How To Survive In The Jungle (With A Tiny Song For Flowers)

Capture water and hold it close to your heart,
where the sticky
mass of your body’s blood
can contain criminal secrets. Can hold hostile
hot terrain under a bottom lip like spitup.

Capture water and let it flood in under your skin,
where the pocket
moisture of your dermal underbelly
can sustain its want. Can protect voyeuristic
urges from bubbling up to the surface.

Oh flower! My life for a day in your roots! My fortune for a whisper of your nectary!

Capture water and careen forward like a broken branch,
where the force
of your bailing carbonated bits
can burrow under the soft earth. Can effervesce
minerals in the service implacable condescension.

One In Which I Dream Hotly While Naked Abed

The wet creak you mixes
with a muffled miss-hearing
(due my riot of breath-warm
blankets, smelling of human nakedness)
for a fast fading tropical vision
of mystery.

There you are, delicate hombre,
hiding your weakness beneath the
drooping damp of a stout, heavenward
bromeliad.

There you go, mincing in mild
angelic hops the dreamscape
of what I know to be real;
flashing a roil of greens and reds

in the dissipating umber of a Michigan
cold-bottomed bedroom.

More Than A Feeling

Improbable Canadian rocker (he may be from Flint or Inkster)
working gate 49 in Delta's terminal, blows cereal and Merit Lights
and half a bottle of warm Pepsi at me as I ask about my Austin flight.

Blonde pageboy/mullet has been swung in love. We've no doubt
spilled beer on each other's shoes in the elbow-close confines of good
smoking bars, drawn heroic inspiration from the same jukeboxes

been staggeringly charming for half-my-size women who didn't deserve it.
I catch that his name is Marc, and guess that it kills him each morning to tuck
in that triple ex el white uniform shirt, belt on navy slacks against the heavy

push of Molson-made guts and go to fucking suck dick at DTW all day.
Long deep drinks of coffee, in to-go mugs with busted tops, are shared
luxury, and briefly humane. Marc's gate desk is six inches too short

for him. My chair is hard-backed and busted and we both could stand
to get drunk.

And It Don’t Stop

First snow
rests light
outside our
thin window

Wake up
The weather
is alive
and trying

to speak
You’ll miss
This shit
When you’re

dead man
Get shoveling
And snow
get melting

It’s early
December My
god it’s
still early

to hold
cold clotting
my head
and bones

I’ve a
hard, hot
craving Water
to be

cool wine

A Prayer Before Shaving

You might just consider it, one,
when your close mirrored face
is red-line-y about the eyes
And Tuesday morning just cracked
open hard like a can shook.

Things are happening below
the nose, that, when last night
filled up with assholes and doffed
corks and mislaid complements,
may have seemed immaterial

but we know that that isn’t true.

Steam clouds the bathroom.
Sits slick on still chilly tiles
as two wooden hands creep
up to do the deed you always regret.

Matchison Terminal Blues KO

He slipped on a sure-fire herringbone
jacket before he slipped on the floor.
Get noticed, meet people,
see the world.

See the world from the floor looking up
he guesses. Watching skirt
corners flap away
to the bus.

His pants were dampened, dirtied from the wet
spot; where you are going, how you get there.
Stand up fast before you’re laughed
at by girls

33

These are broad days
now, and full. Though
we remember skinny
uncertainties,
we can choose abatement
of age in this choking
sun spilling over the sill.
Said another way:
We can close our eyes
For singular perfect recollections
of standing in a Zeeland cornfield
at seventeen,
run a tongue along lips
that still feel like our lips
even after all this breathing,
or pour out music, hard and backward,
from our ears into that eternal air.
You are nothing time, and nowhere,
Under the full force of our
Creaking human brains.