sun sallies

I am a mesa child,

and a mountain mama.

Boxelder Creek keeps

Christian constance

on my mind, 80 exits

away from fading

into faceless states

of white emotion.

Summer drowns me

humidly—lost, to

one great sweeping,

Irene pulled out all

the filth—filtered it

into the vacuum

of the upper atmosphere-

outer-space limits,

of skinny one-town horses

swishing their tails

blithely, in the back-

side of my mind,

still tracing mythic

California coastline cliffs,

as New Mexico mystics

steam chug water,

chill me out, hidden in

the prickled shadows

that leave notes for me

on the bedside table:

lies about love and war,

and drinking,

leave me strangled good

in the oven, presses

on my thighs, mounting

Appalachia, quickly

switch-back murder blade

wiped clean on my jeans,

and tossed, mechanically

grease stained

to the grey wood floor,

has a tilt. It is

a bit crooked,

like gin. It leads gulls

to painless suicides

in an old war song,

softly distorted lovely

on the shortwave radio

head waves dig the grave

gold pot at the end.

ceilings

hushed macramé matriarchs 
meddle meticulously,

knotting delicate ecru chain mail menageries,

like wet cement paste, between bricks

that snicker, at the stop watch on the wall

when we call to say hello

and then hang up confused

and lonely at the back door locked automatically behind us

crying like a dog barking from echo puddle London

out to the country, and snowy roads

and brown trucks with no heat

make us say that we are giving up,

absolutely refuse, to move another step 
toward that marching army

of meth-yeti white cult delusions in Nebraska:

raging slop fest jester pests in my back pocket

make me want to masturbate rabidly in a prison cell

because that way, they’ll all stay away,

leave us to fidget widget mobile app for that

in the concrete corner,

frying red ants on the sidewalk 
with a mini magnifying glass,

and laughing hysterically maniacally mayhem madness,

echoing through the Towson parking garage

where someone gets murdered at least once a year:

last year it was an elderly guy, a Professor

got held up at knife point

and whatever happened, they ended up killing him,

so we park right next to the entrance,

mocking ourselves, must be in the front row

of the sticky movie theater

where normal people go to watch

Julia Roberts love herself, unabashed

red confidence blooming vulgarly

as an O’Keefe on Fort Meade,

Janis Joplin and her bush

on the blue rug of the white house oval office,

while Monica hides politely under the desk—

breach

I came to swallow the cold with my fingertips, trekking barefoot through the snow

in West Virginia, the peaks of cedars resting sweetly sung as moss peepers on the edge of season, the teetering tots of bees. We were only feeling out the path, never meaning to actually traverse its waters or wend its way into our wretched minds, the roll of rocks down Sideling Hill, the trill, the try, the will-you-say-goodbye.  Will you look for me in the springtime, or under Walt’s boot soles?  Will you find me when I have fallen to my lesser, or better instincts?  Pluck me from my cauldron of simmering sighs?  I whisper lies so that you may, or may not, fully hear what I have to say, because you don’t really care anyway; otherwise, you wouldn’t have thrown the blanket I made in the dog cage, the leftovers in the trashcan, the future-in-laws next door, the white walls, the valium, the vacuum hose sucking out spare pennies from under the couch. The coins clack through the spinning filter like batteries snapping into place between the spring and the plastic: the ever lasting magic of new technology and hybrid theology, the biology of bending to the will of another.  Our fathers are shaving off layers of my brain like soft wood on a rusted blade, gone and made a mockery of the old errand: the masking of meeting someone and making them think you are real, stealing splices of conversations from a humid bar, and slinging them precariously over my shoulder blades again, and I would love nothing more, than to rip off my shirt in front of all of these assholes…the thing about being an asshole is, that you don’t call yourself an asshole, take hold of what’s been left for you, what’s been told to you about, once upon a time, there was obedience, and fairness of hand, and slightness of jaw.  Failing to find a lark, to be heralded by angels on chariots, bullwhipping their oily horses into red lashes of puckering flesh, and nodding, as if to say, these truly are the last of days, the waves are here to say so long.

[untitled]

On Whipporwill Road,

I watched myself wither up,

my skin shrivel and pucker

like tomato in the dry sun:

my insides were tough

jerky, ready to be gnawed

and torn off by some gator,

who would suck and lick

his claws in satisfaction

one after another, to leave

my weathered and callous

bones on the rusty banks

of Lake Meredith, waiting,

wishing to be cast wind

blown to sacred dust

and carried away to

the Colorado Rockies,

the coldest night of sleep yet,

all cocooned in my blankets,

wiping my running nose

on my sheets and dreaming

wearily that maybe I'll

wake up with a set of wet

wings, spread them red-orange 

shimmer silver in the morning

sun crept silent over

the west bank mountains,

steaming the rocky men

awake in their boots

and becking me brick

up my britches and flutter

out warily, testing the air

for it's consistency:

can it carry me aloft? or

will I fall crashing into

some Granby pine? hear it

wince and whine the impact,

and find myself stuck

sap side of earwax

to its crying core trunk,

listen to its branches crack

and hiss wet into his fire

on the ground, prodding

the fat log left from the night

before, breathing, blowing

into the smoke coming

from its bottom smolder

and beg it re-fire its tomb

into my hollow womb,

a baked bourbon baby

all blank eyed and war

scared of wire and willing

to singe the soles

of our feet to a healthy

black brown buckwheat

mountain honey

and bristled black berries

all plucked precariously

from their twiggy branches,

the chance of me finding

a final chapter to my

filtering senescence

is unlikely as the possibility

that Hell exists in

the Christian sense,

along with purgatoried Heaven,

where we wait for washed up

loved ones on its hazy shore

of enchantment-come-dis-

enchantment, disillusioned

and dissolved all pearly

glass sand grain to molecular

nothing is everything

and if you're everywhere

you're nowhere on Earth

I've found--