The songs of people trapped in the air

the time is hidden hell, the air is muffled strange,
the wooden gates in sunlight are a mansion's porch,
the walls are folding outwards in a sneer,
all birds within the highway lines are screeching
insisting on a home in highway air for me and you,
pine-needles and maple leaves fall stricken
through the air and fall so gently on
simmering pavements, a sledgehammer in a dream world
falls on their passages, disintegrates the gentleness
of their wafting down, makes the roots tremble
in their most fertile soil, climbing to riverbanks,
shredding stone with the urge to grow,
five girls fuck run under the bridge, tying a rope swing
to the rusting girders underneath, giving birth
to five baby demons in the brown water,
they are my sons, speaking fresh from the womb,
striking a match on the encrusted metal,
beating their new hands on their watery chests,
thudding their heartbeats into mine,
stringing their blood-murmurs on the wind,
tearing the sighs from swingsets old and trembling
placing them back in aging carbonated beer bones,
making a cut lawn of every future, breaking the knives
in the grass, the green blades where a guardian angel
danced his last, and an infant spine went unprotected
as he ascended on a river of chimney smoke
through the shallow sky of an early winter
placing his hope in the cupped hands of a young girl
standing on the red porch boards of her house insanity,
black-eyed susans willing themselves out of the soil,
screaming bumblebees offering honey from
a broken stem, nourishment from war-torn earth,
love from a pistol weeping tears of oil.

the mountain is strange in the early light
it seems to have moved closer to oceans thrown
thrown sideways into leering lantern eyes
watching to see if faith can shake all foundations,
and the prophet's voice resound throughout
every payphone. the stream of whiskey water
brown and clean, over the lichened stones,
over the man of water and the highway of water,
over the ribs of water and the earth of water,
throbs a heart in the moss, pulls an indian cucumber
out of the famished soil for a starving mouth,
the nourishment proceeds into the dessert's taste,
the earth and the human ribs gasp in terror,
both are starving, both capable of discordant orgasms,
both raising fences against the entrance of
their own children into a new garden, the flowers
appear to be plastic until a toddler's hand or a violent
breeze from hurricane-stirred oceans
touches their lips, finds the patterns in a grain of hair
that grew their stems shriek upward in the soil,
wheelbarrow full of steaming strength new life,
yellow petals making sense of charcoal core,
tearing loose the clouds that gather in a fuming dome
above the garden's crayon mountain.

this is no earth, but a fuming ball of dream,
no holding hands, but broken bodies thrusting
compound fractures we call genitals into each other's
crushed forms, resuscitating grey flesh, bringing
a tan to an android's cheek, breaking every blossom
and bud with a deflowerer's experienced hand.
in the metal of the gates lurks the craftmanship
of the lecher, and those who hang on to earth
from desperation and not from love.

the garden is a rectangle of pumpkins,
a rhombus of pears, we find no trouble there
where the pink and orange glow of mild colors
heats the air, makes small volcanoes burst
like bottle-rockets in a century that fire
does not recognize, does not touch hand-like
with its flaming heat, tracing backyard pools
with fiery murmurs of deceit in the air.
the chlorined water trembles in the movements
of unprotected sex, and an infant with a glowing
radioactive mouth is born from coupling
in the pool whose water surface is coated
with pine needles, coated in maple leaves,
coated in suit jackets from thrift store sales
thrown off from businessmen in burning offices,
inherited by isolationists who sleep on
beaten mats in a streetlight dawn
through a cheap apartment window;

this is what happens when a tall glass of beer
collides with a mind trapped in forty-hour
work-weeks and then suddenly freed,
free to see the glass tables that stretch
into eternity, and the disintegrating restaurant
bars that comprise the sky. angelic forms
are drinking there, pouring the whiskey through
their hearts and onto the floor.