Mrs. Wheeler is having a conversation with a convincing jumble of interstate
saying something about leaving town

Her children clang like a few angry spoons
arguing in the sink

The whole house is obnoxious

The Archers are at home listening to 'The Buffalo'

Chad's watching owls sing vinyl siding into the trees
and teaching their love songs
to a tape recorder
expecting their guitars to fly

Someone's bickering over the phone with a sea that never returns his calls

Everyone is interrupted

Our mothers sit across from each other
in a kitchen
neither has ever cooked in
who discuss nothing
as intensely
as the aluminum siding pamphlets
sleeping in dust
on the coffee table
covered in stains
from these heated conversations

I never went to school

the room argues with itself

Sophies and Thomases
play in their pajama's
to music
none of their three grandfathers
approve of

The sun burns the lawn
'For Sale'? signs grown from the brown patches of dead grass

The highway tangles its smoky limbs
outside around our town
protecting us from it
forever

everyone forgets
no one goes to church
and your heritage
sits on a bench
in south Texas
continuously

misspelling your neighm
cause
Mary Lou is dead


and so,
at night,

Mr. Cardini dreams of an angel headed owl monster of hammers falling on the Atlantic mountains
like steel exploding in the bellies of trees

like a twine of asphalt reshaping every September evening
if only to scare the women

like a big hovering nothing
manipulated by the timeless and exhausted
now haunted with bourbon
if only to make it louder
if only to make more money

and it pushes everything
upside down
out of gutters
into mines
straight to work
to look out
for the burbs
where no is thirsty
or pushes
the moon
out of place
with hammers
deep into dreams
about the mountains
sitting misshapen
in a September evening

The Wheelers wake him up
The Archers get him a glass of water
and all their children
stand around the bed

contemplating a life
with out choices

Noberto comes in from the garage
and explains

'Mr. Cardini cant sleep
says his father brought him a ghost of hands
spoken out over his answering machine
and it plays

all night
and that's why
There is paper all over the floor

he picks up a page
and reads

'Imagine our home Guadalupe
before its walls and children
sink
into the hilly talk
of our frustration.

A : gamble of your lighting, bright as lousy dimes, spent all over Carolina.

A : hushed America falling on the riverbank like killer machinery coming across the water for Plano and Moyock, in whom I sit lonely.

A : sea of women, emptying into the bay, leaving the shore choked in dresses.

and all us sleepy creatures of the mountains
have stayed awake with the moon
talking no blues
about nowhere
and callin it youth

knownin this low moan of heat in dreaming beds as angst
yet callin it you

Walkin around your kitchen
distressed
and swimming in folk music

Wading through your living room as us poor tongues
talk about hunger
in a book
floating by your feet

where I said your neighm,

( a pale echo of shock returning from the moon to flood my house of prayers already a sway with tension to fall in love in the burbs)

yet couldn't write it down.

Down by the river,
the wind is being baptized
rolling off somewhere
to be alone
and dry
as a dress
undraped
and about the shoreline
like silence

Where all the sick girls of no thoughts or patience
have found themselves trapped
in a large thing of space
known simply
as my absence




Where I came,
following the sun down
slow
over the rooftops
with my finger

My finger hiding from my hand
worried what they'll do together
to these drowning daughters
lapping the beach
in sighs and no dresses

all singing something somber
they don't know
but'll soon learn
with my hands

My hands raised anxious
in skirts
in darkness
in Virginia
where I heard them
cuming your neighm

to rise high loud
and snap in the canopy
scaring all the aging wet mothers at home
worried about the sound
falling from the sky
from another tired wanderer
covering the hills
in hands
and dresses
sent to her
from the moon

of Dixie


















But let me tell you somethin,
all of my fathers left town
when they heard your gypsies were young and not afraid to drive through the breathless expanse of southern magic they so irresponsibly spelled across your thighs.

Where a drunk flood of prairie maids have poured more milk, cream and alcohol.
saying your neighm, like suburbia, is �too loud and expensive
Says he misses you, like all the other tender creatures of no pitch or trouble in the dew.
says all these tones have stepped out of his radio
pressing you against the hills in sleep to make the dark
and its gorgeous
like the high rolling ranges of bucolic tongues
born broken in your mouth
as twang



As Wheeler.
As Price.
As Stanely.
As Fields.
As Labrador.
As Hipsher.
As Cardini.

As all the old boys of tokay and fingers.

As all the poor beat forms way back beyond the ridge in the sticks.

As all the sour silhouettes of whiskey, made of nothing imaginable, rolling in big as waves from space, heard washing up in dreams as surf music.

As a long history of working hands doing so many things in the stern suburban night of grandfather antenna and doppelgangers threading the air with the umbilical debris of coal and people and thinking it landscape, sending them everywhere as the bitter churn of road and wire that has kept them alert on your move from Appalachia.
Where your mother moved in with a navy man

Where your daughter sits, at home, holy legged in her dreams of your pride.

Where someone has no bed, and so sleeps in the records as the two new moons of your cats, the age of your house, the hidden devouring eyes of your lover and the old negro churches of your young Christ mind that still dance your hallways when you're at work or prayer, resting in the heart of Ohio, where you still have no father, but in sorrow, abandon and letters have neighmed new children out of your hips wedlock and lightning heard breaking through the trees


As all us lonesome travelers,
mapping out a book crossing over pages falling out a window sailing through the hills

and callin it wind
and callin it

her


In contrast sinks a calm town of sidewalks
deep
into a pink ridge of chemicals

In their valley, a huge thing,
jagged
and as encompassing in vision as sleep
rolls into the plains
plodding out the tributaries of highway, caught cascading into southern pools of fields
as a yawn of sprawl out across the undergrowth

and callin it

Nowhere

A : dream of snakes, large as thoughts, billowing over the heads of the ugly children of a plastic forest.

A : lull of joy and madness sighed just below space by a southern hush of trees tall in humid stupor

A : noise of suburbs hiding in their basements from music

And all the friends are trapped in the city limits
Full bodies of appetite tangled in a static web of power-lines
transmitting the whole drama of night
and mistakenly calling it
life
calling it
Gail
An : Atlantic hymn of maiden neighms defining the sky as overwhelming and intrusive

A : chorus of Crystals and Matthews a gasp in a stellar operetta performed in a heart

An : element of understanding, blown, unheard, in the dark, by the lungs of CoalBurn,
coughing for her sons,
afraid of their hands and calling it
hereditary
something like
inevitable
kinda like
the wind
As depicted by the searchers
lost in the caverns looking for the interstate and getting outta town

following dad like shame
over the mountains and onto the beach
where they'll rest
confused and write a book
about nothing
for them
called you

A : black tome thrown against a tree causing a hurricane

A : summer of eclipses producing the anticipated sounds of the future

A : Jak, con-fu-flux in shape and as irrelevant to planets as love
and I'm calling it







A : Space Opera

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