They laughed when you told them yr name
Gnashed and cried, screamed bloody murder
Did their damndest to make you come apart
You walked the edge of a chainlink fence
With yr hands on fire, a smile painted on yr face
Yr guts in a brown paper bag
They broke yr favorite things, took
Yr hardest-won toys, those pretty pretty boys
No kiss lasts, you said. No tide relieves me
Something as simple as flames –
You broke it down, took them to places
They never wanted to go
I see you now poised on the edge
Of some inconquerable cliff
Pointing to the foam with broken fingers,
Mouthing truth and faking it among whitecaps
Made to madden and reinvent you
Waves break because everything does
Yr skin is someone else’s leather
Stretched too tight to fit over hollows where bones
Don’t know their place locked in the execution
Half-assed pirouettes spun in the periphery
-----------------------
Drunk on the blood
Of six generations of Texans
My lips are stained with Mad Dog
My teeth chatter
My skin crawls around me
High on southern hospitality
Comfort seeps from poverty’s pores
And I don’t pretend to understand
Anything as complex as dirt
Even though I know
This flavor, this grit
Of seedwheat in a summer Coke
Lightbroken air breathed
Through harvest filters –
I have been there
Scratched it onto tabletops
Puked it onto carpets
Tried to wash it off
Until I was pink and raw
As a barbed-wire newborn
Drunk on the sap
Of a family tree
I draw the poison out
Eversoslowly
Through the hollow end
Of a wheatstalk spike
