I barely manage to brush my teeth
before sleep. I neglect to wash
my face. In the harshest of mirrors
pink discoloration on my left cheek.
The grim reaper rapturing your dog
is too much. Ghost Sims haunt burnt
down houses. They abandon you.
They contain free will until you
determine they don’t. I did play
The Movies. Acted as stylist,
choosing avatars’ hairdos,
premiere gowns, jewelry.
I’d clay the stars glam.
I’d pay for their rehab.
I’d make them filthy rich.
I played on sandbox mode.
I didn’t want to run a studio
either. I only want to run
headlong into that which
wounds me.

Hard snowfall blurs the passage
of this conifer field. Extinguished
woodsmoke lingers—its plumes
coil frostbitten juniper. You stoop
deep inside your collar, cottontail
held close to your chest. The squall
curls in dark cedars. Spirits are rising
from the ground. They whirl in muslin
dresses & tuxedos, foxtrot in constellated
ballrooms. They sob into handkerchiefs,
let their silk snag onto denuded branches,
denuded branches these spirits sift like wind.
The cottontail heeds their sad music.
You are far behind me now. Stars absorb
our injury and rupture. You instruct
that when I reach the end to turn around.

The lucky newlyweds
wear designer straitjackets.
Perched at the starlit altar
in the middle of the highway,
they clench zinnias in their teeth.
The dazed lobotomized in metal
chairs gawk up at the anemic sky,
then back down at the pavement.
The priest swigs bleach from a flask.
He pronounces them husband and wife,
they blink, and that is that. Nobody claps.
In the 400 milliseconds of that blink, time froze.
By the time the time melted, they had lived
for a thousand years. Inside their eyes
contorted spiders spun gossamer webs,
dangled from their lashes. They stand
amongst silk dusk sinking into the earth,
straitjackets white as cocaine. In a past life,
they lurked these streets searching for it.
Now, they stare into the eye of the moon,
dream of snorting it with a corvette key.
They waddle to the fence on the edge
of the lawn. Beyond it, the clink
of beaming glasses and they’re back
at the altar, all those years ago.

The clearest photograph of the sun
looks like a head of hair, exponential
strands of burning flares. Once, I looked up
Cancer rising bald, curious to discover
if my astrological placement that determines
physical appearance leads to baldness.
Instead, countless links of people with cancer.
I can be dumb, vain, clueless. I watch videos
of strangers climbing sickeningly tall infrastructures
without harnesses and my knees go weak. To flirt
with death like they have nice teeth. Upward starlings
levitate, spellbound. They flock in great formations.
Solemn, humbling; here glued to the grass, its blades
intonations of future lives; to pick one from the earth
and scythe it gently across my arm, this earth moving
so slow beneath us, these deep shadows of summer dusk.
The clothesline & its bleached sheets haunt the breeze.
The jaws of bumblebees sheathed around pollinated
tongues. I was fluent in my own self-destruction.
I remember where I began: a dark gloom of stars
roaring wild in the night, all beams of light gossiped
around the ancient gravitational lurch of the air.
Alone in the lawn gleaming blue from the July moon,
I imagined all the worlds beyond our own: the lost addresses
of our past, the translucent curtains of windows fluttering
in our excavated sternums, the night & its mirrors poured
in the forests where I once explored the bone of summer
listening for the struck axe; when I heard it, it implied
my tongue spoke of nothing but forgiveness. Yes, our fathers
exist there, stranded inside the television screen’s smolder.
The gasp of cold living rooms, they die slow deaths,
attuned to the clarion of felled sycamores: some might
call it beauty, beauty extinguished with the flick of a wrist,
the cavalry of the future summoning, or ice-coated lakes
cracked by footstep, or the fearless climbing those buildings
without hesitation, these buildings that we’ve built
that could reach the clear eternal, the complete unknown.

My father cries out from his crib, tie and suitcoat
ironed, pressed. On the TV, Jackie O in her black dress.
His mother clasps her cocktail crushed with ice chips,
glossy eyes lost in the footage of Glen Campbell crooning,
strumming his guitar. We tell her who he is three times:
That’s Glen Campbell, we say. His voice is marvelous, she exclaims.
Isn’t it? Isn’t what? While leaving, she trips down the steps.
He lifts her up. We pull in her driveway. I lead her inside.
She’ll slip on her nightgown, speak with the ashes.
Once, driving home from a long party, looming highway
light poles glazed pools of dull orange into my windows.
A spectral woman crawled the guardrail, lit by our taillights,
searching for her daughter amongst a deluge of shattered glass.
My father often initiated a drunk, drive-home game of trivia.
What is the relation between Darth Vader and Luke? Who lassoed
the moon like it was a wild mustang? Who stayed up all night
chewing ice chips waiting for her husband to walk through the door?
My father opened the backseat. The lights blinkered on.
He carried me through the door, eyelids flickering.
I laid my head on his shoulder. He set me down.
In the cool night fell asleep as quickly as I awoke.