Dear bayou with the hill-topped hissing grass,
dear bayou beyond the church, the bald flowers, the ant hills,
and all the green lacewings mocking my curl pattern, my fuss and envy:
enrage me, undo my skin from its fantasy of unit.
Houston as hyper-object, as snare drum and walkie-talkie spindle;
every AC-blown building a contested after-taste of a bullish world.
Dear new room, dear marble and live-edge wood, ensoul me, Adam and Eve me,
take these even-shaped calves and popsicle their heat.
It is with every feeling of austerity that I say the grasses
could never fail, or coo me out of their haunted areola,
and I beg and bourgeon, and I stay up all night, outside,
fasting under the dizzy lights of pseudo dive bars just to
feel something other than smoke disguised as weather.
I read the books, watered the plants, cocooned, and ended up
in the same place as always— my fist halfway in my mouth,
the wet fog of belabored breathing on every store window,
the heat-honeyed cement fractured and fracturing still in a clocked cadence
like the blanket houses we built as kids to avoid our parents,
the low curves balancing on our heads, making static.
I wanted the vista in its full recourse, annihilation as a bad joke,
the certainty that this bare-back sunshine is just
another symptom of unflinching seasonhood, that the birds still
hold all directionality in a single flap, but mostly, if it comes to it,
that there will be an underground, and there will be an under-underground.
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