eternal return
after the train derailment, the sunsets lasted twice as long. my uncle defeated the purpose of his bunker by overdosing before the war could start. before chimneys, chimney swifts were just swifts. the key to reading this poem is to imagine yourself extinct. i drove past the same house everyday until it burned down. after my dealer got arrested, switchgrass grew around his car like the bones of a hundred lizard tails. when i bit the wafer, the wrong body flooded into me. clouds banked like clouds. i didn't understand how they could fit a river in the atmosphere. the medical bills came postscripted with inspirational stories about kids with cancer. every morning, crows by the bus stop pretended to be an omen.
all three of the gift shops at guantanamo bay sell castro bobbleheads
in the basement, we stripped phosphorus from match-strikes with nail files. bring the war home. punch your neighbor. when the bellringer left his post outside the kroger we took the change in his bucket and distributed cans of mace throughout the neighborhood. dusk fell over the reservoir's scald of water like a hood on a detainee. if i was more important FBI informants would be reading this poem. the advantage of being low-income was that less of my taxes went to bombing civilians. in the highway median, coral mushrooms blossomed out of a paper bag. the geese all flocked in the wrong direction. after the dillard’s closed, two competing naval recruitment centers set up shop. outside the hospital, snow fell from a chemical plant.
the insurgency turned the used car lot into a staging ground
desire paths ran the lawn like hesitation marks. my doctor, holding a tongue depressor like a shiv, told me his crocuses came up six months early. 300 feet above us, tourists in a hot air balloon photographed an unmarked graveyard. at the bonfire i burned my medical bills and watched the smoke roil into a broken arm. after the armistice day parade, a city employee swept electric candles into a garbage compactor. before folding the sheets back into the bed, my ex left their set of keys on the armoire. if history is the history of class struggle then why'd my landlord leave me a pan of brownies. on the radio they were sure we'd still win the war. it was only by the grace of god that i got out of the closeout sale for pitchforks unscathed. as the anthem played we all laid down like lenin at his funeral. when we squinted, we could still see flowers rising from the scorched earth.
