Three Poems

Cave cities in crater walls
collect shelves with books with impossible marginalia

where their readers were
really just drifting off,

but wanted to promise future
possessors

they’d uncovered the deepest meanings.
A feeling

not unlike falling through bed-sheets to the black pillar
alone in the dune

as pyramids scream across the sky, exhausted
by the intentions of their maker.

A blimp delivers me from big rock candied grace
to where mahogany grows on trees and a wolf princess

sends me videos of her doing wheelies on her horse.
I study what I do not trust.

I hitch a ride with a glistening semi-trailer
truck driver who power-bombs me back

into the ork-blood of my youth.
He watches the road like it’s the entirety of outer space

and he’s in charge,
but turns away from Saturn’s outer moons

to bathe in the night of another credit sequence
before reloading the test launch mandated by our new regime.

The Screen

Our sun falls a tired eye
past the meridian. It scatters violet
pieces of mirror across the stove
my mother liberated off a few murdered angels.
She boils spew, a scrotum
forms over the surface she punctures with a steak knife, pushing
it back down to where fire licks the tin’s base
blackening. Our daily loveable nothing
is what sleep always wanted to be.
My mother hacks
New World tar, punctuating
her long complaint about the collective—
a moment analogous with the darkness
comedians retreat to between jokes.
I took six paper bags of mixed currency
off a monk in a pool hall halved by meteorites.
Why does it feel good?
I cut my dad’s throat with aluminum sheeting and it was like
a quiet movie to make love inside.
My mom made jerky out of his hide. We shot down a plane
and built his bones a raft out of the seat cushions.
Her nightly lecture fades with the light, browning out
as I’m reminded of a longing for the screen.

Starship

I yawn alive, rub
mist from the view:

woods buffering awake, a star-
ridden dome, sounds

pulled into quieter waves: a lark
pecking a beetle’s husk, an oozing.

Memories of the moon shrink, earth
disappears a marble in oil.

Who stands on the shoulders of giants, but giant children?
This we’ll call our noblest

imaginable end—satyrs plowing island groves,
toxicities in the moon chambers,

iron heaving and there is war:
the distance between a few words—to crack

ape bone to ape bone
as the sun’s sub-bass crackles on in tiers.

Robots have a joke about us:
the things themselves, knowing only

ideas about themselves
walk into bars and leave.

Earth hardens to a glob in the lava
lamp’s tube.

Earth stops and people fly off—
they discover China, they discover Christ.

Our brains cast lures for shimmering fish.
I was riding a blue horse south when a husky kissed me awake

and dawn came to my porthole in yellow.
I want to rename the light, but the old symbols reek

and the walls become clearer. The walls provide
tremendous pleasure

and the walls
offer their love.