This contusion-colored evening
maybe you paint the silhouette
of the gaunt tree line singed in '97

when wildfires threatened my development
and the swallowed towns the Klan had founded
the shaded sand dens were party caverns

for them who'd come hallucinate while we slept
scaring our rabbits to death in their hutches
can't remember how I used to live

but they've all cased their jumps
fatally I willed it to be
in the hours of blankness preceding sleep

oh the years we waste faking remorse
every decision I have ever made
bred the branching future's mute howlers

with burst-vessel red eyes
roaring inaudibly
on the freezing morning walk to the dim corner grocery

what hangs over big empty country
reborn in negatives of photos of dusk
regret so huge it's on a phantom axis

receding beaches hissing hearing damage
and the miles-long column of cold moonlight cast across
still seas when my nose begins to bleed

some submitted to having their lights put out
by ba!@&(t thrill killers
in the neighborhood I heard being murdered is no experience

ten or eleven wounds
in it's not about Satan or anything you just die
it's weird