For Barb
mike lazarchuk
I'd write you something
About chiffon air
But my life is unrefined
& love poems prove
Impossible as picking
Shit with birds
I'd rather write about
Rattle snake hides
& black cat moans
Mock hopes&foolish dreams
I'd rather devour you with cobwebs
Obscure you from society
Fill you with caustic sarcasm
Spin you an old crankcase daddy
Of a yarn about fading youth
Hot radio&dry bones
Tell you tales of coyote reckoning
Of death in unlit rooms of how dark
The night the young girl vanished
Draw you into the secrets of
Bad tasting mouths homosexual hands
& my son who lurks in the alley
I'd rather make fiery orations about
Rusty film cans fast drives
Through the abyss blood soaked bandages
& the fetus inside the earth
Take a Viking's funeral worth of
Pleasure reciting you the
Life× history of every
Jerkwater Joe who's every splattered his brains
Against a dingy wall fed up with being
Bleak&bleary in some rat roach
Bottom rung down on rickety row
Hold your smooth hand ghostly
Leading you down that rubble
Strewn path of exaggeration to
Where lions guard the temple of
Insanity's big religion&dragons
Shoot metaphors through the
Laughing mouth of the sky
Make myself as clear to you as
A moon dog's blood
Clear as a bursting egg
In a jimson weed jungle
& if that isn't close enough to love
Close enough to modern love
I'll write you something impossible as
Picking shit with birds
