Collected blackouts, 2012.

No, no, no, make no mistake; these are the suns I rise for, this is the fractured battlefield dawn, this is the glory. A leather bird carries arrows and flint, telling hesitant secrets of our gasoline blood spilled in clots among interstate ruin. Your delicate savage foot a red sled sliding atop shell and grisly snow, you throw haughty lips towards the conflagration as the brave wade knee-deep in the guts of their stricken brothers, brows slickened and singed in the greasy smoke. Scalping white people scalping white people, scalps, scalps, scalps.

"Bach visits"

Brought to wheezing life
at a Spaniard's hand,
there is the smoke of guitar
lofty in a room
belonging to the breeze,
I awkward on elbows
I spin sparkling eyes
I dream lightly
on a plain plaster ceiling;
oxen, a levee
a man, a mistress
a gentle rain of feetsteps
a bow with swept cap
from deep in the gut
to mouth a moth
down dry throat
and dust my lungs
with a boiling allegro.

Spitting spit and drooling mistakes, I'm as cute you know I'm just as cute. My back blank of flesh reminds us in it a canvas for a girl I know sweet as wine and a homely feather who claws at my meat to leave blood marching along nailed deltas in the knots of muscle, I wanting her to tear me apart and shove barrow-loads of gristle upon the morning's screaming sidewalks, I tense instead gather my skin and not inquire more into her delicate position. Oh Lord I am lost and lose the children.

My pain seems guileless and my worry sustainable. My tears grind without pride. But my pain is acutely and viciously MINE and my worry smotheringly and warmly MINE though my tears grind for us all. I expect no anodyne light upon my lips nor a shoulder to share my yoke. I expect to be let be, bent and learned.

I was born with your eyes searing negatives, I was made strong carrying much for long, hoping for oystershelled fingertips to rifle me as the pearl pages of a new book. I've looked for you in dim-lit rooms from ocean to ocean, in postcards from my father, 2002, in Harry Nilsson songs I knew by heart well before the foggy Humboldt dawn knew to assault my eyes, searing negatives and laying such a burden upon newborn shoulders.

Death limps
mystery and fog
trailing us all
A bad feeling all day
Pressed hands sail
valleys of ivory
drank all sensory
bliss
in every irreplaceable blemish
There are caverns in my hands
to hide whispers
to skate razors
and lit matches
Scar scar tissue
Count backwards from zero
right hand through left eye