Shot through the head I’m coming up on an overpass Rifle Eyesight was lying low in the high grass the empty skull lolls milky cataracts peel limpid limitless swimming outside the cranium betrayers of children exposed by distortions his property swelling Lenses Alien shot through the neck I bled correct  something called me back a bleacher fixture
kidless grinning aorta plaque guts for abduction well my friend that’s another thing we parted curtains to watch comings and goings the sun
distended Lenses Alien on Lake Sedation some drugged corrupt husk scrubbed up for the surgery waking splayed in fiberglass-pink a silent space a Planet Pain but you can’t bore a hole to a cavity where the soul lives Vaseline Hands the door slams behind us in a flesh lined heaven cities of coral complexity where drowning forms thrashed up from central densities having a stroke I learned a new way to see tea-colored trout lairs and gold frozen bodies the crawlspace grave he improvised believe at that bone altar oh I’m hollow and I am
bankrupt palpate its baby teeth nodules with insensate fingers that raised ranch lambent bay windows say “benign”but tell me what former police sits at the bus stop offering rides genius senses capture overlapping smeared & dazzling grids some trails expanding Juarez oceanic from Horizon City tasted incipient sickness in the mucus produced by a cough one day you’ll see you’ll say “you’re peering top-down into me” when light pollution parking lot cabals all fall asleep in ice-covered cars far from the interstate a submerged home a snowbanked lane the smoke from a house fire refineries and water pipes Elizabeth’s smog my friend I pause and remember you I gotta root it so you know that it’s human weeping through the dremel tool holes and shaking like a leaf beneath the covers even though you hold me exit for Shore Points I don’t want to go to Spring Lake again ‘cause walking in a dream  did this evil that is staying with me sodium vapor lamps reflect in spin-out strips of black ice cattails sway in cracked concrete the wood smoke transports me your small human sounds haunt the street is it a gas leak, the last unity eyes upside-down face malaise you’ll pay for faking feelings leading false lives glazed and fever clouded pinned against the platform pillar moments frozen and relived the wait is over step onto the train shrinking the sun lit up vessels inside my shut eyelids landscape pixelated flickered and blinked out to nothing motorboats drone styrofoam the coolers packed with beer and soda splotchy shadows juke
like floaters splendidly empty the gentlemen came close to caring lines on my face from the labor of lying to spare you our city’s streetcars with Christmas lights strung on ‘em I taste my fever take in the room I suck your earrings unfulfilled and scraping by when I fall ill knock off at five scoot home sped only by a cold wind stolen passports pouring rain I couldn’t ever feel the same I’m glad I’m back but it’s a goddamn bore there was a man who killed a state trooper and drove his pickup truck to Belmar and slept in a beach house a dream of the day when two
protons collide and everything everything changes when I drive with floodplains on either side of me and in the back seat my friends point out egrets’ nests high on the telephone poles friends fuck each other in the guest room I feel the ghost of all the parties still happening right on this very spot that I am standing kids are blissing in the spare room light years away the drug store smilers tower ten feet tall over a maze of abandoned cars their canceled eyes show through the
holes in their sphinx masks I scramble to the dunes to puke under the pale moon it is initiation season so watch out for the cars with no lights on if you flash them they will swing around and follow you home and in the lamp light living room A Portal gently pulls at all the shit that you own what a relief it is to laugh like this years later through tears at someone’s kitchen table feeling the full weight of all that dark energy because there’s matter and there’s legion else unobservable scaffolding for planets and stars dry mushrooms taste a lot like communion wafers to see cathedral ships behind the Bucks County sky when I was thirteen my man’s in a hallucination reverie he says that there was a man who went and murdered a plainclothes but he drove so far away from Belmar because all of the people there hung glow in the dark masks on every single screen door a crown vic in the rear view, oh my god bring me to the world of guilt and sorrow for the races tonightwhere boats go cutting through undulating mirror images  of incandescent spires the roads there are parabolas with nameless water towers
near the exits you could turn it all on end still wouldn’t be taller
than the biotic arch at the crown of creation there are people who put dirty hypodermic needles between the seat cushions in the movie theater we all have the same dream the night that we contract it so maybe I’ve been sleeping less at your place since that man’s last panicked screams startled us awake we were paralyzed as the cop cars arrived casting slow-spinning mobiles on your ceiling three colors we watched the frozen moon in daylight I stare past your eyes’ lenses windows framing solar wind  rustling ivy on painted pink buildings I’ve been
hearing the soft step of the gray-eyed governess but I know you know the physical form of the moaning alarm coming from the air force base a skinless and sinewy leviathan all terrible contraction and release debasement ringed in banner plane exhaust and scattering V’s of geese I emerged as if through a narrowed eye into lashes of white sun from your apartment and pollen clouds held absent sound in gutted buildings
we pray bridges and causeways curl fast again like slap bracelets and the skyline resets to a bare, hushed wilderness I worship the day of the invisible wave then a stream of revenants surged outward like prominences from the sun 1927 an explosion another Tunguska and at once I was flat on my back my skateboard rolled on down the hill the congregating deer stood stock still in the corridor of manicured lawns remember you and I would get so high we’d pass out with our shoes on
first light through leaves this was back when my smoke would juke and stutter in the highway crossbreeze crying in our cars a thousand trillion ghost lives humming names of places swallowed sub-god’s withered hand a cool pillow-faced smiler a private loss that settles on us I feel so at peace there’s infinite
earth versions legion me’s free from malignancies this contusion-colored evening maybe you paint the silhouette of the gaunt tree line singed in ‘97 when wildfires threatened my development the swallowed towns the Klan had founded the shaded sand dens were Party Caverns for them who’d come hallucinate while we slept scaring our rabbits to death in their hutches I can’t remember how I used to live but they’ve all cased their jumps fatally I willed it to be in the hours of blankness preceding sleep oh the years wasted faking
remorse every decision I have ever made bred the branching future’s mute howlers with burst-vessel red eyes roaring inaudibly on the freezing morning walk to the corner grocery what hangs over the big empty country reborn in the negatives of photos of dusk regret so huge it’s on a phantom axis receding beaches hissing hearing damage the miles-long column of cold moonlight cast across still seas when my
nose begins to bleed some submitted to having their lights put out by the basement thrill killer of the neighborhood I heard being murdered is no experience ten or eleven wounds in “It’s not about Satan or anything.  You just die— It’s weird.”  up over the queasy glossed acre of scrub pine  ‘hind your house through the glass of the sliding door it passes now without sound leave my clothes in a heap on the floor and collapse into bed not the world’s dead lid sagging green-black and pregnant still it’s a fatuous wish to be blank and brand-new noticing motion in this sick and sprawling splendor spilling guts motes were clouds in spokes of shivering sun the life to come, the life to come snorted up an orgasm times twenty then one day you can’t turn the shower on look down all your birthmarks and scars are gone skin pink and virgin a burn victim what you sloughed off found cold in your bed and mourned before ever trying weed before the blind opioid glow he loved his secret family what a pain hiding dilation and unnatural brightness from the corner store clerks who never looked up we went and left the dog on the highway median glaring sky to map microbial floaters against but it grew dark as we sat ‘hind a car that wouldn’t let us pass the child in the back didn’t quit waving her doll’s arm I said “from the age of six this boy did not want to live” the passing of time hasn’t changed your dad’s pained expression I felt our diners and our movie theaters in poisoned nighttimes intumescent and crawling nonlocalized awakenings, memory’s strange abbreviation in that other time before I knew you my parents fell asleep bathed in wavering blue some breathing dogwood trees lined the street swaying white and pink carpeting the canopied hall the shared nightmare of your shut room on a rail through the absence in the morning hole in histories we made for some show but pulled off to the side when rain came prismatic spreading the headlights then you drove me home is it teeth-shaking polyphony grace and completion or nothing

Do you know how many cities had been built on the mainland and the trains there how they’d glide over the marshes and the hazy sea carrying business men in starched collar shirts who peered out windows that would fog faster than you could wipe them man why are there mountains when the last fire dies we rebuild with foundations set just slightly higher on compacted ash and bone spiraling skyward at the GWB will you take the wheel for a while I’m suddenly real tired we two running our course your summer version was so fresh and fertile emerald green the wind in your hair like wind Russian through the canopy and I was green too with robust fucked envy and the way suspension bridges shake when you’re stopped behind trucks sailing into 1999 And now a road connects the cul-de-sac to the adjacent development but there used to be trees stretching back and there was no way through and I was thankful for the mystery but by the time that girl had hanged herself I could have looked out my back window and watched her neck just snap baseball field lights that shine over the shedding pine each bulb’s a blinding sphere in the secular nation unhurried sirens moan pitches that glaze my eyes she’s just a pale fleshy typewriter-light advertisement for a wind chime that emits rays which resonate in the polluted sky all entrances to the Merritt blocked off I mean I’d love to believe that death’s just the beginning as the shutters fly open and the breeze gives me pause I know what’s out there morning phone calls silence and resentment and craters a new moon built in a line As the descent began I got the distinct impression Lake Michigan had been frozen for decades I conducted the warmth from my metronome sternum to our massive jetting vessel billowing plumes of spent fuel the tundra under us cracked and ruptured to reveal palisades made of blades of gray, gray bristling grass and papulose lichen I was so frightened as my grip on you tightened your skin got slicker I am a deserted bus depot though our approach suggested an American hazy sea like the one I found inside after driving you home once still half high I-90 through utter desolation I sense evil at the heart of each far flung well lighted home I close my eyes and see cellar stairways vermiculated with delicate animal bone musty rooms house racks of fur jackets spattered with plasma on a bus in Indiana I called you and screamed under ceaseless patterns of weeping light We drove a hundred miles that day to see a Halloween parade skeletal autumn in Cold Spring parents holding hands with Pale Death’s infants shivering on the courthouse steps in polyester robes and exposed bone thermals march them down to riverside square your teeth gnash together as you chew an Excedrin on the way home the empty parkway wound its way back through charred black pine just like a wormhole hickory death rattles into stagnant tracts of sky like warnings whispered antiphonal stridency that slept for half a century and where are you as lives are punctuated by moons I’ve never loved you more than when you said “I’m so scared of all the things I risk with kids I never knew existed” time machine rotors ripping holes over Freehold constellations rearrange and orbit ‘round the steeple of First Presbyterian Church I am Bear Mountain I am entering orbit on the way home the empty parkway wound its way back through charred black pine just like a wormhole a bridge becomes an island when the ends are disconnected wind is feedback antiphonal stridency that slept for half a century and where are you If I should return like I once did animals will mark me with brown infant eyes the same eyes whose lids I kissed the high grass in which they sit is shoulder length and hanging on your forehead a week is four years in ancient hive minds and soon those eyes begin to well up your shallow grave concealed by fragrant leaf piles black glistening bird eyes averted Exotic vision permanently red-light squinting for hours natural American spirit doctorate make love to inanimate objects pasteboard decked out in Ikea finery without use of a pole she swings her thighs clamped ‘round infinity in the eye of a maelstrom of Marlboro mail-order memorabilia rivers mountains and smoking shirt jackets I am his liver I’m gray and decaying my texture’s a sidewalk and Notre Dame’s playing afternoon’s wristwatch deposited in nightstand’s drawer if Jerry knew he’d build a marquee and charge her silent watchers and they’d pay in foreign-looking coins that would turn to dust in his dresser by morning yeah you’re gaslighting me I can see through the dusk beams walking with your fingers in splints yeah in her last moments I pined for times when I could never have dreamed of being responsible for the charred remains presently huffed by the most famous of the celebrity teenage drug casualties the wind the wind the wind the wind the wind the wind I met the first guy who said “I’ll always remember this night, Jane” when I brought cigarettes home on a whim it was really him and all of us other guys who’ve said it since then well we’ve been trying to mean it as sincerely as he did there is a metal divide between myself and this lake in New Jersey silver seaweed hands reach up and grab a woman walking dog pulled in never heard from again focus on shining tension we’re striders on the surface of striders on the surface I found a dog’s leash on the shores of the Pacific it means nothing to me
Nightly empty luminous ballrooms roll back in your skull I resigned myself to all the disappearance I was sure the cops would come calling some sick shivering morning I live in Newark now where cars speed away and weekend freebasers bury their stems in shaded groves and muted clearings in Philadelphia we didn’t know clammy hands and beaming thresholds and I’m visited by naked reality in the higher gloss of the cars that cut in front of me and depression is nothing compared to what’s in store for them having hitched across America like an itinerant laborer or a serial killer on pulsing arterials I numbly recline in a filth slicked lawn chair as our garage yawns behind me with tunnels the pinkest sky I’d ever seen still pocked with dirigibles and flying machines opened up I thought it’d begun hailing but amethyst and glass were raining down from an unmarked aircraft covering the cooling tar totally in manufactured street sheen I’ve been finding clipped-off Parliaments everywhere lately I take it as a sign that you’re around see J passed away for the first time in June and the last time last night in the Warren as a warm round mournful sound flooded my room like blood does from the faucets of pitch-black bathrooms during adolescent summoning rituals