And the moon was a cattle-skin drum
And my life was a way to be measured
By my every lover’s hands
Beneath the autumn-jellied moonlight
My life was a thing
I would die wasting
My life was a thing I’d die to waste
I remember stuffing the daylight into bottles
And burying those bottles in the woods
This was before I split my body
Into images
We dug them up in seven days
And drank them all
They tasted tall
And literary
The dead accountants in our throats
Came back to life again
They spit out angel numbers
Delicate theorems of God
And we were young and apple-smitten
To be one was to be manied
By the many that were one
Our lives
Walking out into a downpour
And picking up a length of rain
And swinging it
Against our fathers
My body was my parachute
And I fell long down into distance
Distant air
And distant carelessness
We held onto the flowers
So we would not fall off the earth
I was ninety percent LSD
For twenty years
And I saw continents
Of jungle jumble
Barefoot darkness
I saw my mind grow polka-dots
I grew so tall
I started shrinking
I took in so much nothingness
I started to look
Like everything
We ate polar bear for Christmas
My shadow was my only hope
I drank cardboard wine
The bones of water
I got so lost
I had to stick the wind with a syringe
And suck it up
Real good
I was everywhere I hadn’t been
My friends were like that too
Herbariums of competence
Haufbrauhauses
Of primitive light
I dangled swords inside my brain
And cut off everything
Post-modern
I was a chain of instances
Like you
And you
And everybody
With dogs made of light
Digging for roots
Beneath their skin
I got cooties
It wasn’t hard
To get our deaths to play with us
Death was the old waffle iron
Between whose halves
We squeezed ourselves
Death was the undercover cop
Spitting down the early bowels
Of L’Enfant
I combed my hair with it
Death’s little fingers
Death was the owl on our roofs
Crinkling its way down the chimneys
Death was a crusty old arcade game
And I had the high score
Death was a mirror that showed everything
Except the present
I loved to look at it
Death was lovely
A pinchable sky
It overwhelmed my friends like weather
But I was home in it
I knew death had room for all of us
If they taught us that in school
I don’t remember it
I powdered my face with death
I loved death like a fire loves wood
I loved death like an overgrown river
Loves a downhill run
And death was an owl with no eyelids
Who chopped up the night
With the beams of its seeing
And death was a Chesapeake cherry
And death was the time that I lied
To my mother when I said
That I never talked to strangers
That I had never walked past death’s front door
I’m the one who painted death
On every flat surface
Within 100 miles
Of our home
Death had eyes like empty houses
Death was handsome as a gun
Death had all his teeth
But didn’t need them
Death didn’t need to live to be alive
Death had a wooden nose
And a bad haircut
A lantern dangled from death’s septum
His face was round like a raspberry pie
I drew him everywhere
I drew him on my babysitter once
When she was sleeping
And she died 10 days later
That didn’t slow me down
I thought death was a horse I could ride on
Until I found that place behind the wind
Where God stood naked
Eating the irony
Of His existence
I thought death was good like butter
I thought death was a pill I could take
And grow rabid
With partial beauty
I thought death was a family member
I thought death was a fragrant anonymity
I thought death was a parlor trick
That most people could do only once
But a special chosen few
Could pull out many times
I wanted that
I wanted to be the place death settled down
Inside of
I wanted death to decorate me
Like I was its only child
Or like if death was my lone daughter
And death wanted to paint my fingernails
I guess I lose track sometimes
Of which parts of me belong to death
Which parts of death belong to me
I always have
There were days where I felt death
Like toothlessness
Triangular autumns
The sun like a wad of chewing gum
Stuck to the sky
The only bit of rain
Like the leftover sweating
Dribbling down God’s shaved back
It all made sense back then
Even if it doesn’t now
I thought death was the hambone
And I was the ham
I thought death was a punctuation mark
And I was the sentence
On which it relied
Death needed me
Just like I needed it
That’s still clear
And the moon grew daily
Like a clover patch
The moon gatekept the sky
The moon was a frozen ballerina
Stuck forever in one dance
The moon was a glorious tooth
The moon was airless
And exacting
The moon was my father’s blood clot
The moon was long, like ice
The moon was there
And I wasn’t
Sometimes
Sometimes I’d close my eyes
And I’d be gone
Not sleeping
Just beautiful
With there-lessness
If I dreamed I did so me-lessly
I’d dream of painters eating mirrors
They wanted to hold onto the real
That desperately
I’d dream of eyes fed up with seeing
I’d dream of wood giving birth
To newborn fire
And elderly fire
Giving birth to new smoke
I dreamt that winter was a ship
Carved out of icicles
And that each year was a bucket
Of uncharted water
Into which the winter melted
And out of which the spring grew
Like green foam
I would dream the most beautiful murders
And the ugliest salvations
I would dream of pirates squeezing themselves
Between the pages of the ocean
Turning over with each tide
I’d dream agrarian
I’d dream my body was a field that death was tilling
I’d dream that death
Was a thinkable meadow
And I was one spiral of grass
Twinkling down near the stream
That ran through death
My animal
Toward some other nothingness