On the telephone, I know

So I leave my windows down

Come inhabit this room

I can stand growing old

So you've found out

Play it all back

awake

what.
awake.
raucous R.E.M.
"it's been a bad day
please don't take a picture."

before 6 are
15 milky minutes
where a girl I once knew,
acts as a caricature.

and oh nudity!
like painted carnival booths...
muscles and skin of delacroix
or el greco!

one more canister
of clicking slides--
noah's ark behind a cardboard city,
a curious and falling pilot,
and a perpetual staircase of escape--
time's up.

Ventura

On the bleached Ventura coast of California
salt and sunscreen combine and run
into the corners of my eyes.
Those eyes upon the pier's end: the meeting
of drunk fishermen and barefoot women.

Above fourteen thousand feet
of golden-hot atmosphere, sweat rolls,
singeing and blurring my vision.

What West Coast freedoms are sold for altitude!
For those sunned statuettes, those eager children,
the seagulls, the fishermen, and their prey
never visit my third dimension, my cockpit.

And yet, I find a second ocean,
more measureless than the first.
A new abandon of yellows, whites, and blues.

I don't expect to be buried

I don't expect to be buried in Noble, Guymon, or Shawnee.
I doubt my name will trace these cemetery plates
or be entered by letter in the records of Oklahoma.

No, the muted, mustard gold and the wet greens
of Easter farmland is but one palette I must process.

A process of ink-staining my cognition
with the odors of soil and tomatoes.

What raw odds

At eight past eleven, I stood outside
the roar of coiling limbs, the plastic alcohol.
Then down those slanted halls, but first ink
of two black crosses behind the knuckles.

Oh tobacco, you wash over us now.

What raw odds we give conscience,
where men prod over auction goods.
What a solid, silent association
now circles the transfixed and resigned.

Here is a commonplace exposé of the id.

The ink, a cursory scarring in comparison;
and again an immediate release to night.

A Thickness

At eight years, I'd sprawl across a solid bed.

Upon the monolith, my eyes soon dimmed.
But my fingers relaxed against a blank thickness--
a negative substance of my muscles' contraction.

Now, I romance the idea. I glorify it as a measure
of faces, of modern art, and of unfamiliar music.
Where my slackened mind finds substance,
there are bedsheets to lie within.

City,

City, I've read your gospel,
seen your banks erected
in plaster and brick.

City, your rooftops are familiar--
water towers and a highway.

And city, your avenues
will be mine again.