A Poem about Going Crazy before Your Time

During the evening hours of a Midwestern spring
metal and plastic buckets sit upright. Earthworms
sleep under the containers,
crawl like cancer when exposed.

Like the time I spent hours laughing outside of the carnival’s gate.
The elephants shot water from their wrinkled trunks,
runaways slept in the house of mirrors and I cried one hundred beers as
the bones of woolly mammoths heated the heart of this dirty city.

The rains of April wash away dog shit as I count the crickets’ pillow talk.
Little black bugs, horny as all hell, repeat synthesizer sounds of the 1980’s.
It feels like living in Seattle or London or a under a heartbroken teen’s tear ducts
the way heaven’s showers wash away lucidity from my detached body.
The smell of dust on roses or the weight of an anvil umbrella
subdue me like an intentional overdose or a vision of

the devil raping doves before the birth of summer’s heat.