Denim & Oxblood

Hey man I found a secret thing

    on the cusp

of the woozy spring.  I need your help

to kill myself with righteous aplomb

            or else find

the damsel in this dress

that hangs there like the sky out behind

    the haunted old shithouse on the outskirts

on prom nite with the rain coming down

in black sheets

while the black bluebells peal

with a zeal reserved for martyrs just before

the torch hits kindling. You’re kind of cute,

really, bumming a light from our chaperone

with the Parliament already wet

on your lips.  Warm enough now

to wind our way down toward the abandoned

            tracks,

where someone else has written your name

in the bark of an old elm with a palette knife;

    you’ve bartered your soul

for the money for art school.  Bully

    for you, the soul

is nothing but a cheap trick, something to believe

    that your body is naught

but a gauge of the relative hostility

    of your surroundings.  You are in danger

down by the water

with the plastic bags & the reckoned

poison dart frogs; the angry fauna

wear their rage as Rorschach stains, just so

you wear those in your steel toes & the

Sharpie-scrawled Venom across your back.

    Three norns in their pulchritude

lead you further into the swamp.

    He came away

    like the one before & the one before

came back wrong.  The ground

is sour down there.  Blue eyes,

    they holler.  Firelight, it swelters

& cleansed the map shifting

patternless & paddling without

a rudder.