I light the cigarette 

in your black curls 

a pink sun runs over

our triacontagon spirit ship

you stand in the kitchen in a dead 

band tee shirt 

 

your mate runs back to us 

from the independent 

biscuit place under the highway bridge 

synthetic psilocybin digitizing 

the gulf universe the live 

 

oaks vibrating mosquitos 

fluorescent and I in the quiver 

you standing over the biscuits 

turning the butter 

 

knife into a hash pipe 

years before I wore purple 

you invite me to try the butter 

knife trick lifting 

 

your head up from your tea 

the sea behind us 

the sea always over 

 

our shoulder even swimming 

in the Spring River in July the tea 

water the cow run-off

the pop-up camper the rope 

 

swing the Stones 

in the corporate arena 

in Memphis you half-dead 

in the greyhound station in Memphis 

in an eastern purple knit 

cap fifteen years after the Stones 

four years ago after the Greyhound 

station in Memphis 

 

we read Komunyakaa in the state

run treatment center visiting 

room we chain smoke the interstate 

to the family reunion we swim 

in the Spring River in Arkansas 

as kids we finish the joke 

 

the other leaves hanging 

out there like rosemary 

between us and the light 

and in the nights we drink

we drink too close 

 

your song with a secret 

as the song 

I play you in Oxford 

the midnight I turn twenty-one 

 

we’re drunk on Maker’s 

uncle gave us in the hill country  

we steal on the coast 

out of the subdued supermarket 

the corporate bookstore 

the Chevron depot 

 

I hit you in the morning 

before school 

in the mini van’s front seat 

you push my tooth in my lip 

with your left combat boot, 

 

we trip in the disaster trailer 

in a drifting fall in a green 

spirit ball its interior cabin lights 

awash in all the flow of pier lights 

the ceiling of an aquarium,  

 

you hold me on oak steps painted sky

blue on the front porch in the hill country 

you tell me our love is depressed 

I am drunk and you drape your arm 

over my denim shoulder 

a crying blurring black 

into the cedar horizon 

 

we bury you before

rain comes to turn

a dust world a dark paste 

your inner circle continues 

on the grass edge of the bending 

oyster shell drive of the graveyard

named dead French 

 

our uncles sing no more 

no more darkness in ambering holy oxygen

warming us in the living pines 

half shadow half bird song light 

 

we protect your coffin in Catholic 

skins you bury in your signature 

woolen pin stripe three piece 

our love homolyzing all of us your body 

 

your inner circle surviving 

in ruined Hot Topic and hair dye  

half my innards 

in a crescent in the last pew

 

you are born on the gulf river 

you read forever from every country 

you write every night and outsing 

 

Cohen on Cohen in the top of your New Orleans closet 

hot as hell in the summer past a broken fan 

your brother watches you silent 

from the doorway a palmetto

 

sprouts in the hole in the pine floors 

beneath and between his feet as he weeps 

over the phone out in Texas 

 

seeing you in the morning alone 

your spirit louder than your voice louder than the song 

 

your wry amendments to the impenetrable genus

the lyrics you danced over like a spilled cat  

in the strange atmosphere you perfected 

 

on Mandeville street in the months 

you spent sleeping in Elysian’s medians 

 

you first move to the city 

sleeping above the washers of the laundromat 

and the kindness of the strange owner 

picking on the corner of Josephine 

your rat on your shoulder hiking 

into a sundowned St. Claude 

a route 44 Styrofoam cup of original Coke 

 

in your left hand a teen age 

year swimming in your ear 

your forever voice your love