American Corduroy

I remember nights of Imessage insults driven through sprinkled streets,two white trash wanna be’s dueling with roman candles,carbon dioxide limping off recycled apologies,snaking from the muffler to the window of lovesinfallible four door sedan, its crash tested, top safety rating.Close the garage it's timeto get to business.       Darlingif I told you I longed for a nightmare, would you believe me?speaking like a broad who gets off on being tied upspit on

there's a kink between the window and the muffler keeping us alive,             it's the thrill of suffocation, that ever so incandescent phrase landedon panting lips, ‘choke me’ revolving like an elegy to innocence; the animalistic intentcan’t stop won’t stopthrill of looming death, fingering pink piano keys in a dire spring,that blonde matinee of american corduroy, clasping starlight and butterflies,trudging through heavy air, fascinated with the way each stuck to her skin, butterscotch scarssprouting honeysuckles; we would have been beautiful if it wasn’t for

God andthe IRS.

There’s news,

the old hound you loved is dead.Milky eyed and mean muggin gray, she blindly wandered the house,sack bunting loose shoes and goring table legs,her trash compacted face wrought into that extraterrestrial pecan swirl.A seizure took her while I worked, she died alone in the living roomlooking like a botched acid trip, her spellbound smirk half relieved,half terrified, the scent of unbrushed fangs cloaked in expelled bowls,hoisted to heaven in a black leather La-Z-Boy.I imagine this to be the pinnacle of modern death, hairy pride and

the diarrheal

ascension.Do you rememberthe night we went dancing?your dress too tight to drop it low, my prideto high to admit you were taller than me in heels,you tugged at coattails as if theexistential wind were inching up your skirt,trying to cop a feel with a newly cracked Pabst

gripped like a rose.

When we leapt off the porch to go to the shore,I gave you that hackneyed promiseI’m still convinced is worth something only once,that first time I expelled it out of instinct       starved wolf pack depravitylike a promise to God in a moment of terror, you can’t shut it out,can’t mute your own repression, can't cannibalize your own words

not anymore;

You returned it on the zenith of the bridge, steel tongue grafted over the inlet,the charter vessels roaring in sync with boiling passion

You spoke reluctantly,

as if choking on something you’d been meaning to saybut never could

still to this daynever could;

held over my head,

somemeant-to-be-broken-take-twice-a-day-with-food-promise.

I went on huffing salt as if trying to wake from a dream,staring over the sapphire expanse of the Atlantic,wondering how such darkness could mirror the stars.In the gravel lot years before we parted, the sky was a snapdragon,citrus clouds seemed to stare with fiery eyes,I knew it was just God watching me make mistakes,cloaking wisdom with peregrine wings.You always hit your head on the roof of the car,there was a trampoline rhythm to it,the sound became our heartbeat, alive and drowned in darkness,neon lights leaking from the dashboard,filling your eyes with psychedelic splendor.I stroked your feline back, wrenched over anddazed in pure love politeness, under spell in shoulders boney grip,you levitated in the wake of disasterlike a cherub in the eye of a hurricane,voice echoing convictions in a tired rasp.

At christmas,my signature naughty-coal-in-stocking-maneuver,we’d already bought presents so we exchangedin a neutral parking lot armistice,awkward tears brandishedbrash hugs like credit card paymentsor post-holiday-poor-gift-returns.We retreated to separate bunkerseach confided to their own secretsfolded neatly into wrapping paper cranes.

Those promises were solar flares bleeding offtight lipped best-left-forgottens,like that old hound and her milky eyessilently promising me she’d live foreverwhile we watched movies she couldn’t see or hear

or understand

on the La-Z-Boy that would soon hoisther to high heavenin a far too comfortable throne of death,a vaguely capricious catafalque, singingGoliath silence, swallowing her final breath with leather lips.

It's true I can’t sleep, I’m constantly rewriting my last words,trying to nail a final epilogueperhaps best left to silence,like the hound and those acorns of tragedysoftly staring into the finality of forever,a wedding dance with eternity,cauterized in the cerebral cortex of Ithe adopted fatherlistening to tongue kissing rainweeping on the roof

untrimmed nails still drumming on the laminate floorher spirit still bowling through the halls at nightnailing mahogany pedestrians like a blind yellow cab.

Tragedy knights itself, quickly becomesthe sainted,the sublime,the sole inspiration,

sitting here in this candle light,low and sorrowful, my passionfar greater than over prescribedpesticides can withstand, far greaterthan pest control can massacre termitesor ants or junebugs, far greaterthan a warhead could depopulatethe Earth, far greaterthan the toll and howl of severed speciesof humanities ceaseless conniption, hence the bottle ofJack resigned to the nightstand;I’d like to stick a tattered rag inside,hear the growl of a zippo striking flint,let the grief stricken crash fill the fuselage of my heart,my face pieced together by firelight,think Poe at a lectern lamenting for dear Lenore.