Even though
You've written home to Nancy
Clear-headed, twice this week

As if intensity were a virtue we say
good and. Good and drunk. Good and dead.
What plural means is everything

The wheel went round and left me
on a block of broken bottles,
spirits spent. So where

It begins simply with nail scissors, clipping, the ends of a few hairs from the edge of his beard. Finally, after a week, he begins to notice that his beard isn’t growing.

Dear Y.

What are you doing? Everyone I know is drunk. Everyone Iknow died. Everyone I know told me it would be all right but he had to write his mother-in-law for the go-ahead on a meal ticket. He drives it to school everyday. 

Every single one gone      Even the gray ones
         the color of his eyes      The black one
         carved from coal shade of his hair

In training    He loves pretending he is
A layer of skin    Peeled from Death's moonburnt

Shoulders    Tonight he is resting under

Begin to arrive
Like the toothpaste of his mother’s hug

On the back of a giant moon

   The entrance to the Computer Lab opens like the oak
doors to a suite in the Plaza.

   Vast threads of CD-ROM talk spiral around the white

Oh it’s Christmas time in Omaha Nebraska!
“Almost alive” red lips say through the panes.
His blue eye, his brown eye, his chipped ear.