Riding

I am better when I am dead

or when I am

dreaming.

Having finally entered

the carboned pistons

of your machinery.

You, as a boy,

racing through

the warm excess

of night’s soft decline.

When I rise

I kerosene 

my fingers

place my hands flat

on its weeping

branches.

The music is smashed

Wurlitzer, trashed and drug

up from a landfill

in Tazewell.

Earth mixed with quell

and the bright peal

of a mangled glockenspiel.

In the winter hills

of summer, a sick

foal in the barn,

and an old farmhouse

with all its clocks

pulled out.

Its cold room

filling miraculously

with the slow sediment

of forget.