Coyotes calling. A corrupted audio file
of children laughing. Gray vapors rise
from highway smokestacks like souls
dissociating from their bodies.
On nights like this I give way to the raw
purple umber of the celestial maw,
swaddle myself in a vulture's shadow
like a widow's shawl. Exactly now,
a newborn is gasping its first breath
as a failing throat rattles its last.
The air shifts and pulses with a song.
My mouth forms a word like a finger
running the length of a string
on a beer-stained guitar.

. . .

A shawl woven out of candlewicks
lights up when the first note hits air.
I am a country song played backwards—
miracles unfold. The spirits
once took control of my body—
brandy, bourbon, bitters. I was tired
of decay, a harmonica dipped in beer,
a pungent reed. Tired of being baby.
There's nothing holier than prescient
lips that press themselves against metal.
Nothing more beautiful than
the sound that betrays the form.

. . .

On nights like this, when records spin
on blank, I run my finger over the word
S A D, pierced into my ankle drunk
the same week I burned my arm
with a cigarette for an audience
of one. Each day, as the inked letters
fade away, rubbed into amoebic blur
by my stride, I'm able to hold on longer,
little by little, to all the singing faces of all
the beautiful people and all the bereft
trumpeting of mothers bounces backwards
in dying waves of sound, inert potential
in the shuddering stillness
of baby-blue mornings. 

__

Written in a parked car by moonlit smokestacks on a winter night in Iowa. See: blue screen of death, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Período Azul, Awful Dreams by Lightnin' Hopkins.