Tongue gone dumb
 from disuse at some
 numb young sea-scum’s post
 Bottle after bottle after bottle out sink
 cold filled to the cork with uncrackable code
 so good through the years the knots went
 that its alphabet was even forgotten
 Me? I’m head vessel for a fleet of tears
 out on my old man’s bones parole
 Under sail only for a hole to [bad word] to fill
 with handfuls and handfuls of loose-earned dust
 or plug up level really with anything other than us
 and then to toss a [bad word] over--

 Lost (lost lost) in translation. Lost.

 To a kingdom of light I wish tonight to fall witness
 but victim to a spite it might incite sickness
 I sit in and pretend and through it write hymns:
 Tight-limbed in white English as my one and trite business.
 Light as a nice fat rice sack boiled in water
 out farther than the house of my father
 waiting in the sitting room of yet another doctor
 I taste what little bitter roots this winter has to offer and
 without a son or daughter to shoulder the debt
 alone with the past and prone to regret
 dreamt my death by a knife on a path in Burnet
 but under the bedspread, I’m younger than dead yet.

 Lost (lost lost) in translation. Lost.

 Even an opal heart hopes all night
 in the bright, biting strobe lights 
 and bitter cold, as the living set up
 to a long white joke told through sun up 
 ‘til the bones and bodies spun around them fold.
 Hopes all night through the old lone fight
 and the bright vast cold, but there’s no punch-line
 by this told whack joke for all one’s life is surrounded
 ‘til the black hole and bodies spun around it fold.

 Lost (lost lost) in translation. Lost.
 Lost (lost lost) in translation. Lost.
 *(Glass shatters)