Friday, April 1, 2016

2016 1/30


A partial index of kisses before the age of consent

Beside the fishpond, too hard, and bumping teeth
in the back of a pickup open mouthed and tongueless
till our jaws ached from the empty feast of it
in dreams against imagined sex smooth as a dolphin's blowhole
furitively, the back of the hand,
shehulk and vampirella and cherry poptart in smeary newsprint
sheen of oil in a hustler, a oui, a cheri
a bad-tracked betamax snowstorm
back, then, drunk babysitter
hitting drums with wooden spoons
with ragged-tatters of insulation hanging like party streamers
with the foster girl beside the dumpsters, almost.
some distant cousin in the funeral parlor break room
to the biker's daughter, the trash-filled woods
in truth. In dare.
yellow polaroids older than memory
frozen sun, rapturous with an unremembered neighbor
who dared me eat a white spider
in the pig farm's dirt
or back to origin, my godmother
with jack daniels on her breath
or past innocence
a girl on a set of steps
who had had a Budweiser bottle broken over her head
beneath the cloud of county fair dreamcatchers
in the trailer park
on a cement pad beside a highway
covered in blood and dresed in white
in the rotting airstream, with old milwaukee
and bad hashish
in the haunted basements
in the gravitron line, the himalaya, the screaming eagle
through clouds of aquanet and cherry chapstick, sloe gin and coke
on the steps of the silverball arcade
in exchange for a Ratt t-shirt
after crawling through a doube-wide window
after everyone had gone to sleep
and rubber banded braces backstage at the crucible
in a maze of basements, and the rooftop of the athena
with college freshman and a mouth full of towny lies
in bathrooms, in stairwells
in the theater they were stripping of asbestos
in bonfire-lit woods in the river smelling mud
in the rock ridges of the hills
with my stepfather's mistress

in prayer to the devil
with shotgunned smoke, with old crow
with two mezcal worms in my belly
with a head full of blotter acid
in the woodshop bathroom atop a cracked sink
in a storm sewer, in a tent shaking with speed
on the handlebars of a half-stolen bicycle
under the railway trestle
in sprung beds and rent to own couches
and roach filled apartments above the street
in a forest green chrysler sedan with a dead battery
in a thousand graveyards
in the kicked in mausoleum
in the empty church
in the ruined house, beside the dead well

before the fire came

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