Many Michigans Ago

I didn’t understand why they didn’t see it

I noticed their confusion one day

One morning with a snotty nose on some

Michigan avenue.  Waiting for the bus.

This was the truth obviously

Smack dab in front of your face

Bitterest cold up your nose and someone’s written

Hello backwards.

My eyes were open, I couldn’t understand

Where they were looking.

I dropped my pants.

I gripped the icy metal crowbar.

I spat sand into their faces.

I threw my bike off the breakwater

So I’d have to dive to the bottom and fish it back out.

When the time came I turned my eyes to the sky

The moon shimmered and glittered

In my little black eyes

I was a sauna rolling down a hill

I was obviously naked.

I sniffed out the cement and the broken things

There are grass bridges

making walkways across highways.

There are places you can’t get to the other side of.

I’m in charge of finding those bridges… I’m on bridge brigade.

This is obviously the most beautiful thing I will ever see.

Linkoln

I want to thank you for the links

In a house with all the lights turned off

except for my silver screen

Though I hate you for your consensual contemporary territorialism,

Though I hate you for your big words

we hate what we fear

I hate what you don’t know.

I want to thank you

Because I could feel our brains entangling

Yours was a similar shade of gold

Shimmering, glittering, molting

Like big ugly birds loving ourselves slowly

In everyone I know I see something

that breaks my heart,

Something that I never asked

and they rarely said

I sing you break my heart

you keep on breathing

In everyone I know I see something

I decide to hate

And forget to dream about

shimmers that bury me up to my eyes

Forced gaze towards this place where

You are supposed to be revealed to me

In childhood I wasn’t one of anyone

Was I was supposed to say hello

and make you understand me?

If I could bury myself in the earth

I shirked the outside at its game

In childhood I wasn’t one of anyone

That being said, I was alone

Wondrously, crazily, living in glitter mode

Can you imagine how godly I had been

when I knew everything means everything

in the chosen lens

Cure-Alls in a CVS

Love’s more sacred than a cure-all

I wanted to tell you that

I wanted to tell you all that

But you might not have listened

I know you’d take it the wrong way

You don’t write songs for your one-day fixes

You say to someone,

If we spend time together

It won’t fix anything

But it will make it more

Apparent

Translucent

Core

Love’s more like a Big Question

You ask on a preacher’s pulp

It

Love’s more like something you believe in

The others will say they think you’re young

And insane

Love’s something you commit to

When you’re screaming in a field

When you’re out on your own

When you know

The unmeasured paths in your dailybreath

And they won’t listen and they won’t listen

And you believe that someday

They will

Obama's Still Here

It’s the day after the reelection

The streets are empty

College students around bowls of Cap’n crunch

Are saying things like

Of course

It will get better now

It’s the day after the reelection and all the liberal towns

Are strangely calm.

All the republicans

Are still up in arms

It’s the day after the reelection

and we know the future will be our fault

Some Thursday Night

A violin appeared on the bed

She was in the Duderstadt

She said

“I’d like to try to play again”

He ran right through the grass

in his campus going clothes

going

 “I’m making a path-

   I’m creating a raft”

“I’ve found something nice for myself.”

Cutting corners, tricky toes

I knew I’d think about this

And I knew it would help me make sense

I wrote it down somewhere.

I found something nice for myself.

We all think about how we all die alone

We all know the piano keys consolation.

Picking out a disco suit from the Wal-Mart that’s dead

Singing to get myself up there

Singing until I got up to that blue sky sun belief

I wish I could find other words for singing that are not singing

Like….

I don’t know

Sucking in the cattails through a straw

All solid breath once again

At the end of my screams off of lifeguard stands

No one answers back

I’d always linger

And carve my little secrets

Into the sides of the wood

There were

Many acronyms

For things that meant secret things to my heart that no one could know

A secret language that I’ve mostly forgotten now

In your language

You can choose to have an I, you can choose to have a you, or a he or a Name here

I want to think of anything but myself

I want to think of everything of myself

And so I wonder about the violin’s appearance

And I’m glad I asked him

What are you doing running so late?

Because I could never imagine

What’s in your brain