Halloween Cento (Cento from Horse Less Review 8, part 2)

Everything smells like wet lawns & burned charcoal
in a suburban backyard. Their sweaty palms make etchings of the dirt ........on
long fences of night.
Or you come to the grass
the other side of a cattle fence;
stay longer, count the day's keloidal cells.

**

This is the house we have always lived in.

Eyes rimmed red,
dusted skin,
can you see that I am transparent? I pretend otherwise.
Who crushed the brain with numerals?
Who are you to talk politics? I know
the simple morality of a gun under your pillow --
bookended in sheaves of leaves, cotton --
in this country, left to right, top to bottom.

**

You've been mastering the dream; you conjured our whole ........neighborhood!
They knifed you & scooped out the bad
drills & cranes & trains & planes & automobiles
at night. At ten o'clock, the metal screeches down.
I'm scared to go to the party with you. It's my party:
a graveyard receiving bodies:
storage of the unappealing & inedible.

**

At the exact same moment
(that flat wide blade slung over your shoulder),
behind a velvet curtain in the foyer of the art gallery, a boy punched ........the,
the mirror, a window behind which
I have carried a torch
in the unperishable past. I function, at the time of telling you this ........story,
fine. Another trance upon us, then.

Or lullaby & goodnight. The fate of a nation,
whether or not to be savage
by these few simple rules. Their book deals with disappearances, ........& the
negation, to the deepest blue. But it's hard to get the blue of this ........sky. They
entangled like vines in summertime. Between skin & clothes
I dreamed I carried a snake.

**

When you see us burn things, read the smoke
like a god to me. Let be be
air for sale.

Am I losing you? The white marble
on your forehead
lets go her balloon. We will do
some sugar cane & melon. Barely
caused a scene.

The sunset shifts;
the black sky
reeks of progress.
Locks click
still like that
bag full of headlines
you're supposed to live.

**

& if we're really here
I was born for this, just as you were born
of its hairs, those along the back,
with more thought, more flesh.

**

Listen to raccoons clawing through the gutters
without us knowing. Remember
& smile more. Say something that will follow me
right now. The ducks are not ducks anymore. They're the center of ........the pond.

**

horse less review 8