down down down
like feathers poured over rain
kissing each other in the
scentless prison of time;
like tumbling
foundlings

to an earth
unmoved

Cindy burns up near
the hall;

against the wall
a smear of men
with thin hats

and rat-eyes
leer up at god
and wrench their
impotent legs

up and down
up and down -

cold angels
with wings
of filth,

they bestow
evil names
on the flightless
hungers

that live like
invisible glass
in their guts

the skimpy queens
drip their glory
beneath the neon-winged
albatross
in purple waves;

they straighten their
fractured hair in
fragrant puddles

as the rotten meat
of traffic kills
the stars

I worship too quickly.
My gods think they’re still alive.
Am I the world my children worry over.
Am I the worry.
My job is a soap fattened in hell.
I send my brothers songs sung by women
In the language of my voice.
I didn’t drink until I missed being sick.
I love my father in a way only my sons will understand.
I love my mother shhhhh.
Being quiet is the childhood of silence.
Hear underwater
Touch
Starve.
Or be
With sightseeing
The lord
Of your phone.
I’m sorry if that was your body.

the old promenade of the
graveyard loops its anarchic
teeth around me;

I think of Mister Death

his eyes unclouded by fear.

I think of cysts and powders
and drainages;

I think of pills in tight orange
cases, meticulously labeled

I think of needles and ******
and God;

I hear the trouncing and
bumping of lives

like the overlapping shadows
of branches beneath an
Elder tree.

I ask the eating
dusk if Mister Death
ever visits the littlest
of the graves


to wonder where it all went
wrong.

Look at what god was given. What did you do with your last silence. You sharpened yourself in a whale and let your baby die in an owl. Yourself has no world in this place. None of my cousins are dead but I'll never see them again. My sickest son has no hell. Have no hell.