Freeland: An Erasure

Day forms night over again in fine glass sheets of blue.

The unit is.

See my body, a shifting silver ministry.

Hell kicked over two days ago; ground officers shaped time into this shape.

Our country’s a scene in a movie.

A banger, a masterlock, an extension cord, respectively.

Sit inside your anything beautiful, your anything song.

It’s not so bad.

___

Natural life swings wide, turns physical.

Like a good family, we fetch water, mind honor, write letters.

Dream the loose blue tank top, the ceaseless white.

The mirror rejects your reflection, citing inappropriate content.

Dayroom immigrants melt into threads of crucial affiliations.

My father’s contaminating line shares a bottle with me.

A grin strains, readjusts, speaks an earthy state.

Cleaned up, you can culture a facility refund.

___

The US approached with coffee and a bed.

Tired, I read, ate.

Tomorrow the cages will wait for their respective dogs.

A hot bus glows with peppers, tomatoes, carrots—a premeditated drive-through art.

The origami engineering is a dream.

Hanging from stardust, the installed concertina almost winking.

My window opens to a very small wire.

Beyond the glowing retrospect, a region shines.

___

As a boy, I could hop a chain-link fence.

I breathed snow.

I convinced the kids from school the sky was my mother.

Here, men play heroes to crickets in the yard.

I used to run mountains, but I’ve never been on a train.

I’ve gotten used to the warehouse.

The world waterfalls to a future beyond this grass and dirt.

I’ve learned a person can still grow in a pool of gray.

___

Possible futures pour like loud blues from too-small headphones.

I know mine is not murdered.

Let me say it again: I know my future is not murdered.

A wrench heavies through, tumors hours into years.

Divorced from peers, entire legs become teeth, then clamshells, then solid crystal.

I see people freeze, then melt, then freeze.

I would like to ask for home’s number, take her to dinner sometime.

Sixty each pull-ups, chin-ups, and push-ups premeditate a glistening out there.

___

Not even Eliot or Pound approach the melancholy weapon of the punitive farm.

In profile, I separate from this justice.

Tattoo economy pens my skin into a letter.

Dear anyone.

Distorted paintings brush against the sentence.

Any box will logic a soul into a numbered life.

I don’t know what I look like.

I picture my sister running and playing games when my mind is being searched.

___

Even inside this U-shaped slab, I don’t worry about my safety.

I lock my life to a flower pressed between books.

My mom and dad and brother and sister and grandparents and friends all have names.

Bodies and names as infinite as fields of corn.

So do I.

I tell them to sit in the grass and look up at storms and melting lights.

Look and look because they can.

I know one day I will be held again.

___

Some days I walk and talk with other men.

Some days we sprint and lift ourselves until we flower into muscle.

We package our adult selves into small metal walls.

We don’t say we feel like paper in a fountain.

Instead, Dear fish, we write.

Dear kids and bare skin and crickets outside the fence.

Dear Cheerios, dear cherries, and pretzels, and chocolate chips,


   and chocolate bars with orange in them. Dear iced tea

and making out. Dear school. Dear New Hampshire and California

   and New York

and Detroit. Dear barbershops


   and the shape of clothes not blue:

          I remember you.