The ghosts at play beneath my skin
kill all happy thoughts. Children wither
down to sog and blisters

out on the street, under my touch.
My loving is a black cataclysm;
nympholepsy for leper’s bread.

I’ve staggered into light before:
when I was young, before all
the touching dried up, I played
the colors in my big American
backyard, blowing Spring
birds that never hung
around long enough to get
my name.

The ghosts at play beneath my skin
shake their candy-hot wings.
My nights, crowded with zombie sugar:

my dawns, doused with hounds

I was walking last night
through a city emptied by sleep
and I was walking last night
through fire blossoms of feet
covered over by vein’d pavement
and I was walking last night
through the tradition and crushed
beauty of the Poems
and I was walking last night
through every American home

We were fat in every bed
and blooming with tendrils of smoke
We were dizzy with spin
and trying to vote our conscience
though our conscience was hard to find
We had torn apart those lands
we feared and discovered them
in our dreams

I was walking like a terrorist
through a city darkened by
invisible rain
I walked like an insurgency
owning nothing but resistence
and opening from the inside
out

Sucking water,

the venusian venetians are blind to what
hot tolls erupt. When I was younger

among
or agog
within

hemlines embraced, hemlines followed
the course of wind-swept pelts.

It’s along those days.

My skin was and isn’t
flustered by tidal grift.

The renunciation chafes
after a while. Rain maybes
treelines slim and noxious,
so houses might pop up
and clean the grass with
streets. I’m alive

somewhere in there:
buzzing and crackling
like any electric
in-between. She puts
her hands right through
me, breaking me

up. The tornado of 1924.
Everything gets torn down.