In tune with the trees’ fated shiver, get sad

and try again, coughing up nostalgic sands as brass

melodies imitate a barbed wire memorial for the rain

to polish at which point you ask for directions

get lost in a city’s identical awnings renting your brain.

Then after that rain and the rain and rain with rain in it

raining the rain and the rain’s sibling the rain, I verify

my skin waiting for sheets of air or stale echoes,

the junctions the poem needed to free all threads

of resentment and desire. Time then held tight in the

shopping bags singing the future’s toothbrush into being

from muscles of commerce, the ghosts that wait along its river

aren’t even real, no time to stop and talk, this territory of bad still

sounds an empty room, air in the can, the clock the tree’s poetic

rot as a joke I don’t get, please tell it again.

Sit and think of violent movies your mother

would like, a rearranged scale to climb the blasted

scaffolding how voice folds and devours its tent

collapsing in rain and the mud groans ancient.

How you could just take it and reserve a table for poetry,

hold music on hold while the stroller wheel’s grocery

discovers nothing’s adjective nothing

facing down as dark water sunk the sensuous edges of a missile,

know that skin. Yeah, I still don’t want a country though

and its identities, its births breathing all documents

to hamburger horizons and national sunglasses

a slow limp across a parking lot as energy drinks

investigate the limb’s motion. Really, I’m a coupon

open book percentage on the picnic table

and the self-flagellating storms invent excuses

to mispronounce the applause across the river’s electrified

debris, that border will fuck with you, that muscle will be weak

about halfway across and then what, whose helicopter is that

blaring in the teeth’s imbalanced sleep when dawn’s rushes

come in the window they’re all left waiting for you, gardens

of violence beckon a summertime stroll, the blood visible

and then just a flower.