For Detroit

I am close enough
to the city

it is shelves
of light

it falls off
like a noose

I make a drawing
of the noose

it falls
as though
I am a ledge

I draw
the ledge

it falls like guilt
cold,
shining

if I draw
the buildings fill
with rivers, trees
birds

I beg to plow

open the mouth
of guilt

soil and creatures
spilling out

Upon Your Return

alone in the house
with few sounds

sometimes an
insect bumping into
the panes

pouring over maps
stacking books
just so

the breeze
sucks my hands
out the window

living in this
smashed down
skyline

it's been easier
to write
nothing at all

avoiding language
by moving it
in heaps
around the room

this morning
it won't lie still

barking out of
my fingertips
until

I tell you
this is the real
beginning

every morning
love
will be pressed into
our palms

like a coin from
a doting relative

the rough sketch of an inability to write

there are no words to eat
the city is barren
I can't see anything

poetics
lost to

to bricks

this world in the morning
is a quick heat
and feeling nothing

perhaps only a need
to be lifted up
by my hair

but what do I know
of this immaculate season?

finding things from within
is murk, like river bottom
and the last sip in the glass

To be young

It's not missing
the moon sinking over
the city,

A deep clementine falter.

Its not missing us,
you sway
in our
used to be

Time
is simple

ours, unerring

I sink to my cigarette knees
Sometimes

Bearing up the memory
A farm field bird

Wood floor wings

The red suspender
Days

Blank Black Print

just this morning

the bodies unearthed,
tallied like
stacked wood

I've seen
the blank black
print,
etched
in undertows


the color of blood
is your new home

You are the good
the do ing
of good

While
my saddle sits at home

my heat snatched up
fled and lifted
into the itch of a jungle

Or the vast binding
of some open plain

The break of me, look

So that
beyond communications
and slender
future
we might talk a while

Squirming through months
I'll watch the columns

Those whispers of genocides
and wonder

Horselessness

Strange that this is
January

The earth is
So awake

The colors
Puncture

It is as though
My life never slept

This year
Meant waking

And mostly
The sky

Has been
Underneath me