Suburban Living

Here are things I never told you. I liked your plastic birds from Tom Thumb. I liked your jagged scribbles of planets. I liked your studio apartment on the shitty edge of your father’s expectations. I liked your fist flowering like a drunken mouth. Here are things I am telling you. At dinner glasses clink & so do your eyelids when you tilt your head. At least I think so. Listen, but don’t. Fade into the textured slapjack of palm trees in the Californian backyard. Live a life of gray-shuttered linearity. Do not forget that I am writing about you from Texas, that time makes miles of tacked leather boots. It could be journalism, the square stompage of it all. Picture the artists, starving tenderly. The man over there: a ceramic centaur. His greaves slick with olive oil, slumped in front of the Greek restaurant on Route 66. Here are things you are showing me. Motorcycles grinning through evil-eyed citylight. Charred concrete trembling back, marine as can be. This house, too, and nothing more.