Summer Sweat

It's a fever-pitch
evening downtown
the heat still
radiates off of the walls and
asphalt,
hot
black and silver
daytime coming
from underneath,
so we're sweating
and it's
beer sweat, smelling
and thick, no breeze
in the alleyway
to cool our brows.

It's a low drone
buzzing to actual
conversation, meaning
it's
looks and gestures of heatstroke
until the beer
sweats out.

Those peers of the gingkos,
the streetlamps, shine
that orange sheen onto everything
and no one knows
what colors
the cars truly are.

Broken shafts
of light trickle down
to the sidewalk, where
a little
slick of vomit
reflects a green, then
yellow, then red
light.

Through a Lens

There's a rosy vision
in my mind
of you:

Making jokes in fireside flickers
and for moments
falling embers lit the night
so that we
might look
into the points of light
in each other's eyes.

The vision there before me
tasted of fireworks and
model train engine steam
the only
embers' shine
was
the end of
a Marlboro light.

But the jokes were still there
and through a joviality
we wrested back
control from the stars
and so
divine our own
horoscope-love, to
spin a zodiac back
around to Aquarius
and trip him with our feet.

Lauderdale

Come on come on
and what I mean here is
get your ass in the car.

Whadye mean you left yer
phone at home?
That sonovabitch,
you don't need it anyway.

You smell 'at clutch dust?
I kinda like the way it smells.

When you go down
to the creek and kinda try
to wash the road
grit from your forearms
in the cold water.

Flying down a county road
to get there
chasing daylight
at eight thirty in the evenin'
the sun is still up
and it's 89 degrees

"whoooooooooo!
Y'all smell 'at polecat!"

And you're yelling over
a blasting radio, it's playing
something you really
jam out to.
It's "Hold On Loosely"
or even, "Caught Up in You"

We talked about
the gun show and the fair.

We drank cheap
smoked brown
burned regular
in smoking vapor
trails all over
the county.

Racing the Waterloo
Cop down
redneck riviera
into the sunset.