Framework

I hope you get it all right
and find a way around these sorry people
who believe that every day
is meant to make the most
of what is forced on you
for the inclusion in a club
that’s broken anyway.

No amount of landlines shaped
like anything but phones can now atone
for all the hang ups left behind
in melted wires over top the streets
we drive to get our money
or to spend it all at once.

The angel statues in the graveyard
sink into more closed off poses
as the dead are left to wonder
what is shifting up above them
that is so heavy they can hear it
with their skulls.

The playground politics spreads upwards
through the parents into foreign policy
causing the hemisphere to schism like
a disco ball that falls from too much
spinning in the night above the earth,
and all the underworlds and overworlds
around it.

The desperate agents of faceless conglomerates
reload their weapons in the quiet moment
where he is kneeling beneath the archway,
and she is leaning against a cross beam
in the rafters. To stop the killing now
would be to close off every sidewalk
from the thorn tree in our marrow
while there are buzzards in the branches
looking down.

The bottles are breaking everywhere
and the glass is cutting everybody’s shoes,
but still the bar fight rages on as the wooden
chandeliers come crashing down onto
the tables and the roof is pulled apart
by all the updrafts now created
when tornadoes come in contact with a mirror.