wide as a wishing well

This is very much a work-in-progress, as it scares me a little.

Blue Wheels and Handshakes

We spill like the doughnuts of best boys
at work on a light fixture commercial.

Jay curls rinds of duct-tape around
the lever that lifts his footstool.
Mr. Shingle stepped unsaluted by the
cabbie from the green rail to the trout molars.
Andrew repairs the Keno machines
and keeps some toothpaste in his glovebox.

We meet for bonfires and bathroom doors,
sloshed at four am to gush about
your vintage Bronco, how it drives like
squeezing soap bubbles down a woman's back.

Chris bought a cloak of liquid silver and
sidesteps the anthill outside the library.
Frank hid in a daguerreotype of a rowboat
then sicced the sparrows on his own ribcage.
I run into a janitor I know outside of Denny's.
He wails for vinegar chips from the cape.

Ross rode a coastline that slurs your
tongue hair on a bus down from Seattle,
but steering back up (twenty years gone)
sees now the absence of ice cream shops.

Daniel mawks through life at Chuckie Cheese,
drives a van and owns a full-hilt saber,
none of which will stop Doritos
from mangling their bag design.

"They've gone all star white," he says to me.
And "I want to sell the notions of May on eBay."
And "Where are you these days, you fucker? Around
here, we're stuck with squirt guns in the belly swamps."

Daniel and I are sifting through Seven-Eleven,
and he never says those things, but they
glint and clank in his chaffed elbows,
spring from his shrugs like dumb glee from pinball.

And I remember watching two men shrug, their
mustaches twenty years stale, on a public bus,
after discussing nothing less than Africa and
what a damn shame and what God demands from us --

but it's as if the world reasoned them off
like so many pimples in the face of love.

So what is my love with these shot pipes,
with these new regulations for toilets?

But I can still say Bill, Bill, cabbie Bill
(his beard like bread heels for seagulls)
who drove my mother to my birth --
he would of kept track of Mr. Shingle's ride
from the Motel 6 to the green bridge,
and I want to paint a million pump organs!

O we are armed with eyelashes and WD-40
and how the denim only kids the fall.

But Bill would say there's still New Zealand to see.
Bill would say I feel it coming on --

and all that code that crawled from Oklahoma
to slap up a church we're sure to overswell.