Wavelengths

This contusion-colored evening
Maybe you paint the silhouette
Of the gaunt tree line singed in '97
When wildfires threatened my development
And the swallowed towns the Klan had founded

The shaded sand dens were Party Caverns
For them who'd come hallucinate while we slept
Scaring our rabbits to death in their hutches
I can't remember how I used to live

But they've all cased their jumps fatally
I willed it to be in the hours of blankness preceding to sleep
Oh, the years we waste faking remorse, remorse

Every decision I have ever made
Bred the branching future's mute howlers
With burst-vessel red eyes roaring inaudibly
On the freezing morning walk to the corner grocery

What hangs over big empty country
Reborn in negatives of photos of dusk
Regret so huge it's on a phantom axis
Receding beaches hissing hearing damage
The miles-long column on cold moonlight cast across still seas
When my nose begins to bleed

Some submitted to having their lights put out
By the basement thrill killer of the neighborhood
I heard being murdered is no experience
Ten or eleven wounds in
"It's not about Satan or anything. You just die-- It's weird."