All of your debts That blow to me like harmonizing trumpets Then fall so ugly on all of me How much harm will the harmonizing be? As you take away from me All of my nets Where all your silverfish Used to come right in I wish you'd let them come again Not bellied up or smelling of the sin That you're proudly musking of with All your regrets June again The milk times ten For I have two new mothers Giving birth to all the men My brothers who will molt to others I'm a thief in the prime of life A belief that the summer is my knife A pine tree straighter than a mascara applicator Bristling and whistling through the needles Your eyelashes are like needles How they brown when the sun comes down And the heat just rises through the needles Your eyelashes are like needles Up so tall where a dead phone call Pumps through the wires, through the needles Your eyelashes are like needles Your eyelashes are like All of your debts

Though there are so many black holes The JCPenny and the back of Kohl's Where rot a lot of things I can't say Oh Nicole, your trailer park Can console any darkness Spooled around the ground-floor patio Where the tomatoes Once cooled in your young night Don't let it dim your eyesight Of the divorced split-level mansion The exit of forced expansion Now miniatured The furniture sharpens its imprints Into the carpeting since We've dozed off and napped Is it preserved and plastic-wrapped? Little Caesars, birthday night Our dads have seizures and they bite Their tongues before the rug-burned floor Where we learned how to die Where we wrestled, laughed, and tickle-tortured Till our love made us cry So Jacqueline, when are you coming home? Your organ bench is warped and wrenched and so Many nights I see your bedroom window lights I guess the widowed ghost ignites Because they left that house in Union Lake And I had my First Communion cake In a weight-room clubhouse of their apartment Where the freeway air of 275 Rushed when they were still alive So I extend my endless thanks Grandchild pranks and oxygen tanks Hissing to the daytime TV Where you and me Crossword puzzles, I was ten With some promotional pen And now the doorknobs and windowpanes are Dripping wet The dead night is pressing tight against The glowing light of a heated home tonight The time machines of television sets Oh, Mary, let me see that lotto-heart Let the auto parts break down and die Wheel around the squealing sound of a Shopping cart Smile down the grocery aisle till you Softly hang your head and start to Cry For a while In Waterford, the discount stores Sneezing in the freezing rain pours Sunken women drunken on some far-fetched wrenching dreams Drenched in Starter jackets of their favorite first-grade teams Though there are so many black holes Jacquelines and orphan Nicoles I know They all know Love All the girls in their smooth teeth Jot death dates on their loose leaf I don't know if I'll ever die

Meet me in the Christmas mall If this fall I’m swollen With hot air the heaters blare Which no one is controlling And filling up my entire world And making me feel so young But old enough to notice that The thermostat has been stolen Hey, my best friend A smile so narrow Can point like an arrow To the end of you, and Oh, how we tend To pray soft and lowly For past worlds to slowly Mend and then Render tenderly A brilliantly thawing overpass The slush shoots out sun like a magnifying Glass in your eye Oh my, what it can imply Makes me cry You were not so impatient then Commuter stations of black-night men God, it makes me think of when Where was enough without why Hey, Mary-Lynn Some moments are frozen And constantly chosen to win The grin from within, yeah Oh, it's always been So why weep over Some grade-school sleepover again? It disintegrates and The red-faced shame mates with beauty But in fifteen years Somerset Mall will be Just like them all Summit Place Dump it all to waste Is that just what you do when you get bored? Send a postcard to the Lord Of the opposite gender No need to stress, no return address To fear it may come back to sender A deer knelt down on the midnight crown of Someone's front lawn bathed in our headlights They're white as suns but now we're the ones Flooding other people's windows with brights Oh, my little punctured cup What am I gonna do with you? Every time I fill you up There’s something spilling out of you And filling up my entire world And making it all so wet I do believe I can never leave Every person that I’ve ever met

Birthday girl Blue dress Soft face embrace In such foreignness Three birthdays This spring Mark this darkness With some blossoming The deep world I knew It was because Of you Although the Volvo is running well I can smell some Sorrowful fumes The blacktop of the IHOP was Scorched for us A chorus of buzzing Street-lamps still looms Hotel rooms, Oregon I can't keep up the recording Of our days, so slick Bit my nail down to the quick After the laughter does rise and swell Like a bell It falls back to earth There it is, it perishes Where it fell Straight to hell Now, what is it worth? But birthday girl

As the windshield wipes and exhaust pipes Are coughing out some winter It’s a splinter of what I once contained And I suppose the whole world glows A little for the squinter But you recall when all that fire rained And nothing very solid Ever thaws away the squalid Junk-drawers that us whorish people know And while the junk collects interminably Other things will certainly Thaw away so swollen with the snow I’ve mythologized the worlds you’re from The nervous taste of chewing gum Some high school faces Basements you protect But in the spring a cork I’ll find In the side-yard to remind The New Year’s souvenirs I must collect The sun looks pretty hot today The snow’s about to rot, they say So maybe I’ll drive all the way to Lansing If nothing’s able to stay static Perhaps we left some strips of fabric Bloodied up and streaming In the fencing And is it possible That the hospital Is waiting for all? Without stall it will bawl all The life out of you But nothing is ever lost The piled past is cataloged and tossed Into where it is stored in Some vestigial organ It pumps inside of me The bile and the memory The bathroom tile of ivory The carpet sponges so absorbently Nothing is ever lost Nothing is ever, ever lost By now I’ve declared you drive a hard bargain It’s a pardon every time I hear its name When my tongue’s stung by every dripping juice-hole in the garden My world goes mute, my cute words dumb and lame For the dental office arthritics and mental softness heart-critics Who can’t process me or the sophistry I live in I will pluck the soft weight of ripe love The sticky teenage-sweet type of Respite that the black night bites are given Where it's probable I’m unstoppable By all that tries To chastise the damp eyes My world contains?

Out in the night the world freezes It pleases me only to know They say in the wilderness Jesus Felt his moment slow I’ve stayed inside for a few nights Been four or five in a row Outside the teeth when the frost bites And pretty girls go So Slowly The world’s frigid harshness Is clear in the darkness Your soft skin is clearly unwelcome Your soft heart is part fear and part dumb But I love you more than I can stomach And the world’s love is a frozen phantom Out in the night the world freezes It teases me outside to go Silent and sterile the peace is And deadly it steadily blows

Abigail, I buried you so deep It's a wonder that they found you Down by where the pregnant lilacs weep Well I guess I should have drowned you But the water was froze up And your memory rose up I've made many beds in many towns Hung like heads 'neath starry crowns You're the only weight I could wish for But you don't pin me anymore And the buoyancy abounds with a pull Nothing ever drowns full The water was froze up Your memory rose up Abigail, I buried you so deep I remember when I found you Down by where the pregnant lilacs weep I remember when I found you

Papa's standing sort of bovine In the shrine of his brother's room, the priest Recently deceased in this North Country heat Lunch meat on the kitchen counter Mary's counting bug bites on a sunburned shoulder I'm counting sacramental rites and old crucifixes All my great-uncles' nights of cocktail mixes Are over Then we encounter Accidental modern radio hits Spits his brother's boom-box From the room walks Papa and then sits And then it's Time Where the handicap tourist-trap putt-putt courses And trailers patched with corrugated scrap metal and divorces Stand Well, I got a granduncle and he lives inland Where the pure manure summer vapors get fanned By electric fence whir and a wave of the hand Of the Amish infants standing barefoot in the sand While the gas-station kids hang out idle and bland At the Subway Well, him and Anne died down in some dim town Where he built a swimming pool into the swampy farm ground Where the accumulation of the dimming pounds down Since the 70s The pool Has a cool blue aqua shade Like the Gatorade that my dad likes to drink Where you'll peer into the pump-house, dear Or the diving board where you laid on the brink But please don't freeze or fade Like the bottles of booze That snooze beneath the sink And if my reasoning gets frayed It'll cauterize us tauter ties someday I think When the roofers jump in the seaway At midday in their jean-shorts to cool down We'll go down to Morristown And bask there in the decay And ask where our summer glories drown With the subtle carnage of the bloated rock bass Sucking in the bright sky summer boat gas Floating there As we boated past Slinking through the stony Thousand Islands That go sinking in the water with the slickest absence of violence But In the musty attic loft I knew your young sore ecstatic soft Body The waitress' language was blaring out, "Can you Bear the despair of the typos on the menu?" I wheeled you through the field with the billboards You wheeled the Ford to the sordid Price Chopper Where every shopper was leaning in the struggle to stand Like the green copper-stained gravestones that sink into the land That night Earthworms were squirming their way through my dark feel Some sermons found permanence on ancient-burned reel-to-reel If permanence is arbitrary Who decides the summers where we will Be forever? I'd like to meet that thing It's a dimming thing

On the bike trail of pale white chalk Where I surveil the loading dock That's chipping in the wailing shock Of the mercilessly electric creatures The deranged men who shirtlessly stalk The desperate features in their walk Until they melt like boiling caulk On the metal of the blacktop bleachers The summer has an open hymen The Sylvan Manor baseball diamond Rattles hot with tattletales So frailly shot into the night Christopher keeps the receipts For all the love that no one eats In the glassy office complex suites Behind which the ditch heats and squiggles Where all the deathlike little birds And the yearlings in their little herds And the perversion of my words Gets trapped and sweats and frets and wriggles In a grouping of the tower spines And the flaccid drooping power lines Where I'm recouping what is mine From the placidly eternal Hot day when the sprinklers vent A burning rubber aqua scent And evaporate all that I've meant About the mercilessly electric creatures But how do they hone the drone and tune it To the gargle of the backyard AC unit? It rattles hot with tattletales So frailly shot into the night

I met Rebecca in the summer I forgot my tally In the back, behind the bowling alley Where my street Ends She opened all the blinds up in my room She pried open my mouth And out spilled my gloom Just as it sometimes Tends to We walked up to the point On Sylvan Lake It got to the point That our skin burned and baked So we dove in When I met her father Our clothes were still wet When I met her sister Those secrets were not told yet I wish they'd never been By 9 p.m., all of them Carport lights are on They buzz on through What does ensue Till they blend into the dawn I met Rebecca in some house In a dream I had Murderers and worshippers And random fandom stabbing at us Till we made an escape Where she wore some dresses That to my eyes were gossamer And the hard truth impresses That I'd die at the loss of her So I wrap it up in ribbons and tape By 9 a.m., all of them Metal things reflect The nightmares and the bright sun-glares That force me to protect My love

August obliterates trust and it's in sun-dust I'm found Home to swill the shrilly insect sound Stumble to the Dairy Queen Thumb a People Magazine Glossy as the bright leaf greened and drowned In the light An eternity of dimming You turn to me, I'm slimming The graininess is winning every night Clarity's a rarity that once was just beginning Now hellish unembellished foreign blurs In the corners of my eyesight In this local exit highway night We must grow accustomed to the sight And empty all surprise to see the capsize of the semis 'Cause nothing will stop the world's physics from working Or the manner in which it's situated and lurking Permanently, so externally But there's pleasure and death in each second To be reckoned with And there's boredom and sex within each wild minute And the mildest hour has some deadly power in it And maybe I'll cower with Yia Yia's silk flowers As the motion sensor light does brighten and sour On the back patio where the raccoons go Whining and divining through the grainy night glow The same as me as I'm fumbling to see An inch off my face with a pinch of disgrace Each photo of the summer is one in the same With a bloodshot number in the corner of the frame Dating each time that we became Memorialized in the Dimming An eternity of dimming You turn to me, I'm slimming The graininess is winning every night Clarity's a rarity that once was young and brimming Now hellish unembellished foreign blurs In the corners of my eyesight A bat circles above my brain As I walk down St. Joseph in the dusky Graininess, yes this gorgeousness is Growing too dark To mention What becomes of the summer skin When it disintegrates in The blackness of the past? At last, I've become An extension Of the dimming

My oh my, you're so far away By the time I see you The sky may look so evil and gray Or perhaps, we'll take naps in the sun If the suns collapse We'll make laps on the run And run forever 'Neath their punishment But punishment is not what you deserve You were meant For something they reserve For early mornings When your heaven is blurred Blurred and vague Each word does age so fast Like a plague It's not allowed to last For very long but how Fantastic and strong While it does, while it buzzes free All that was still courses Through me Infinite tons, liquid gallons Of stunning suns In some brittle part Of my little heart I know I can Plan a way to stay And say My oh my, you're so far away If I die, it could be today And all I see All that I free will be Okay

What can it mean to go it alone To quarantine the moments we've known And lock it away And bury the throne Of a hot summer bed in my heart? It's not smart To try to die When something so soft's standing by But why should I Deserve something only to lie? I don't know why I should Or whatever let me do it But if your sweetness Could defeat this for good I wouldn't hold you to it Placing the nightmares of space Between myself and the dearest face That I could every try to recall At all And if each threat That we came to regret As we'd shout it At the outlet mall Still dissolves there Broke and bare The worst shame All the same What can I do but become estranged From the truest true that the world had arranged For me to cling to But only deranged Sad as a dumpster at night? It's not right To kill the chill That defines the warmth there inside I'm ill and most likely will Never get right there inside But oh the pride When you were the one who knew me I cried When the angels of heat flew through me

I approach my coach to tell him The anesthesia wore off And then a loose cough Crackles accolades in spades For me So they pour us up to LaRosa Market Maybe you meet us with the Taurus And you park it there The air is sweet with bare summer feet And cucumber-scented hair The sun is wetting heads Of sweating girls In pretty smells It swells and swirls Then wanes And the surgical wound Is twisted deep Like the sheets on a summer bed And I'm marooned In the summer weeds Behind Sylvan Lanes instead And all the life behind Sylvan Lanes It wanes till it is dead Keego Harbor trailer park Beneath my parents' Upper Room They had one too Pet love in the sweat of Forgetful heavenly days I got some Mackinac Island caricatures Where my toothy youth decays When we would take Orchard Lake Road To the St. Mary's Fair Your first cellular phone And the tone of the blown-out speaker Lying supine on the pebbly asphalt Electrically whine through the trebly assault As the sidewalk calk, yeah the fault-lines Scuff your sneaker Disposable camera prints Leaning in the doorjamb squints The figure of my dad And the body he had When he was shirtless and virile He'd drive me to intramural Or the soccer travel fear A Chevy Cavalier And though I was puerile My comfort was near I genuflect on the kindergarten rug Where I chugged all my pure light A clunky TV cart and the sunken eyesight A sleepy-eyed departure of a dream Now I'm feeling like a phony up at Kerby's Koney Island And the parents tick in decades And the pathos just parades its wickedness So sad All the love that we had Dissolves to an abyss Of summer ski-hills Where my newcomer skills Once skidded in wintriness Till the kid crashed And red-faced shame Is the world's only aim When my spoiled Christmas gifts got stashed I could hear strange percussion In the depths of the concussion Like the fireworks that once splashed In Sylvan Lake Then some pungent summer deodorant Forced me to awake To my mother's laugh

Oh, if the summer Leafy screens Of the undersides of bushes Took me in like time machines I'd crawl out Red-faced 2006 And set my mind to find you Inside the library bricks And with your date-stamper You'd brand my hand I'm the nervous camper Who would happily choke on the woodsmoke To lie next to you where you woke In the sand Oh, what a bummer Not to re-begin Not to have a sunburn Marrying the sum of our skin And in some very small rooms Where we'd sweat through the sheets I'd curse the hour that it all blooms And just pray to God it repeats M.A.C. and Elizabeth Sweating through the Sheets with A memory and a myth The balcony of Meredith's Apartment Blinded my eye sockets to the Sight of Marian The youngest memories burst Like a sun In the hot black night I Found my contrarian If any girl is cursed She's the one And I am the curse I am the worst Oh, if the summer Lake and pool Cease to make my body Feel so young and cool For I've been burned so badly In the worst way By squandering so sadly By being cruel In that way

I'll be swimming in the ditches With the brimming snowmelt With unexplainable fishes And the plopped-down mallards belt out For vouchers of pizza coupons Surrounding the mailbox And drowned in the lawns There with me Yes, some spiny heart grieves For our occasional escape In its artichoke leaves That our bottom teeth familially scrape Then discard on creased paper plates As a knife extricates what's released And the heat levitates Does your dad fall asleep With the remote in his hand? Does a digital beep Promote gentle reprimand To share all your love Like the threadbare cloth of Some T-shirt your mom wears From a tournament of soccer you played In 1998? He bakes blank birthday cakes In the grocery store flicker And the hard plastic cases He seals with a sticker With a bar code and what's owed And in a gossiping snicker The birthday-boy moms With expired pom-poms gravitate To personalize one For her first and only prized son I cannot sleep With this language snowing so deeply In my head Dim soccer goals And non-marking gym soles With which I walk through instead The archaic layout of the buildings that play out My past as I'm lying in my bed They will not stay out and so the only way out Is to worship these worlds with my face red Blushing beauteously Rushing circuitously Shaking with every endorphin Constantly mesmerized By all I've memorized Leaving no place as an orphan I perfect my conveyance by directing a seance From an eighth grade computer lab station in the basement Where the latchkey kids feel like a non-factor And the black-ice skids call the strip-mall Chiropractor To the sweetly faulty parents On their white-stained salty errands Nonetheless, I digress I walk through Each janitor's closet And lavatory faucet And desk configuration And signature validation On a permission slip nervously forged Clarifying tenuous eras of my penmanship's formation The holy gradation For the coaches that wronged me And my sense of belonging There's a song I can taste when the braces are tightened And the forceps clamp and the summer is heightened And my mouth is the amplifier that voices its name Well, no two-bit piece of shit interloper Is gonna touch my world or molest my hope or My kingdom that lingers in each drawer I open When I open it up I'll be groping at what is for damn sure In the dimming of Sylvan Manor

The muffler smoke Does lovingly choke The community college's dusk parking lot The potholes soak Because the ice broke And jarringly jolt us till the shocks are shot And the carports are revving with warming-up motors With throats that are heavily fuming exhaust And I taste who I am when I breathe the odors And all that was feral is sterile with frost And it feels so good Feels so holy My world should Soon control me And I know that I would Like it to The shrink-wrapped cosmetics and cardboard aesthetics of department store picture frame inserts that my Mother keeps under a sink in a cupboard with her high school diploma and it hurts to try To keep all our treasures intact for forever in fact they are cluttered and muttering sighs The pipes froze and ruptured and so now her cupboard is full of possessions that she can't keep dry I see wild geese in the drainage ditch east Of the hotel chains behind Thunderbird Lanes When I go do some banking, rigidly thanking What the frigidness deems and the extremes it contains And the funeral home, pharmacy, bar and grill are to see Me to the white and bright sports domes of youth But all that was docile's now frozen and hostilely Clenching her denture where once was a tooth Behind the Home Depot parking lot The cold woods decay The homeless they go and squat And wrestle their way The old lovers spurn And the new lovers enter The bitter night burns In the bottle return's sticky center Where The dealerships garishly light up the parish where we Wore Catholic uniforms from K to 8 The winter it frigidly deals out a litany Of auto parts from car wrecks at the Secretary of State Dealerships, dealerships in the night townships Where my allergist's magazines were from the late 1990s when dealerships dealt out Pleated-pant children belting in lots Shelter their snow-boots in sweltering showrooms Or a storage space that radiates ten-thousand watts And then I'll meet you out where the outlet malls turn to black holes I'll greet you cradling obsolete remote controls To television sets in entertainment cabinets From lost living rooms of trampled carpets Of VHS sun-bleached cassettes and teenage trophies of plastic soccer nets And the clip art signs are cartoonish on diners Which are actually grimmer than hell in the night And a bright CVS might make me obsess But at least I have found what is mine in the light And it feels so pure Feels so singular Still and sure That's the thing you were Meant to see when you Went through the Dimming world Those blaring bugs wouldn't leave me alone And it's not that I deserved their letting The autumn tugs and the summer moans And pretty soon winter was setting And if safety is the one thing I knew never would harm me Last hot fall I put all mine In a Salvation Army On the borderline of losing my mind And pitifully making excuses On the borderline of sweetness I find In Rhode Island and Massachusetts

The trees of memories don’t shift Though their shadows deep and dark orbit Around the years Here Where careers Are shaped like houses The stars are dead But their tombstones love me Their funeral family flowers flicker and shine So bright above me

Hard-hopin' I can open It up Heartbroken And soft-spoken Ain't we all grown up now? Mary-Lynn, when you call to me There is little I can do And you want to bring it all to me Well, you know, I'd want you to But seeing as there is no place Seeing as there is no trace I do not know if I can taste it Anymore Now I rub each tear duct with my hands When someone's foreign bathtub product brands Stung my heart and plucked my glands Because it understands the smell You wore That's when I follow my dad down To the video rental store Mentally explore The glorious Phantasmagoria To some sunny summer family reunion in a soccer practice park Through a dark grainy camcorder With '1994' in white numbers on the border of the lower right corner where you Were quite pixelated by the men in the tans Beside the subtly outdated minivans In turquoise polos as the boys blow 'O's Through the dirty mustaches they grew Smoking Merit cigarettes you inherit from Papou Pulled from soft packs in an '89 Buick Park Avenue In slacks on the pickup lane of the Catholic K thru 8 his great grandson goes to There's a dead world locked in a Nintendo 64 In some divorced friend's mom's apartment bedroom drawer And a chandelier of chrome in her white brick apartment home's Shared stairwell where the farewells blew And sag with the bags Of sidewalk salt You cannot disown Your middle-school cologne And the tedium Is the medium that connects All that is holy I was the goalie Who let in an infinitude of Worlds That I can't possibly disown The snow Ossified to bone And got stained so black By the track of the sliding doors Of the modern cell phone stores Chaldeans smoking sweetly As the deeply dim night pours For you There's a meteorologist On the local news Whose hand I got to grip On a fifth grade field trip He's no long young-dad hip For he's now as old as all of us Would ever want to be And the weather, we foresee Will be better endlessly Once Nana's Backyard swallows us The lawns aren't cut too short And they abut the tennis court And our ages are not cages That we cannot re-assort Oh, the obsolescence Of your adolescence Heavy as a copy machine Gargantuan, elephantine In an old friend's dad's 90s home office With off-white purring processors And PC blurs on monitors They can't display the past so they Just mark their time and darken I'm just Hard-hopin' I can open It up