i.

I am a bowl of plastic fruit, a pulp fiction, hot in citronella fumes

On a summer night’s particular odor

ii.

Like those lost in thickets,

In war-torn forests that absorbed countless ammunition

iii.

This is the poem I intended to write

iv.

The worst thing is telling an American what to do

v.

Why would I want the cake if not to eat it?

vi.

I read of a Mormon financial planner hunting muskrat with mink

Of cryptozoologists tying up legal teams, clergymen living atop alien remains

vii.

Laundry that lay fallow in each Pennsylvania I’d encountered

viii.

The scattered dominions, the backbones of those that came before,

      dusted off, reshaped to form

Lone chimneys left standing in charred frontiers

Where stood the old mines, surrounded by musicy tents,

      a saloon’s supper with low tallying nutrition

ix.

The earth never really liked you

x.

If a tree falls in the woods, I swear to God, you won’t hear the end of it

xi.

Trapdoors of light

xii.

And lightning striking far out in the somewhere else

xiii.

A child sits below a mustard windmill in a static of gnats

A dog leash left in the closet from a visitor long ago

The warbled reflection of an incorrigible person always present

      in a roadside pond

xiv.

There wasn’t the smell of fresh cut grass for miles

xv.

The truth is there were lies

xvi.

There were forests from the trees, pages of words

Origin stories draining through cracked dimensions at the earth’s edge

xvii.

Our gaming consoles needed precious metals

xviii.

At age seven I took an elevator to the 2nd floor with a nugget of fool’s gold

xix.

The kerchunk of cruise liners, the greeting card humor of their comedians

Stranded conquistadors dismantled by crabs on an atoll

On any given weekday in our history

xx.

Smallpox, Typhoid, Yellow Fever, Polio

Soda can condensation, simple pleasures

xxi.

Grandad left behind a list of all the automobiles he’d owned in his lifetime

xxii.

The older model of humans taught to recite their state birds and capitals

As insects slowly pooled in the globes of ceiling fans

And the police blotters read of concluded deer investigations

xxiii.

I’d spent hours drawing clock hands on the empty faces

of my clock homework

The techniques of the destructive adult not yet honed

xxiv.

Showing the back of your hand as a comedic device

xxv.

I know these rooms but don’t walk through these doors anymore

I’d taken all the words from your letters and arranged them in my favor

xxvi.

Like stolen garden flowers from a neighbor who euthanizes housepets for work

xxvii.

The corner of a bank wall streaked with urine from upper west side dogs

xxviii.

Channeling sixteenth century hairdressers

xxix.

And those that let the data speak for itself

xxx.

I believe that hangovers are the soul reentering the body

xxxi.

This is not the poem I had intended to write

xxxii.

I’d forgotten how an air mattress felt

The sound of dishes being done in copper daybreak

xxxiii.

Dying parents demanding their magazines from hospital beds

A betrothed orderly, a restroom’s simulated waterfall

An ambulance looking very self-important, stuck sideways in the snow

xxxiv.

The eight souls of a cat floating in a mirror behind it

xxxv.

Pay per view was our undoing

xxxvi.

The jack-o-lantern brought out the cosmetic surgeon in all of us

xxxvii.

For the record, I’ve always seen New Jersey as fetus shaped

xxxviii.

I am a half-baked vulture in its permeable egg

Passed by tumbleweeds that look like an argument for the impossible

xxxix.

For a moment I thought I could get away with it, this labor

While a fellow human twitches toward sleep beside me

xxxx.

Nowhere is a good place to start

Years and years squandered when I could have just said this