All the vegetation in the settled world is stirring 
I’m blurring into sun-burnt and heartbroken worrying
 About how the day took such a long time to die
 When it was reeking of women I once had on my side But now that I’ve found another smell to believe in
 I’m buzzing like hell just to hope I can breathe it
 And resurrect the simplistic calm in some eyes
 That are trying to find you or
 bury your nightmind
 And it will take
 time Oh your tongue and the twilight marina
 When so young and brave and still dreaming
 Getting to know you lash by dark lash
 The rooms where you sleep in
 The floors where you crash
 And gas-stations are pleasantly blowing
 Thunder rolls for dresses you’re wearing
 On a body so unknowing
 Of what that blowing’s for or preparing
 And patience is never affording When prettiness and sweetness are pouring
 Out from you and
 Onto me and Dampness of sweat is the sweetest recording
 And you can lay with your head on my body
 The worlds of the night and disease try to rob me All the vegetation in the settled world is stirring
 But stillness and calmness are all that I’m hearing 
now
 And it will take 
time

I held three strands
 But I lost one 
Dark as the lands 
Surrounding Boston 
On the train that backscratched the windows
 The backs of the houses, pulsing the rain glows
 That sick man so shiny in his slump
 Doubled over like a water pump
 He was dribbling out from his nostrils 
Onto his ankles leaking like Aprils
 Yeah the thaw had already begun
 We could hear the earshot from your cabin 
In the holy boldness your cheeks purpled and pinked
 There in the coldness with some sort of instinct
 Oh the fluency, me with my hands cupped 
Catching currency that you made it erupt 
The quiet of spilling right after the stilling
 Why it was chilling our hot window-silling 
I see your stature when breathing and turning
 Smoking the black blur as if something’s burning
 Remember the gray-slate coming of some thrill 
The low sky of too-late up on Bunker Hill And the whirling eddies sprayed off the semi’s tail
 The curling snow-traps of your hair
 Feeling warm inside the swarms of hail 
The foreign planet of some diner we found there So my brother and I saddle up some horse 
And watch the snow thinning with the thawing
 Another will die, rattle me so coarse 
Will it leave me grinning or awing? In Ontario

Look at all the steam off the snow
 We listen to the Top 40 country radio blow 
Listen to the singer, trying to put my finger on who killed who
 When it does linger, the sweet nostril-stinger of the spring’s mildew
 Was it your will to take his pill orally? 
Or did you act perfunctorily?
 The lamp-shadow dampness 
The safe world of campus
 The water of your high school eyes
 Some stadium 
Some old college tries
 There in my stomach the liquor heated 
With every place I ever trick-or-treated and 
We used to message through the ink of night
 With skin still young and pink and tight
 Back when the tongue thrust with all of our young lust
 The dimple-chin brunettes who make simpleton pets of me
 And yes I’m a heel, but with Peter’s keel 
I will cut through the lily-pads 
The moping mothers and hillbilly dads
 And the billboard dentist from White Lake to East Lansing
 With his day-glo halo sentence entrancing
 The moon makes lake-water out to be a filmy skin
 But who can begin to tell what skin holds far within
 Oh the bathers
 Oh the toweling
 Your cells are saviors that ring wet bells growling and 
You have the black eyes
 Just holes filled with night skies 
A saddening sweetness through your kid-sister-sighs
 Where the Sylvan Lake corner is flickering with childhood
 And the mourner within me feels older than wildwood 
And if I knew what part of me was wax
 I would try to truncate it with a black sopping night axe

So look across at St. Hugo 
Don’t they say wherever you go 
He will follow?
 So my dumpster fellow
 Let out a bellow
 In my name When my father sleeps the house has lungs
 You have heard those songs he’s sung
 But sometimes
 He wakes up with a start 
I hear a confused cry come straight from his heart 
And it’s sad Oh your once-sweet teenage face
 Episodically erased
 You were perfect 
In the safe sitcom vacuum 
Ten seasons have been your doom Oh the springterror
 Be my ringbearer
 Oh the spring-rot 
The sweet-rank taste that I’ve got
 When all’s forgiven

A bright-night-kitchen moth and the washcloth that I use For the refuse That is littering all of your clues Orion is dead and gone but something in it still Belongs to me The bright night I see High hot-time all the braggarts drag Their boats down to the water She dragged down to drown each and every Brown rag I bought her The silverfish they ditch their skins as The Saturday air raid begins Pitching exoskeletons Revolting in their molting Don't you know I'm just like that? You can tell where I've been at On every doormat I have sat A relic so angelic Oh the once hard-biting night Now ruthlessly a toothless sight to see A shot down Telegraph with a hot laugh as we cruise Through the sinews Connecting all of your clues The blinds they clap for the The napping overheated tangles Daytime may climb high until the dusk sucks out All that it mangles Melting with the blacktop moms On a bed of palms and psalms Immersed in the universe Of off-ramp proms and sitcoms Sylvan Lake and in between Perpetually like Halloween I saw you In the dormitory with the warming glory Of the harvest The pilings of the night are whiling out Where their forms are the largest Feeling about half as vicious As all the silverfishes crawl If I truly am a coward Memory-fueled and fear-powered I'll be damned But if I were That gorgeous blur I'd be Sure A bright-night-kitchen moth and the washcloth that I use For the refuse That is littering all of your clues Tripped up on the alley-weed Through which I elbowed and kneed The bottle of my beer emptied And I was warm and fluid The body is a bottle, I guess That I would like to throttle, yes Mottled skin and spilling sin And a holiness so stupid The heaven that I long to see The undone linearity I've proven Is all the love I've tried to show Buried where those buildings glow And ruined?

Bad insulation forms The sad creation of One-heavy-eight-foot-long icicle And there unridden sleeps The frost-bitten frame of Our sunken-in tandem bicycle With an endless art for recycling breakfast And an after-school comfort Unimaginable Two costume earrings and One matching necklace And two black eyes Undeniable Two soiled halves of One folded mattress An island on ice Nice and pliable There on the floor There are two bodies tangled By the price of Becoming unpryable But they're liable to be Kicking around a small blow-up globe Of the world that is see-through and Inflatable Still holding breath from your last abode Where we filled it with air Untranslatable The thick-carpet-world where the Streetlamps explode In the spring At the dawn With the smiling tears Breaking the night as the morning flowed Through my slight overbite And your dialing ears Piling the ways The planks and the rails of the L lifted up and Across Wabash Like a balcony And the city's light returns with its kills and it Fills up my eyes With its Falconry And I felt very bad you know 'Cause you'd never been to Chicago And you'd been bugging me And then you turn and you see me go To Chicago with some Other company It's gonna be the way But our upper room was so insulated that No holy fire coulda smoked us out Touching the wounds my fingers penetrated And they brushed and they hushed and they Poked about Three bobby pins on one bedside table While three soft lamps often blasted out On two shut-ins in one bulging cradle Inflated within while there without A wilderness did grow So blow up a room and Saran-wrap the windows In the winter To make sure It never leaks Become entombed in each other's shadows That rattle and shift With the wall and weeks Two slanted ceilings and Twelve suffocations Waiting on hot tongues But it rarely speaks Despite one white candle And night invocations Bones and a bed frame That moans and creeks I see two parents in one sleeping visage Beneath two soft tufts of swerving brows Did you sense the burning? Well that was my message A marking to come build a room somehow A burning breathing room

Oh, the storms come like a sickness, don't they? Blacking out the ceiling of the seaway Mary-Lynn you should begin to blow home Blow along the ditches of the freeway When my body's buzzing like a midway Mary-Lynn, oh, how thinly it stays When my body's breaking by the midday And the touching-towns stretch to the bounds of my body And all the mounds out from the ground are bulging hotly Then I know it won't be long before it finally Does me in For good As we take a ferry to an island Where all the deafening gusts look very silent We're every blackberry in the clearing pickin' Who knew my slow heart could ever quicken? When your body's steaming from the doorway Mary-Lynn, I have sinned in more ways Than I could ever tell you with a straight face But it gets so hot before the chill comes So much will rot in its welcoming Sweltering yard And oh, I know it won't be long before it finally Does me in For good Yeah, the storms have formed some sickness increased Blacking out the thawing memory at least Mary-Lynn you should begin to blow home Nodding off, the bell rings some, the kingdom we did find The ever-growing holiness we blinded and then put behind Bouncing with the night-boughs that are heavy with their kind Rushing with the snow-melt gushing earshot of what's on my mind It's a love too large to use Too large not to lose or abuse And you know how it Does me in

I hope that this summer Sweats through all my clothes so I can taste Some sort of second-comer Who'll blow the lilac-breath into my face Now I know I've had three wives The first was your ghost, the other was mine The last comes when the day dies and then Outside the trinity just cries Frightened by the tower Spiraled with the wild windy night I only have one father and I, his only child, fear is my birthright And who has a redeemer Towering above the summertime? When sweat will make you cleaner And spit is all I want instead of wine We cannot stay broken Or darken violently with summer storm We will climb the tower And in the burning morning be reborn

The nightfall's like a house of mirrors The shuttered deadmall and the Sears Where my mother worked for years In the nineties The drugstore dried out parking lots A fluorescent crest of snow still rots Piling in the handicap spot's Blind-freeze there The touching-towns have special wants M-59 and the salad-bar-restaurants Something in it always taunts my Nostrils When I'm smoking goddamn Pontiac And the hidden end of the Amtrak Woodward and the good word crack and the Exhaust fills the air Where A cul-de-sac Has sweetly softened The coughing memory Dulled and black Far too often Black ice on the greenery And all the women Sap me with their sadness And now I'm sad too But Pontiac's not The heart of darkness But freezing on the brink Where I am at Some fading starkness Where the brains of darkness think The firmly-fixtured-fast-food-beacons Do not dangle, do not weaken Neither does the heart I'm seekin' In you Mary-Lynn you wouldn't know But you do too have holy glow But how am I supposed to show You you? 'Cause your voice through those holy nodes Marked me like the salted roads Chalky white, the night forebodes The coming 'Cause your throat throttled northtown boys From the Rochesters and Troys They will also hear your noise Drumming low The wilderness of floating text The endless half-conscious of present tense winter sex Do you see how it connects In me? Because they touch in such awful blurs Their cough is full with all it remembers Draining the stripmall containers To find me there Where The Silverdome, the Palace The silt-slush road and all its malice Sweethearted and waiting for me Your face flushed like a toilet Where I could only soil it To unearth all my worth so futilely St. Joseph is black-ice-gripped And all the mailboxes are very tightlipped With the way they know my name And all the black ice ever gives Twenty swerving adjectives Repeating and cheating in our game In Pontiac the night falls like a whim Looking back, the night just seemed to brim Down the track, dangerous and grim In the black we all look so dim And the night has a yellow-gray-glow It's as though The whole world's my halo The grocery story bright light Aisles of the night Piling the blackwhite The whole strip-mall plaza Wheezing with asthma On your miasma The night has a yellow-gray-glow It's as though The whole world's my halo

Your kitchen window Where I would do the dishes Neck-deep in the wash and drunken Do your windows still glow Like the gaping orifices Of a burning pumpkin? How could I abandon my only companion? But I did The night strikes at random And I was not plannin' To dim Now early Aprils Fill my nostrils With the road-kills Of the skunks Every spring-girl Handsome and plural Are swaying sloppy high-heeled drunks Now that I've abandoned my only companion Yes I see She halved the burden Now it's been expandin' And hurtin' horribly And it used to be Early Aprils filled my nostrils With such possibility Now the sun's my maker And forsaker Undertaker and I'm guilty

Just like the brown bulbs of your eyes The stars are certainly dead But something makes them shine When I hover right above your dark-bed And I know it’s not me Illuminating through your face so well-fed But it brightens the Parts of all your skin I ever wanted You are a dark savior I do need saving All our hot behavior Will not deliver me The lilac-breath Is hot and still in The first hours of the evening And what is left In my will when The lilac-breath is leaving? You are a dark savior I do need saving All our hot behavior Will not deliver me And what a dangerous drive that was So young and dark Jefferson Avenue I imagined I blew The spark of a bullet Into a tree on Belle Isle While you were steering Your father’s giant car I kept hearing Far, far, far away Some childish dirge those Merging semi-trucks would Play

Pour your nighteyes on me Pour your sorrow Or your memory When the yard-fence darkens I can really see