The scars on my torso are intercoms.
What they sing back of your sentence is deadpan
& covers the emergency light in the bathroom.

When we first make love I refuse to remove my shirt.
Two girls have walked off the set
to drive to a location lit brightly with grief.

Episode 11 is still crashing around inside you.
The lights of room 50 of the Deportation Motel
have begun their chronic flickering.

I come on at 11am & again at 8pm.
I last an immense hour & watching myself
gives me amnesia. I lose your jawline
at laughter killing the smell of rain.

After lovemaking on invisible terms
don't be surprised if you get a full clearance
& a headache when you ask to alter my memory of you.
Your short hair becomes a red wig.
The quiet face starts talking a lover out of time.

I sing the last part of what you say.
You are called Episode 13 now.
When I stop glowing you can't believe you got undressed.

She listens for friends on the dead city radio.
This dark beach is not the transmitter she wants, not the hushing—

Her friends waiting upside down from fire escapes
                   for lightning to return the salt to their mouths.

The secret we don’t know is a no-show & we’re too big
for the ocean. Someone’s floating white clothes
                                        tremble & tighten around us.
We’ve found a chamber in the low tide.
                   Our impulse is to start

our own galaxy for the voices she does pick-up.
                    The salvation we offer is three bedrooms wide,
it is unamplified, we can only offer her dead
                    lovemaking they’ll want to memorize.
They won’t want to be strangers when they dance
                    to Lightning Dream & cannot stop.

Her list: 1. He would paint with his empathy, tell me
to help him put a nervous system into the future,
                                         so it could feel us coming.

The storm she says conquers our airwaves.

Do we choose to laugh at the unformed sky along the water?
                   Throw a beer can at it?
Or turn our backs & mix into the telepathic & burning metropolis?
                                       Either side is a drug.

2. She would make me an offshoot of her driving:
                                         confuse me with destination.

Now she wants to take off her jeans
& oscillate her legs in the surf.

How will you tune in your voices?
They cause a nervous system I can’t locate.

Then she tunes into me saying field of blood
                                       into her hair, into her list,
which I make believe is a symmetry

of non-stop gazes into the details. The details
                   of the bodies: lipsticked heads,
shaved heads, with or without
the Future Dream in their faces.

3. She would pick up the doll from the saguaro.
4. He got impatient with things going loose.

                                        I pull up a white shirt
by its sleeve, heavy with water like lifting
a body’s left arm, & throw it up the beach.
This pulls from the dark heart girl a vast laugh.
She knows the lightning has hit the city at last.

The underwear is too hard to catch.
She wonders if someone naked or transparent will appear,
wonders what the bodies we can’t see do
when they want to be bright like inside a doll.

The lifeguard tower is our spot to inferno our senses—
                    her leg touched by headlights.

                                       But this lovemaking is staged
for her to tell me her destroyed names.

I have none. I watch lightning because holy lights
                    shock my city alive, divide my city
into double galaxies. I’m swinging my arms in both.

5. The insomniac I drove the mesa with at night—
                      6. The guitarist who took films of me—

But is she only this list? Does her skin,
                                         when it touches mine,
feel which side of living I’m holding her in?

She’s putting this nervous system around my neck.

Why are her lips becoming difficult to kiss?
Why is a chaos of droplets the future she wants me in?

These dead shouldn’t have let her shake them into me—
They shouldn’t have let me get to the following song—