for Lindsay
We climbed and we climbed,
Oh, how we climbed
My, how we climbed
Over the stars to top
tiger mountain
Forcing the lines through the snow.
–Brian Eno, Taking Tiger Mountain
There once was a chick from Fredonia
who had quite a sly way of knowin’ ya
She’d rawdog the sky,
clawing through such winter’s meat.
And I noticed that I wasn’t even high
today, just blessed with her and intersections,
so the trees just lace just veins just branches
carried the pulse of sunset over the houses.
It was ambient jungle, or cold lust all alone
after lying with her in her red bed last weekend
and awake, capable of such softness, afraid
if where we join unhinges. I’m healing, I notice;
though, being far from her, and in a house
where children scratch my eyes out over crushes
and their mother threads her hurt harpoons
trying to tie me to Gulliver. All I needed all along
was some understanding, a slant of oddity
colored from the inside in, deep peach and russet.
I might have a soul. If so,
it has been rubbed appropriately down
with drying rose-petal lotion, something scented
with tastes so saturnine, like lilacs bursting
under bare feet. How could anyone walk in heaven
and be satisfied coming home to broken windows?
Is god chipped wood and jagged games?
On Tuesday I went back to being an alien
paying for the crimes of convolved kids.
Vultures suture eulogies to me, loving up my dreams
until even vowels no longer grog my cock.
I wonder if she’s a mirror where even gender
crests, a crisis of a cinch. I remember when she
was on top of me, tossing clouds down at me,
letting them drip through glissandi fabrics down
drowning me back to life. If pruned, the plant responds
by producing fast-growing young vegetative growth
with no flowers, in an attempt to restore the removed branches.
The specimen curled in his amniotic jar
claws in his still dreams.
It’s because I grew outside the circle
of touches that I shrink when someone
nurses a runoff across bare stalks
reaching through to loneliness. I press
restlessness into my scrapbook, looking
out your windows at the gulf. It’s a cold
morning, gazing into the lake wanting
inside her as we pass a joint back and forth.
Why is the snow so fucking loud, Lindsay?
I want to taste like everything all at once for you.
Someone in this room is very afraid all the time
because circles are growing and eating us up.
Pardon my candor, Dr. Priddle,
but I was fucked from the get-go.
My sister leaned into my dreams as I wept
and I begged her to tell me how to be good.
I know what ‘good’ meant to me now.
It’s an aptness of enclosed, a pang draining
the clay feet out from under you, a bedful
of Lindsay stirring, one eyebrow scarred
from pulled piercing. I know the difference
between big wood and brush. The fists
he used to sculpt me from pulp molt
tonight beneath tears in the clouds
because Charles Darwin is crying.
For every adaptation a choice goes cold.
Because it was hard I am hard.
Hand over hand over mouth. We climb
because there is no place for us on the ground.
Lindsay, this is where heaven dreams of us.
Lindsay, this is where heaven keeps it real.
Lindsay, there are no streets of Lorain, Ohio.
The dead I remember are giving me the cold shoulder.
Lindsay, we’re not crazy.
Lindsay, this is what beauty means.
I’m giving fear a cute name to cripple it.
She’d crawl through the scythe,
and lay her sweet body down on ya.
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