The State Bird’s the Meadowlark

Hot, early suburb, still as the wedding cake in the freezer
given over to the dogs. A lot of cruelty to sweet beasts, a lot of dogs and men shot
while the girl—name her for Christmas, name her for Elvis—
diaries the bad blank masochist romance novel
in sentences she lick-spells onto the roof of her mouth.
Kit is two syllables, is James Dean, so-called, waves broadly, will try anything once,
and so her crinolines and bobby socks get trashed into the rusted can;
he makes a suicide A-side at the punched-through recording studio;
arsons up the dollhouse and piano;
and they set forth to make numb writ large.
O, let us all return to the treehouse and the tunnel by the river,
choose a new password for cloud-watching and two-stepping in the dusty
idyll of the forest, post-murder, pre-Vietnam, on the lam from the world of
just kinda blah, like when all the water’s run out of the bathtub.
Blue sky like empty faith. Her finger sings
inside a hostage industrialist’s glass. It doesn’t rain, not once