Many bushes

By the time I get to Vegas

Silk  and sulk     and crows   hugging the succulents   like the white kids in the back of the bus  on the way reciting Dr. Dre’s Song of Innocence     with us budging and crushing the black Klimt    our lovers in a pool of blood and cheetos salt    and hot wanting to know more I am becoming more   a gambler a door of flutes and navy defectors and Gustav I  can taste the gold and mauve idea today I can scalp  our wu-tang tickets and give the proceeds to facebook in exchange   for my name back flush with the needles of lean and limb/black    do you remember the day he smashed the butterfly?

In a landscape

The bruised heat of that radiance kept  coming even as I collapsed into a den of wet logs  and started talking to myself about where to stab the belly  of an animal you plan to eat, raw and with what metal lost in  scoffing/wood. Survival was so funny and incantatory as we ate venison under  the carburetor from the movie abrasively tender gasoline bland as a good  dream we wake up biting the ice in the trunk and slapping the imaginary  gnats of prophecy I love the man stuffed in the deer with a pet Nadine    blunt in the half gallop of spring lunches when the light rides them down the crying tongue       because he is ready as a child for the vocabulary of this swelling instant of instinct    and Rodney rising to the surface of the yard pool and leaning there seductively impossible to  rescue was the other sedative the arms begin to circle the body like prayer beads, palms meeting  in the center near the curtain call the comfortable hum of the dial tone at the end of an emergency  is where we enter dense and hollow-green agreement to establish ourselves in a kingdom that doesn’t exist   yet

Eurydice, Run

Just like Jesus    I am a time machine     I go away I come back     they won’t let me watch things  die and the spy in the spine     a hearse of sense and rumors a bundle     of all that’s possible in a body tied to  its back with the babble of hypocrites      and dirty rivers if you fall asleep in yellow    and awake in a bed of cotton wool with a star of  nails where your heart should go and the cosmetics of     wartime blood lipping wax in a factory basement attached to a  slab of maple you do not have to love that man to slice his  lips and scream what divination turned into demon by ignoring   you alone can remember and revert to god I give the woven   whisper of a kid to her first brown doll mounted to a branch of     song she sings reasons   that fear     our feelings…. To   the dice   in the tree    she is singing   as the torches come   up throbbing and grinning      a crimson minnow in her last est  lap

Prayer

Let  me be   unethical     let me joke with demons who fear themselves  sanctified let the inflection of dread   be sublimated by the twin keys beside   it thrill and readiness and in the   crook of Monk’s smile let innocence decay and    renew of the oval of value brooding its love       of suffering Let me disrupt you and myself everyday     remaining so playful you can’t stand me and can’t look away     let me see the photo again of Naomi as a man and Naima no  lyrics and dad’s mug shot so guiltless and the sambo molasses blackstrap      had all the nerve of a tan line hailing that taxi as it weaves by in  steepest weather it’s not androgyny she’s channeling in the fedora and studded pinkie    ring white suit on blue it’s more like rebirth the most feminine thing I’ve ever  seen this shrugging gangster a woman returning to herself as her very own king smuggled     back into the spotlight and with such stillness the moment shivers let me be cold let  me be blur let me distress them let me break the story into every secret my eyes can carry        and drive by chariot card falling out of my loose pocket stoic erotic obnoxious let me be ma   a fa backwards and the awe fat lips keeping their song for the private ceremony and the passing of candles   through any storm let me deliver the fatal blow like a baby over kissed at her christening let me spread my gorgeous limbs     and scream

Everything should be fun

The Buffalo Fall / Up Jumped Spring

He called them slave   shoes made of canvass rubber  and lazy days husking gravel  down the hillside, hugging the foot  like a bandage hip as a runaway    runway tar and martyr way ethical disaster  capitalism he lept into the dim emerald chasm while   his three friends looked on clapping as though he   was performing despair accomplishing everything saving    their lives naming the tribe of outsiders goodbye, slave  / hello, black horse, black rider how rare the covered feet diving    into bramble threshold mark the wheels of a wry intentional smile impaled  by those green arrows how confident he was plunging into land as it   became ocean and he got the part in Jaws lost in the belly where    he talked to the japanese street meat about side-eye and wide display case corpses of salmon and eel clamoring for buyers       a cage of wombs he thought the cliff a footprint that if followed would lead him to the tropic of    revenge and leather leather and night nurse vengeance and vaca loca barcelona and eventually lunch lynch    had a hunch about a tree had an eatingest winter leather and long neck tablecloth and feast of bosses a piece in each  pocket a law to each glove no accidental Toms in the occident up the mountain down the river

tell   me we’re    so free we  hunt for leisure    tell me we’re so  gone we thank the jumping   kill