Coffee grounds and awful sounds of parental bones breaking
Rental cars picking up stars in the making
Meanwhile the backyard has new knives for grass
It punctures my bare feet
And soccer balls hissing gas
The night that the winds rose abruptly and broke the fence
The unctuous world acquired a puncturing consequence
We slammed the storm windows from inside the bed
And I got so frightened when you slammed into me and said
On the smooth tar behind our unused local laundromat
A one-gallon plastic jug of 2% milk that
Slipped out of somebody's hand on a shortcut
Or maybe they threw it just to possibly see what
White cream expiring on a black backdrop can be
Sticky and violent or suggestively sexy
Or blessed and infested with the creatures of the heat wave
Stuck in the muck where our heaven had its street paved
But it feels different this time around
The sunburned bodies where I walk through the town
Way upstate where I stated my homage
To each organism that tasted the knowledge
Of dying ecstatically each time we come
Down to the river where I pierced my thumb
On the sharp gills of the perch I was holding
When all of the thrills of the search were unfolding
For me
The night that you proudly said you were immortal
And I wondered out loud how that would be an advantage
I said I thought death might be a merciful portal
To filter the holiness that we pilfered from the wreckage
Of coffee grounds and awful sounds of parental bones breaking
Rental cars dropping off stars for the taking
Meanwhile the lazy love we both outgrew
Is reincarnated as a girl who tastes nothing like you
You look different this time around
Is your middle name Catherine now?
Is your mother asleep in the garden?
Is your father still weeping or hardened?
And where is your bedroom that I'm made to memorize
Where all the red fumes of morning will vaporize
Where all the angels of sweetness were murdered
Where the holy completeness of that song was murmured
By me?
I feel different this time around
I'm not so ignorant to what I've found
Deep in the crease of the least of my brothers