A flashback film can’t record
Nor lens focus this bittersweet haze of choice
Nor zoom infinitely mirror me mirror my home
Choosing not the pregnancies, deaths, stress or arrests
only the absence that I want to become

When we were dolled up in retrograde red in fall rain
Like strawberry shortcake feeding ash trays
Introducing arrays of five minute introductions
Delving onto rooftops for visions’
views of sailboats to dream machines mining sexuality
For faces in the care of antiquity
Numbered in hits speedometers street names and rock radio
Forgetting little words we understood unraveling
Our Pennsylvanian pastures like yellow dashing our laughter
A stillness passing through Independent lights
Closing in on our valley’s echoes
Trumpeting our uncovered scenery,
Down in back alley head shops with their roller blade queens
Shot guns, mustard Nazis, and all of our taboo
Carelessly knowing its oppression isn’t true
All lying on the other like trampolines
Our bellies radiating insomnia cookies, trunks of Krispy Crèmes, and the beating stick of Austrian cuisine
Festering in apartments before we old friends knew

my goodbye
this poetry roped like the soul of a photograph
to my absorbingly rapid eyes
Opening upon a dark room in which negatives lie
Now, stolen by its own reception