unsuspecting liar would you park here near the fire

More names. Name poems. Poem names.

Heather Has Always Moved Away

Trust only the brisk, the spirit
with a little bit of sputter behind
it, the others under the same rain.
It's odd to head for another's awning.
But Heather, I miss you like a roadtrip
leaks music, and I thread my legs through
the fire escape bars to listen for operas
from the cats, their secrets of claw sweat.

We do, we do to daydream of the snag
that will elude us still, come next
October, next ban on leaf burning
lobbied for by your biddy neighbors
and their chimney milk like new Pope smoke.
The mailman knows them and won't say shit.

We want, we want to daydream of the knowing
why the bomb crams like a toothache into
Mesopotamian cobble chinks. Heather,
they have carpet in the porta-potties,
and I have flushed what others install.

God put stinkbugs under my bike brakes
to scare me over my handlebars, while
they say kids these days mistake lists
for substance, and I say bullshit and
lick pavement from my elbows and who knows
along with quartz and tar how much errant hair.

Heather, our community theatre did the Wiz
with four of the original munchkins,
but I don't know what to think of that.
Play intermission feels like you crawled
for a pee out the back of a dream. But
who are these children in line, giggling?

Heather, the most beautiful I've yet to
feel was in an emergency waiting room,
where I watched an old man fling backwards
from his walker like fuck it into the
tiles. You can feel a little or a lot
or a variety or nothing, though more
if you still go in for that caroling shit.

Heather, you hear tabbies like the voice
of an other. Or two. Even better. I want you
to tell me a nightmare about jousting giraffes
or catching bird flu, and I want to remember it
under my nails. Please do, so much do I want to
dream up the yous of how flab scrapes nipple.

But still will the night clank, and still
will the night cram us all sausage meal
into its bus huts and the buses between.
I am just a wish vendor low on pennies,
but come on Heather, come on in and in.
Out from the goofy jail of the bones
you know, in for the vessels you don't.