Deer On Fire - from the album Vampire Roofs

The way through starts at the lips. To enter,
you must recognize the alien in your thinking.

That thinking itself is foreign, imposed,
beyond the feathersoft but slanted

rooms of mind. An open window devours
the sense of containment. Maybe the air
is filled with bees? A mouth brimming

with sibilants refers without ceasing to rain
that seizes the soul. A tongue at the bottom
of a sea of breath. Try to name how snow falls,

webbing streetlights on houses,
Friday night corners, frostbit vampire roofs
you pin to, unworthy of suburbs,

so broke of love that trash shushes you on your way by.
As if how ice mildews in scratches

left by cars turning in can capture these cold flakes
murmuring in ripples of electric light. Go, dumb killers;

deer on fire lighting dead ends fragrance trees
that shadow security, bleeding smooth posture
with a sharp objection to any kind of protection

that violence imagines a quarter century
into the millennium that goes down the drain,

paining sewers that stitch Coltrane into fence posts
you almost double over for. I’ll keep worshipping horns

even when your sharp cars crumble. And when you get to the creek
leftover drifts crust your soles, almost an excuse to jump. People,

save your houses to stay in when friends rise dead from the water,
when crystal snowfall winks a hide at you,
the kind of diamond eyes that watch you age.

Soon you’ll ask yourself what it’s like
to live at the bottom of the hill