When the little boats enter

the Tunnel of Love

empty, driven

by some vast clanking machinery

like the heart.

Like the darkness that comes for your bones

when you’re lost

in the tunnel alone.

Carnivals. Poems. Whiskey and blood.

The little girl who wanted to dance at all the parties.

The little boy who slept on her grave.

Dreaming them

as the garbage truck grinds up Cummings Road,

rumbling toward the dump

with a load of spoiled honey,

with lemons and seagulls and funhouse mirrors,

old love letters and busted luck.

Dreaming the boy and girl holding hands

as their little boat enters

the tunnel where language is not enough to save you.

Trying to hold on to their hands

and the darkness and the tunnel and the feeling.

Alice-in-Wonderland hacked to pieces

and buried under the parking lot.

The first lunatic ghoul of a phoneme

screaming in the black tunnel.

Trying to balance

the elegant bone-crystal power of the simple

and the howl clawing your lungs.

Between heartbeat and silence and another

ragged heartbeat

holding on to the torn ticket for dear life.

Waiting all night for the word that meant

little girl dancing, that led the readers

among wizards and demons, helped them

fashion their own faces from the mud.

The poem ends when the feeling’s gone.

When the ruined body collapses in the elevator,

beaten by poems and darkness,

by lovers and whiskey and mirrors,

by the playful glittering nonsense

and the infinitely small vocabulary of our feelings.

The tunnel where words mean nothing. No thing. None.

Not the boy or girl or the bones of their hands

picked clean.

Unable to speak the feelings that bear them,

breath-to-breath the poem goes on,

into the carnival romance, the danger and blood,

the black tunnel,

the Tunnel of Love,

the tunnels we dig toward each other

in the darkness holding hands.

That’s the faith exacted

to endure the famined Sabbath of night,

to wait for the word,

sing for it, cry for it,

beg and curse,

persisting even as we’re slaughtered,

even as we fall.

Hagerty Wrecks Another Company Truck

She was stunning, take-me-now-Lord beautiful as she slid out the new Mercedes SL roadster at Eddie Smith’s Arco across the intersection, sheen of nylon, endless legs, smiling directly at Bill Hagerty in the Roseburg Timber Company pickup, her hair like honey spilled on the heat, smiling directly and with complete congruent understanding at the blood swelling Hagerty’s veins, his nostrils flaring at some phantom fragrance wafting across the baked expanse of asphalt between them, their eyes meeting with a flash of clear purpose. And thus seized, Bill Hagerty smashed into the rear end of an ’89 Trans-Am stopped at the light in front of him, glanced off as he wrenched the wheel, hit the curb, nosed up, and impaled the company Ford on a fire hydrant.