Here's some couplets.
This is called "Black Days."
Couldn't think of a title, so I just
chose my favorite Soundgarden song.
[LAUGHTER]
It's my imaginary letter to Adrian C. Louis.
"There were 15 scorpions pressed apart
with a stick used for stirring paint I need to tell you about.
Couldn't tell you how they dwelled.
Haven't killed enough.
They emerged through cracks in the block wall
separating each box of this cro-magnon neighborhood.
I can tell you, I wept.
Smashing sections, they escaped, moving like those fuckers
from alien flicks.
Anyway, it's been countless years
since I searched the yard perimeter, black light
a false beacon in the muted night, a 9 mil nestled
against my hip, bullet chamber to blast
the skinheads my sister told of, frantic, having
driven the city all night.
Among deadened asphalt synapses, we
wait for dawn's liminal thread to offer blurred visions
for sleep.
She described a battle between cops and neo-Nazis.
I perceived it as singular and internal
until somewhere, in conflict, the house
was injured, ruined, and left as such.
This ruin never occurred.
It was a wreck, a was, embarrassed to speak on,
a false bend a quarter too far.
I want to be clear about the scorpions.
My wife crept behind me with her phone
while I, among the apparitions of depression,
released the safety and cleared the house of the nothing there.
April.
I hadn't killed anything."