some palm reader told me
not to think of you
anymore
well what does he know?

you are the
cold desert nights that
push into morning
heatrise fever play
you are the
heaving sides on
dying good dogs
you are the
waxy rims on
dixie cups left out
in the sun
you are the
post breakfast
cigarette
you are the
shortest straw
the hair of the dog
the morning after
you are the
fall that
made it to skin

we took shots in the dark
and drank to death
and everything that comes before
realizing that is was just
a good dream
a bad dream
and
we blacked out
suddenly
Sunday shaking like the fur
on road kill blown by passing cars.
we woke up
drooling and driving
a lost cannon
late for morning swim practice
your nipples perking up in permafrost
your knuckles vanishing white
wavering a death grip on your internal body temperature
you were cold
toeing the diving board
your dead best friend
pushing you in
head kissing the tiled wall
you just
didn’t look up
god
you just
didn’t look up

http://www.tumblr.com/blog/yellerrat

You killed a pregnant possum on the ride into work on your sister’s outgrown bicycle with the pink streamers, like celluloid pigtails in windblown glamor shots.

You played it off like they were playing dead, with phony gag grimaces and packing seeing-red ketchup packets in the sleeves of their moot fur coats.

Your post-op haircut was fetus-positioned under your uniform black cap, the yellow arches like gateways into deep grease oblivion, minimum-wage cotton.

Marv made you come in on your day off and Pete K. made you come in the wrong way, into the number three for the lowbrow regular in jaundiced reader lenses and

chest hair like earthworms risen post-rain. Company policy maintained special rules for bad customers like your mother maintained special customs for bad company.

Bobby showed up in your driveway when your shift was over, the neon surfboards reposed in the back of his piebald hearse he scored half-price at last

weekend’s estate sale the next town over. You took to the coast ten miles out without checking the weather channel twice. The swells rolled, like too-tight socks

on airsick diabetic ankles. You trailed the prints and trash-talking ads in old beach around makeshift fire pits, like picked scabs haloing knobby knees on last-pick track-losers.

And Bobby talking up the forecast like after party demon hosts, going ‘the good waves have all gone home, so what are you still doing here?’

Meanwhile skunks slinking out to play in their favorite shrouds, the sand dusting their counter-shade underbellies like salt lining last-round cocktail rims.

You waxboy-ed with a High Life till you couldn’t see your hands, the anemic waves breaking down into white noise. The day was a wanton nosebleed, black in the failing light.

You ashed your cigarette on the still-warm driveway of your parents house
like you were thrashing a vanishing-act heirloom white-flag.

You showed me your idolized dead-soldier collection, idle in the closet top-shelf,
with your bedroom door wide-open, like Arnie’s poker-faced casket. You cried that

you could not remember whose side they were on.

The swollen tires on your hand-me-down automobile were bodily
bruises nursing themselves back to health.

‘Thos’er a couple fuckin’ shiners, kid. ‘

your father hacked up dry, without asking you how you got them that way.
The jaundiced pits on his tee shirt wolf-whistled stains of misplaced tears.

Here one day, gone the next.

Your Monday feet static-stuck to my mother’s good carpet fibers,
like dead ants trapped in post-injection hard candy, jolly at the stake.

Your drive-by teeth came late-night to visit and stayed till the morning
of my flight. The surmised sunrise was the color of betadine scrub solution

just before the needle gets shoved in.

Charlie makes

apartment-complex

heaters breathe

like miracles.

Like pig runts

wheeze,

forced out of

dead sleep.

8 days and

two teeth

later,

Charlie holds fast

his swinging

backyard

axe.

The furnace sits,

its back

sweat-stuck

onto the young

wall,

like a broke down

ski-resort

chair- lift,

plastered against the

blistered skyline.

He jams into it,

two-hundred glints,

upraised,

logging

carful slits.

Tally holes like

The mouths on

two-hundred

dentist’s patient

sheep, blunting

halfhearted

ahhs.

Vents like days,

deep-tallied onto

prison walls and

wooden bedposts,

singing

hot spit

like cruddy gills

passed out on

knee-deep docks

wet with

new paint.

Homeward -bound -to tray

You were sour

burgundy

Bar soap,

 Scaling my

rib bones in

Campground

 shower stalls,

Like a child runs

Knotty pine

 sticks down

 iron gates and

hand rails on

 haunted homes .

you’d come up

 for miles

down

 secondhand streets,

where

every house was

hung up on

strung -July-

Christmas -lights  and

peeling plastic

kiddie  pools.

Everyone

went live

when you drove by like

raccoon’s eyes

 caught  on film

 at night.

You stopped

 at the only

bar in town

and

the place was full

of hollow

 jack-o-lanterns

 where

everyone

was happy

to see

everyone.

The bug-leg orchestra

played- on

the next moon

 phase and

and the clammy

 north

forced you into

playwood,

the would- be

 motels,

and the

telephone booths

jackknifed to

bus- stops.

You sang hard

into your fathers

old radio,

with the

batteries

taken out.

Your eyes were

a soft pitch

dog whistles,

calling me

home

In vain.