ I said. ‘even the useless
parts are welcome here.
when we made our pact
years ago, there was no need
for the ground. but I have found
another way, bird, and at last
my toes are in agreement with
me.’

​dad, I understand the madness that drove you
out the door when I was four. I too was not
enough for the world with my face of smashed
lightbulbs and the way that doors fled from me
out in the fields. I could never run fast enough
to keep up; my knees lacked ambitions and the
greased doorknobs were hateful. they slammed
themselves to splinters in rage. is it any wonder
that the trees with their long, vertical tolerance
took me in and the silence made room for me
in the pit of its old green arm. that I found
stars more familiar than faces and in the
unravelling of my tongue it was like kissing a
desert. you would never be good enough for us
and knew it, dad. your motorcycle trail was a box
of horizons. your face was like a little sliver of the
moon, not the whole pie. don’t worry dad, I have
done well. have gone on to be an olympiad
stumbler. have shook hands with holes in the
ground. have climbed up pines and bedded down
fetally in the nests of eagles, dreaming off limits.
have breathed long and slow when the trains
arrived without holding my breath. have shown
mercy to all living things like you have. they say I
am the saint of baby birds and road-kill toads.
you would be proud, dad. when the buckshot stag
ribboned out its guts across my yard in the velvety
night, I did not call anyone for help. I too am useless
beyond a simple kindness, a shrugged sympathy.
no one practices that anymore, dad. the world has
taken out stock in Band Aid. no one would dare
watch the stag die now. hold its inhuman head
in their lap and stoke it like a strange infant.

​the prairie crocus burns
a hole in the late snow with
its lavender eye.
I am grown weary, covered
by words.
let me go, I said.
and they lugged my body
and a gallon of gas
up the oak-darkened hill
in the middle of April.

1.
unfuck the cockeye-hinged door
paint scabbed as an old birch
torso the house that people
forgot to live in the house only the
crude dead remember with their minds
of torn sheets, set the windows again wide
with light in which the curtains again shall
come to roost dovelike unannounced
and return the clatter of dishes at suppertime
the fork dropped to ting like a bell
the full stomach, the horseshoe over
the leaning sill righted so that it can run
on hooves, forever
2.
also unfuck the trees of which we
made pencils and toilet paper
with which to write and wipe away
or burned in a pyromaniacal binge
let the ash and splinters transmigrate
to heartwood, the old leaves sail
from the ground by gravity delinquent
to adorn branch tip delicately as bee-tongues
let each bough at last reach its final
wish, to snag a star in its trellises like
a dragonfly caught in hair
let the trees, the tall green sea of them
climb over this old earth like slow
contortionists and crush the metallurgy
of unreason comparatively as St John
was promised by a stern God but
altogether in a different way
3.
unfuck the bulleted schools
the red-bloomed chalkboards
resurrect the floor splattered
unintelligibly in strawberry milk
or if you will in brains (there are no good ways
to say certain things, drink your milk fellow
countrymen, eat your strawberries
by the pint), realign the awkwardly
scattered lunchboxes, let blood flow
back into the body’s deflated carton
let the students drift backwardly
into the orderly desks in measurable
rows with measurable limbs
and grades, let the yellow tape fall
from doorways and the alphabet
return to order: the pointy tent of the A
preceding the B of breasts
which contain hearts that in turn
necessitate the H and so forth
the Z at the end like a lightningrod
the O buffered in the middle
like a tender egg laid down in a safe sea
. . .but also, and for good measure, unfuck
the fucker who shot
for he is Most Fucked Of All, salvage his
square head from the barren shoals of
claustrophobic civilization, lift him
like a gull, give him a meadow, a kiss
he is deserving I say but if you do not
agree cast him like a match
into the orange eye of the sun
which, beyond madness, loves
everything it incinerates
even death.
4.
unfuck the catastrophic word
the devil-made slander that
ate at the table and stole
the butter knives sharpening
them in secret restrooms
wallpapered in Russian tabloids
and secondhand art, replete
and out of toilet paper
and while at it
unfuck the media-addled
mind, throttle jammed on serotonin
fattened to obesity on Likes and Friends
let the Void replace them with
the wholesale tenderness of nothing
and the silent sails of the night
which go nowhere and can’t be
seen even by the clairvoyant
let the mind empty like a syringe
and go hungry like a beggar
savant, door to door searching
for real bread and real water
eschewing saccharine and
styrofoam-like holy wafers
5.
and so on with such lists.
but let the dead pass on
uninterrupted and let the dying
do their due diligence
of dying and the sorrowful
their due diligence of tears
for though the sky may be
mended by the ozone needle
threaded in azure and hummingbirds
and the ravaged be made whole by
the vindicating light of repurposed
cathedrals, not everything should
be without suffering
old friend who comes to hug us
at midnight so that we dream
fitfully a litany of reversals
lost on the road of all restful
sleep