for Jordan

No humans where public works paint downtown buildings
to tell the poor Merry Christmas! with the gift of grafted skin
to sell for pills from Chevy Malibu broke jaw glove compartments.
Phone music perforates
speaker holes
generational performances in city cemeteries, the plot is never lost
—seed soil for more plastic petroleum trees to re-forest sidewalks.

Some Moses knew we could get along, so they gave us god!
to sound out the limits of language Adam learned
among trees
grown like gas stations
to sell liquefied evolution and canned energy, the only way to wash
out the taste of diamonds grown on tongues as teeth fall out
speaking names of visiting ghosts bright in bathroom flor-essence.

Good words are in need of public works projects as
we don’t walk into Heaven with one another, but babble on in rubble
in memory of someone else, lived out across
our enormous oil spill feathers coated in cold obsidian.

Combustible dollar store THC blooms plastic arms that
light
—–all
——–at
———-once
a fifty-foot tree that never grew rings, a stranger to spring, calls for all to get lit,
come drink on the streets as a stumbling vermilion flannel jacket draws a line
from bar walls, and, like an emptied Solo cup, she’s lain on a bench as if answering
an altar call but lucky no one reads instructions for their sacrificial daggers anymore
tiny knives
tinier voices
assemble as Methodist children mouth sounds called close enough to literacy.

Does she
see ghosts
or happy
we’ll never finish
—so paint over Babylon.

Let there be lights made new for concrete cracked people
as dressed-up ladybugs in their only Walmart chartreuse sweater,
sites on white elephant eyes, black pecan shell centers—

—before painted buildings, a friend bought lottery tickets
a promising concept
worth 16.3 million dollars
with a wrinkled baggie of drive-thru-vacuum-stolen quarters
so I had a Christmas, my creation of a silver shavings parade
for his body’s blue tarp Christmas Eve burial
—red and green
M&M pills still stuck in his neck, this same ceremonial tree in vigil.

Let it shine!
Hallelujah! is only spoken
to be understood
as babble.