1.
On a sweeping, dying schoolyard, made a bottomless and still pond by the surrounding suburbs and forests, lies a Canadian football field. The ghosts of part-time rodeo announcers, sitting stout and smiling with cherry-red cheeks, haunt the press box. Their medium-rare steak voices rumble across the damp grass they overlook. Tonight, the plays are made by stray teenagers stumbling in from mom's minivan or the spectacular beach; quick kicks are smirks, kickoffs are impulse, and defensive tackles are self-explanatory. The teams, usually trios - two boys, one girl, playing all positions at once against themselves. There are only home games, with away teams being reduced to passersby on their way from pissing and smoking in the woods. The moon keeps the inscrutably complex score, with its ancient systems of calculation and notation gauging numbers its glow only alludes to the value of. Jeans become grass stained in ways that will only reveal themselves as holy come the winter. The empty night is a county fair.
-
Come the winter, deep in the outer space of the highway in the early kilometers out of town, dudes in the backseat on psilocybin mushrooms will make the driver, about to be out later than when she said she would be home, uncomfortable with their insistence on stopping for McDonald's. Their words, Germanic in their punch and hip hop in their syllabes, buried the Truth a good twenty feet under subjectivity. The ground of their conversations is hard, so they wouldn't know it. But they wouldn't know the ground was hard if they didn't also know what was under it. So they keep driving, and it's warm, and the driver wonders if he - the most stoned in the back - will think about this as much as she will.
2.
The daytime galaxies
of pastel public swimming pools
Shine out in the eyes of children raining their feet into the shallow ends,
where floaties and water wings create a new skyline for the prairies of white tile,
Sprawling as far as the goggled eye could see into the deep ends
The new birds are flecks of dead skin and hair sinking to the bottom.
3.
The dark hole when I was younger
has given way to me now.
I'm no longer embarrassed by magazine aisles
or keeping a diary
or driving all this way to see a guy who gave me the barest fucking once of attention
AND POEM OVER IM JUST GOING TO LEAVE IT AT THAT BECAUSE I SHOULD SLEEP
