i am thirsty i am the quiet blues waking suit and tie shotgun garbage collector banana skinned skinny bones welfare red and restless and homeless i am 70 billion gunned to the head bullet army lipped i am hollow wet curve of 6 million mouths i am purple night sky pressing tongue into the black and bright city i am grey haired old man’s breath i am beautiful meat i am hard luck

Lee Shelton loved the smokey Missouri night and he loved the feel of a gun in his hand.
He drove his cab and pressed his girls into the night streets with a smile like a gun in his hand.

In the folds of sly Missouri alleys and old tar-roofed houses they called him Stagolee.
They scolded in red eyed murmurings, beware a man who spends life with a gun in his hand.

Billy Lyons was jealous of Stagolee and the fearful respect that people paid him.
Jealous no man told stories of him, that he could not hold fear like a gun in his hand.

Blues men wail about the night Billy met Stagolee in the dark of a Missouri bar.
How he took the hat from Stagolee’s head with great pride and a sneer like a gun in his hand.

Stagolee pointed slow his gun at Billy and shot him through the soft flesh of his belly.
Leaving Billy red and dying, Stagolee walked into a night like a gun in his hand.

Ganesha was blue as the afternoon
His breath was warm against my skin
He sighed in his sleep
He pressed into me

His breath was warm against my skin
I loved the feel of him
He pressed into me
Like diving into the sea

I loved the feel of him
Bright and burning
Like diving into the sea
Ganesha was blue as the afternoon

Dracula apologized to the blue check-out woman he didn’t have the money for the hamburger and he felt so terrible like some dumb little kid but she smiled with her white teeth and her cheap uniform and told him it was alright and she took his handful of green dollar bills and gave him his white plastic bags of milk and bread and chicken he caught at their plastic loop handles feeling stupid and relieved and he wondered if his memories of shopping with his mother as a kid and watching her take her checkbook out of her purse or push a metal shopping cart full of brown paper bags were as distant as they seemed.

J Robert Oppenheimer
Where is your hand on the modern world?
Where is the god of atom?
Where is the father of a thousand bursting suns?
Where is the peace of a nuclear age?
Where is mortality in the face of the great electron?

that mortal youth
the occult delicate
illegitimate
enormous
among hyacinth possessed
claws and serpents
beauty untutored
men
enormous as delicate misfortune
and awe
girl as wild of beauty
hyacinth
strange ruinous teeth
among sons whose beauty wild and believed
gnashed viciously
flowered occult shore
brazen delicate misfortune
fearsome or
strange creature
or mistaken grief

Amelia Earhart was born daughter of a stupid drunk man in the flat of Kansas and when she was a little girl she would wear flowers in her hair like orange animal’s eyes and boy’s pants on her little girl legs and her grandmother would frown at the shape of her.

Lee Harvey Oswald was born son of a dead man in the heat and breath of Louisiana and when he played cops and robbers in the back yard the game always ended with his brothers killing him with their imaginary cartoon bullets and little boy’s hands in the shape of guns.

John Wayne Gacy was born a city boy in the thick streets of Chicago and when he was a kid his father would call him junior goddamn sissy and drink and smile at his son and when he was a man he loved and murdered a soft and beautiful thirty three and called them goddamn sissies.

God was born in an old tenement on the edge of New York against the lips of coal factories and the flanks of stock yards and when the sun came up in the morning he would look out onto smoke stacks and flat faces of cows and shapes of women and men

am I coyote lipped boys with curling sunflower petaled tongues am I airplanes murmuring over lamplight cities am I lion legged girls with soft butterfly faces am I orange slaughterhouse skinned am I cicadas and August afternoons am I Wendy Darling sweating pale pink girl’s fingers slipped between the curves of her legs am I red faced gun fisted am I old catfish women bent under the starvation in their throats am I blue skinned sons and daughters am I gasoline and plum flesh am I black tongued

soft melon flesh blue
eggshell and bone blue
wet velvet tongue blue
wide bright shark eyed blue
smooth snake scaled blue
mute winter breath blue
bloody dirt kneed blue
rough alley lipped blue

American money skeined
American fear mongreled
American whale mouthed
American debt + depression
Dreaming of the holy bomb almighty
Dreaming of snow on the face of Mars
Dreaming of voodoo and absolution
American sly messiahed
American bullet + bones
Dreaming of dead presidents glorious risen back from the dead
American cancerous
American burning bright and ruinous and paradise