NIRVANA

When I was young the fucked up kids
slammed in the pits, raging

against suburbia’s poisoned air. 
They nodded out in basement apartments,

cupping their hands around a flame,
Jerry Springer sputtering on the screen.

In the old nonsense video a janitor
thrashes slo-mo around his mop,

trying to dredge up the sharper pain
of being young. The cheerleaders go wild. 

I mixed bong hits with Southern Comfort,
spent all night communing with the tube,

watching my heroes go to spit. 
I sang into the muzzle of a gun.

A SUNDAY DRIVE

a gang of sparrows breaks from the dying oak
the last sputter of a pointillist’s brain

before it frizzes out     down the road
our babysitter hangs from her seatbelt in an overturned jeep

across the field a farmhouse glitters like a chandelier
two officers trudge over the ditch in blue parkas

in his drinking days
my first boss’s girlfriend left his sorry ass at a rest stop in Ohio

he bought a pint climbed to the top of a semi trailer
and fell asleep to the engine’s lullaby

woke on the highway in a hail of insects
and hung on by his fingernails for two hundred miles

until the driver finally had to piss
when I knew him he was sober living in a trailer full of cockatiels

half-crazed from the racket
we rolled sod pulled weeds from lawyers’ gardens

years later I saw him at the Esquire feeding tequila shots
to a woman with three inches of black roots in her hair

I was not in the business then of questioning
the choices of men in bars

the officers cut the girl from the car and lower her to the frozen ground
she sits a minute then gets on her feet and staggers toward the strobing lights

leaving a shoddy angel in the snow

LIKE MARY OF EGYPT

I’ll have a lion dig my grave
a roughshod pit open

to the auguries of crows
bowing in the scarred pines

no slick montages please
life was short enough

only the flash of heat lighting
everyone I hate decked out

and weeping gin into the soil
as my soul ascends if not to heaven

at least to the roof of the 7-Eleven
when the music drains away

a column of bees rises from the ditch
moss-faced     electric     immune to us

POEM TAKING FLIGHT

I used to see myself as part of the tableau—
walking a furrow, dust reddening my cheeks,
a theme song pumping from the hay bales
on the hill. Overhead, a scatter of cranes

wound their rusted gears. Play the video:
their black insistent outline on the winter sky,
legs stiff as oars. Wind rushes through the arms
of a dying elm and by some backwards miracle

a rust belt town—forge for brick and steel—
rises up around us. Roots buckle sidewalks,
the Baptist Church crumbles at the edges,
busted factory windows blink in a chalk-drawn sun. 

Did you know a swift can heave itself
from the eaves of a French cathedral and fly
ten months without a stop? 
And yet we call them common. 

There are three notes in a chord. 
Leave one out and it sounds spare. 
Not a holy trinity,
but a worldly one: the birds, the fields, the air!

SONNET FOR YOUR FUTURE

A woman fills the sink with soapy water,
pausing to text your obit to her daughter.