for Rico & for the monsters who made K2 bang back in 2012.

Zeke is speaking

with lips that

don’t open. Fried,

aghast.

I don’t like it out here, dude, it’s just us, we’re just out, standing.

This is not being high. This is lost.

Zeke got popped for

smoking real weed in

Georgia before and that’s

why he’s freaking out, why

we’re smoking this mind-scramble

shit that feels like huffing molten scrap

metal in the first place instead of

some actual weed. Feels like

an old, ancestral illness in the blood when

you hit it. Stirring.

Nothing worth romanticizing. Everything tastes like shit.

They drove by, looking out

“a while ago” I say and

my voice doesn’t belong hanging with the wetness in the air, syrup dripping from big trees.

yes and they’re back & I can’t get arrested again

We’re fast, bright.

What if it’s permanent?

“Being arrested?”

This shit we smoked

 o fuck the lights swooped, crawl to the water

That black road by black water,

I’m sitting up against

the car and this shit tastes awful. Smoking

it makes my bipolar come

to life even when we’re

dead for a bit. Cannot believe

I paid money for this. Heart feels like

someone else’s. I’ll never again’

rest fully. I am a creation. Far from birth.

The sum of my intake. I don’t know why I do it.

Zeke’s in that dream that

comes with summer sundown.

dude they slowed down they

fucking basically stopped they’re just gonna—

(but earlier i saw this girl drinking

ice water & taking

pictures of herself

from all the angles

in Chippewa Square)

—gonna come back, let’s roll

fuck, I know he saw me

(the muscular oak

trees there grew

a great handshake

over her and

she posed with

big trees &

did not care

who watched her do this)

Breathe in, my melted ribcage:

I have not breathed

in so long—

I hate when

you smoke;

you just stand

and don’t say shit. I can’t

feel my fingers and I feel

my nails, my teeth and we’re going to prison.

Legal isn’t legal here. I drove into mud.

hot sweat from him

and I smell it

instead of the

heavy fecund groping

labyrinthian garden

under our bones. Zeke

ends somewhere, then I start.

I

think this might be it,

we’re dying. At last.

“This girl today,” but nothing else aloud. Speaking rattles the embalming.

 

The kind

we dream of

smoke shouldn’t ever

be so white

(& i looked

at her with

all her freckles)

let’s just finish it at home,

now, okay, now, living christ, shit

amidst that buzz-saw tinnitus,

that feeling that

something is finally here

with us,

taste so rancid

in me; I

am so dirty.  

The smoke: you never know

when it starts

or when it

leaves you

like belief in anything; the present tense evaporates—

(so, so many freckles

upon her, her

in a hot big sweater

in the damp

murder of afternoon)

we’re probably both dead

dead, irreparably, and this is some velvet cloud glory hole—

I’m just

going to go dammit fuck

you

(blue jeans were

ripped, the lightest

red hairs raised

on moonrock white)

—Zeke  unravels with

impunity on the

K2, always. Bluedark turns to burnt air. Foreign

now.

Once before I smoked it & came to know this is your life, you were once a child & that is gone & you were a young thing & now you are less, shrinking every day, held among the rain & the things that grow low down close to the floor, you’re in it, something you can never be stands just outside your heart, waiting—

no mother anymore to save you, nothing but old prayers withering, suspended, no ears to catch them all, just you & a handful of days between utter black dark sleeptown & that rip in the fabric, onyx night unto me…

paid eleven dollars for that. Unholy.

(she looked like a

thousand girls i’ve seen;

comforting like home like honey & thunder)

& that was what that was.

No hunger for days. My ribcage, Christlike.

Where’s that profound shit this time? We gotta roll

He’s melting down. They didn’t even

see us. We

are with the

bludgeon of night in

the illustrious moonglow rubbing

ever-untouched wooded cradle and

it always smells

like rain out by

the river and

Can you see? Can you see on this shit right now?

(the best part

of seeing & not speaking

is filling the skin of

another world with

whatever you’ve wanted

since you could breathe. The only things

i don’t ruin

are the ones

i don’t touch)

I don’t know how I got

down here, this moment

where I am on

one side of

my life and

everything I’ve touched

is elsewhere and

I can make my eye twitch/I’m going to fucking die—

He’s coming back, Jesus—

I can do absolutely anything—

yes, a chariot glides over purplish mirage, nectar seeping at the corners, godly painting with rain.

O this is a time

where I’m praying to die

and he’s serious.

Aglow. Alive. Renaissance bright

those headlights,

(i knew even

in that first

moment of togetherness

that she & i

never speak &

we are not

the same species

maybe she

smiled at

me when i

wasn’t looking because

that’s how lucidity

works, i hear)

red, blue ignite:

together we make

something very patriotic

I’m so happy to be adorned by such an unsullied white mess of light.

he is crying

my friend

is choking

his eyes are red

his eyes are vacant

he is sad

I wish I

was still high.

(when she left

down the street

i took her place under

the great earthen

round of applause. trees were

just trees then, so

i bought these

drugs to grow

movies after dark.)

do you think

I’m somewhere in

her selfies: eyes

closed, trying to

look somewhere else?

scatter me steal me god fuck: after K2

show me

Renaissance-white

bodies of

strawberry and sunset-headed girls

my hands do not reach

show them

melting against the grain

of other mouths, birth me a

city to sleep under

show me what

it is exactly

that you wanted me to do

with all this walking-around time

show me what

you know

because I need to know

what I smoked and

sleepwalked away

I need to know

this absence

of pleasure

was for something

I need to know

if anything was worth anything

if my body was just for rusting

if I thought I was a god

when I was just meat

decaying gracelessly

with every season.