Before M-5

When the tropes
of lilac and dusk have
bled from my world, you

will be the only
denseness
left for me
to enter.

But it is
exclusively
in lilac and dusk
that I see you
anyway.

It is at the denseness
of two things mingling
in ferocious overlap—

marked by dusk
marked by lilac—

that we ever really meet.

It is not Ann Arbor
and it is not Sylvan Lake or
the exact distance between but, rather—

the galaxy of distances
and all that is capable of overlap, contained
there within.

The day we drove
the entirety of Pontiac Trail

I felt myself keenly
as I was
at every age
I have ever been.

We took a nap
inside the beading car

in front of a video store—
as if the voyage were that demanding.

Remind me again of the metaphor
embodied
by my choosing to piss into
a dry bathtub
stranded in an open field

instead of the field
itself.

What shirt were you wearing
beside me
at the secret point of land

counting
whitecaps?

That the dusk
and the lilacs
are so brief
is the only metaphor
necessary.

Find me sometime
in abrupt coolness
licking
abrupt dense darkness

straddling the inky pit
where two yards meet

between the skunk
and the possum

counting aloud
the number of blossoms
I feel tantruming
in some lost organ
within me—

in the dusk
and lilac
we dim into
a holy vagueness

where I saw you
most clearly.

All the Blossoming Is Is This

It wasn't as depressing as it looked—
to eat a Subway sandwich

all dripping 12 inches
by myself

outside Cobo Hall, facing Canada
with no Red Wings
applause to be heard
or deserved.

Springtime is nothing
but the internal sweetness
of all things
wishing to escape.

In scabs and sap
the young transplants ooze
from slender necks—
trees and girls alike—
along the modernized river-walk
where the Detroit River
squeezes beneath
evening's eventual
thunder.

When spring finally settles
and I re-remember once again
the world's potential for infinite stillness—
the diagonal streaking
of dense backyard dusk, the
sound of birds slicking off molecules
with no resistance, the sad infinity
of forgotten perfection:

I damn it all and make love to it
simultaneously.

The grotesque perfection is the only
beast with which, anymore, I
am truly capable of
making
love.

There is sour beer I suck in
with a force
as my neighbor throttles a lawnmower
down a repaved alley.

At night
when the river is distant
invisible ships
let go of booming calls
too slick to withhold.

The things we pose and inject
will rearrange themselves anyway
as we sleep through the storm.

The things we force down
will eject with an ease
or turn inside-out
like nervous little
flowers.

All the blossoming is
is this:
the grotesque revealings—
the internal springtimes
we could no longer contain.

It Is a Drowsy Heaven

When you order carryout from the bar
down the spring alleyway
but never go to retrieve it
because you wanted more to feed your curiosity
of what the person who answers the telephone's
voice might sound like—
male or female
casual or hurried
dulcet or graveled—

because you wanted more to feed your curiosity
of what the person who answers the telephone's
voice might sound like
than you wanted the cheeseburger
with cheddar cheese both on top and stuffed inside

curiosity more
than wanting to stuff the cheeseburger, itself, into
your aging mouth capable still
of elasticizing back to its attractive-youth shape
every now and then
when screwed up into a certain rare innocence—

you know then
that
you need to find better ways to get your kicks
on a Wednesday night
in mid-April.

And every few months you do a deep-Google search
for the travel soccer coach
who cut you from the team at age 12

by whose surgical excision your mother
lost her sole social identity.

(I somehow found his current phone number and
slammed my laptop
shut.)

Current life
is applying to a Craigslist ad
to write a shitty clickbait listicle
boasting your state's quirky attractions

and not getting the gig.

So—
in a suburban salon my cousin gives me a younger
haircut as my mom thumbs a magazine in the mirror behind

and I see all the sweetness blooming within our pathos

there—
coating the single fake tooth
denture
on the table beside her.

The broken springtimes
within us
are coated, too, in a film—

abrupt sweat
and
absolute
grief

slicked petals
dripping pollen and
hamburger grease—

and the acidic perfume
your mother likes
(that you can never
afford enough of at
Christmastime)

will turn a rancid
nectar
decades from now

yet
still
things feel OK

somehow
most
of
the
time.

I'm Tired

At the end of the first warm day
the sky turns lilac above the station—
like an upturned bowl
collecting maybe milk
maybe blood
that clouds up as they mingle.

The spring night, voiced by
dogs
peevish in the alley
and the growl of amateur motor-sports enthusiasts
screeching westbound on aging 94
toward a vague Ann Arbor
with violent urgency

voiced by the
splashy sound from the Sunday night
wine bar minglers
that wraps around my building
and up into the static of my bedroom.

We wanted warmth and now we are too hot.

We wished for age and now we are too old.

The dogs yap about how you feel ancient
but are even older now at the end of that thought
than at its beginning.

Who cares.

Your mother calls and makes a joke
and you hear a sweetness unique to this world—
one you desperately wish will never expire
like the milk mingling with lilac in the warming sky.

Please, let it remain
somehow and somewhere
other than small talk reminders
on voicemails
you never deleted.

Eternal knives
will be
the reminders of that sweetness
and the recorded voices of
its breathers
once their breathing
has stopped.

Eternal knives
will be the milk
and lilac in a polar sky
frozen into
the world's
fanglike daggers.

You nod off briefly—
standing upright at a urinal in Target.

You calculate your current
social media stats and whether you have
enough coffee left
for the following morning.

Everyone in this town could use a night in.
Everyone in this town begs for the breath
of a hyperventilating other.

The motorcyclists should muzzle their mufflers—
slow to a crawl and capsize gently into the newly
softened ditches of spring grass.

Fall asleep and make drowsy love to the present tense.

I can
hear the Ann Arbor college kids snoring from
here. Their girlfriends, concocting
drastic moves in secrecy dreams.

Fall asleep and make drowsy love to the way
things were
and always will be, in certain secrecy
dreams.

Close the wine bar and mute the techno.

Shutter Target until tomorrow and carry the kiddos
off to bed humming the theme song to "Bonanza"
with a soft galloping motion, like
my dad did for me
once.

Let us nap now—
lest we fall deeply asleep in our 40s and never
fully reawaken.

Let us make drowsy friendship with the sacred
grandparent/grandchild window of
brief temporal overlap.

Let us pet the alley dogs into silence, telling
them stories of our suburban origins
that are now ending.

Where dad cut the lilacs too short and they
never quite grew back. Where we sold the house to demonic strangers
who get drunk on our half-empty containers
of laundry detergent.

It is a nightmare and a heaven simultaneously.

Let us make some sense of it
or at least get enough rest
to grant it enough humor
to function
upon waking.

Smoke in the Shape of Teemu with the Shin Guard in His Mouth

When Teemu was a puppy—
his hyperness caged
in the back room where dad
would sneak menthols, blowing at
the window's black night glare—

when I'd
wink through the missing doorknob

(when blood would billow
like its own sort of smoke
in the bent
ear)

when I’d spy on our genetic miasma
granted brief shape
by
the young-dad
breath
(granted brief shape
by the young-dad
smoke):

I swear
the world had not yet really
even been born.

What was that pre-natal world of
permanent lilac—
of neat new rooms
nail-gunned in new carpet
newness

(unlit cigarette newness—
fresh coffee newness, the
internal organs of
the lilac
turning itself
inside out
newness
newness
newness)?

When the lungs
are young and soft
like lilac skin

the smoke from
fathers
promises something
intense—

a holy
perfect
cough
in some
far-off
inheritance.

To approach now my parents' age then, to
lose track of anniversaries of Teemu's decrepit
death—to surrender the house and its eternal
backroom to modern bachelors
memorizing our
local gas station
ice cream
selections

to abandon our stains is to give in totally
to the sickening stomach
of nightmare nothing.

When—
in the near future—
an ambulance races up
St. Joseph Street

whirling like a seizure
of Christmas-colored
sound

what will it mean

that by the time it hits
Walce
the sirens have been
extinguished
and the brakes
have again
clutched to
the speed limit:

what has died inside

to cause our efforts
so suddenly
to quit?

So, in celebration
of my infinite asking—

can
this
really
be
all?—

I have filled the coffee pot
with Easter candy crumbs
and crabapple dirt

the smoke of our breath

stirred with clothes hangers
from the floors of our closets.

I have pissed in each corner of the backyard
like a puppy made ecstatic
by its own mechanics.