When Teemu was a puppy— his hyperness caged in the back room where dad would sneak menthols, blowing at the window's black night glare— when I'd wink through the missing doorknob (when blood would billow like its own sort of smoke in the bent ear) when I’d spy on our genetic miasma granted brief shape by the young-dad breath (granted brief shape by the young-dad smoke): I swear the world had not yet really even been born. What was that pre-natal world of permanent lilac— of neat new rooms nail-gunned in new carpet newness (unlit cigarette newness— fresh coffee newness, the internal organs of the lilac turning itself inside out newness newness newness)? When the lungs are young and soft like lilac skin the smoke from fathers promises something intense— a holy perfect cough in some far-off inheritance. To approach now my parents' age then, to lose track of anniversaries of Teemu's decrepit death—to surrender the house and its eternal backroom to modern bachelors memorizing our local gas station ice cream selections to abandon our stains is to give in totally to the sickening stomach of nightmare nothing. When— in the near future— an ambulance races up St. Joseph Street whirling like a seizure of Christmas-colored sound what will it mean that by the time it hits Walce the sirens have been extinguished and the brakes have again clutched to the speed limit: what has died inside to cause our efforts so suddenly to quit? So, in celebration of my infinite asking— can this really be all?— I have filled the coffee pot with Easter candy crumbs and crabapple dirt the smoke of our breath stirred with clothes hangers from the floors of our closets. I have pissed in each corner of the backyard like a puppy made ecstatic by its own mechanics.

At the end of the first warm day the sky turns lilac above the station— like an upturned bowl collecting maybe milk maybe blood that clouds up as they mingle. The spring night, voiced by dogs peevish in the alley and the growl of amateur motor-sports enthusiasts screeching westbound on aging 94 toward a vague Ann Arbor with violent urgency voiced by the splashy sound from the Sunday night wine bar minglers that wraps around my building and up into the static of my bedroom. We wanted warmth and now we are too hot. We wished for age and now we are too old. The dogs yap about how you feel ancient but are even older now at the end of that thought than at its beginning. Who cares. Your mother calls and makes a joke and you hear a sweetness unique to this world— one you desperately wish will never expire like the milk mingling with lilac in the warming sky. Please, let it remain somehow and somewhere other than small talk reminders on voicemails you never deleted. Eternal knives will be the reminders of that sweetness and the recorded voices of its breathers once their breathing has stopped. Eternal knives will be the milk and lilac in a polar sky frozen into the world's fanglike daggers. You nod off briefly— standing upright at a urinal in Target. You calculate your current social media stats and whether you have enough coffee left for the following morning. Everyone in this town could use a night in. Everyone in this town begs for the breath of a hyperventilating other. The motorcyclists should muzzle their mufflers— slow to a crawl and capsize gently into the newly softened ditches of spring grass. Fall asleep and make drowsy love to the present tense. I can hear the Ann Arbor college kids snoring from here. Their girlfriends, concocting drastic moves in secrecy dreams. Fall asleep and make drowsy love to the way things were and always will be, in certain secrecy dreams. Close the wine bar and mute the techno. Shutter Target until tomorrow and carry the kiddos off to bed humming the theme song to "Bonanza" with a soft galloping motion, like my dad did for me once. Let us nap now— lest we fall deeply asleep in our 40s and never fully reawaken. Let us make drowsy friendship with the sacred grandparent/grandchild window of brief temporal overlap. Let us pet the alley dogs into silence, telling them stories of our suburban origins that are now ending. Where dad cut the lilacs too short and they never quite grew back. Where we sold the house to demonic strangers who get drunk on our half-empty containers of laundry detergent. It is a nightmare and a heaven simultaneously. Let us make some sense of it or at least get enough rest to grant it enough humor to function upon waking.

When you order carryout from the bar down the spring alleyway but never go to retrieve it because you wanted more to feed your curiosity of what the person who answers the telephone's voice might sound like— male or female casual or hurried dulcet or graveled— because you wanted more to feed your curiosity of what the person who answers the telephone's voice might sound like than you wanted the cheeseburger with cheddar cheese both on top and stuffed inside curiosity more than wanting to stuff the cheeseburger, itself, into your aging mouth capable still of elasticizing back to its attractive-youth shape every now and then when screwed up into a certain rare innocence— you know then that you need to find better ways to get your kicks on a Wednesday night in mid-April. And every few months you do a deep-Google search for the travel soccer coach who cut you from the team at age 12 by whose surgical excision your mother lost her sole social identity. (I somehow found his current phone number and slammed my laptop shut.) Current life is applying to a Craigslist ad to write a shitty clickbait listicle boasting your state's quirky attractions and not getting the gig. So— in a suburban salon my cousin gives me a younger haircut as my mom thumbs a magazine in the mirror behind and I see all the sweetness blooming within our pathos there— coating the single fake tooth denture on the table beside her. The broken springtimes within us are coated, too, in a film— abrupt sweat and absolute grief slicked petals dripping pollen and hamburger grease— and the acidic perfume your mother likes (that you can never afford enough of at Christmastime) will turn a rancid nectar decades from now yet still things feel OK somehow most of the time.

It wasn't as depressing as it looked— to eat a Subway sandwich all dripping 12 inches by myself outside Cobo Hall, facing Canada with no Red Wings applause to be heard or deserved. Springtime is nothing but the internal sweetness of all things wishing to escape. In scabs and sap the young transplants ooze from slender necks— trees and girls alike— along the modernized river-walk where the Detroit River squeezes beneath evening's eventual thunder. When spring finally settles and I re-remember once again the world's potential for infinite stillness— the diagonal streaking of dense backyard dusk, the sound of birds slicking off molecules with no resistance, the sad infinity of forgotten perfection: I damn it all and make love to it simultaneously. The grotesque perfection is the only beast with which, anymore, I am truly capable of making love. There is sour beer I suck in with a force as my neighbor throttles a lawnmower down a repaved alley. At night when the river is distant invisible ships let go of booming calls too slick to withhold. The things we pose and inject will rearrange themselves anyway as we sleep through the storm. The things we force down will eject with an ease or turn inside-out like nervous little flowers. All the blossoming is is this: the grotesque revealings— the internal springtimes we could no longer contain.

When the tropes of lilac and dusk have bled from my world, you will be the only denseness left for me to enter. But it is exclusively in lilac and dusk that I see you anyway. It is at the denseness of two things mingling in ferocious overlap— marked by dusk marked by lilac— that we ever really meet. It is not Ann Arbor and it is not Sylvan Lake or the exact distance between but, rather— the galaxy of distances and all that is capable of overlap, contained there within. The day we drove the entirety of Pontiac Trail I felt myself keenly as I was at every age I have ever been. We took a nap inside the beading car in front of a video store— as if the voyage were that demanding. Remind me again of the metaphor embodied by my choosing to piss into a dry bathtub stranded in an open field instead of the field itself. What shirt were you wearing beside me at the secret point of land counting whitecaps? That the dusk and the lilacs are so brief is the only metaphor necessary. Find me sometime in abrupt coolness licking abrupt dense darkness straddling the inky pit where two yards meet between the skunk and the possum counting aloud the number of blossoms I feel tantruming in some lost organ within me— in the dusk and lilac we dim into a holy vagueness where I saw you most clearly.

There is a secret world brought to my bedside this spring a resilience as if answering superstitious desperate prayers I hadn't even bothered to utter, tugging on bells dangled in scorched grass by accident. Perfected versions of my grandparents and father arrive at my apartment finely dressed with trim haircuts in a car-washed miracle of modern mechanics and a full gas tank— they ask me to drive and to show them my barking breathing son of a bitch city in its soft humid prime preferably at the hour in which the oily sun slips through the cleavage of automotive headquarter skyscrapers like a necklace dripping into the liquidy lap of Belle Isle. The mansions I drive them past are dead inside but they don't need to know. My grandparents cough with joy and satisfaction as my dad awes at the dusk and the lots filling with glittering darkness or the visible leaking of light with bird voices breaking from exhaustion or amazement and popcans exploding from surprise fullness and on this evening they are all my children. I no longer dare to dial the number of our expired landline 2 4 8 6 8 2— (these numbers made of morning breath trailing off into a thin film of disintegration— like tissue paper gossamer as egg yolk in the toilet bowl the night you were up forever crying and coughing)— no sound is there to answer the phone now except the ghost whisper of distant cocker spaniel bark and the swift squeal of an armchair recliner collapsing into ecstatic relaxation after making love to the permanent density of night.

When you remember the can of beer on the veranda that helped you start this poem three days ago open the screen door and retrieve it. Then fearlessly drink the contents: 1/3 warm beer 1/3 April rain water 1 dead hornet that cannot hurt you now. You toast to the night that has just fallen and to the crack-house guard-dogs down the alley that will not shut up. Cheers the recent spring novelty of open windows and therefore, night freighters that sigh upriver and therefore, airliners constantly nearing impact with your bedroom or so it sounds. Do you close the windows when you masturbate tonight? or do you allow the world its own erotic participation: a perfect breeze a hum a sense of gravity, pounding or is it from the swish of these perfect things that you wish to detach? Why is the most lasting advice you remember from your dad to always urinate immediately after sex? and why do you prefer Irish Springs— a soap that floats— simply because it's what Papa kept on the dock to bathe in the river? Will your son also inherit that toothbrushing quirk that triggers a violent gag reflex? Will the galaxy of trivia in your sock drawer alone become a board game for future generations? Here is some advice from a young man startled by the distant entrance of middle-age far up ahead on I-75 North past dark indefinite Pontiac where he once saw only the sleepy eternity of lying in a field with his head on the taut sweatered stomach of a well-off Christian girl: ask your dad while you can when he is there in the passenger seat beside you— what made him weep when he was your exact age when mom said they were living together for the first time in the Keego Harbor upper room and he'd drink 100 beers and cry about his life. Ask him what exactly the matter was because you are currently starring in its made-for-TV reenactment and you want to get the part just right.

When at the first of May the dandelions wage an overnight sweep across the slick chest of Detroit you wonder which feats are marked by instinct— sexed-up and mindless— and which germinate by desperate ambition. The dandelions make love to the city with stalks thistly and raw. The dandelions are a sex unto themselves. They sprout and sweat and suck at the sun with petals of a billion ambitious tongues— nectared and heavy. We wonder if ambition or mechanical instinct, both— and the vegetative creatures of their production— are as useless as the Sharpie insignia on the back of your hand granting admission to last night's rave. In the sacred house that is always for sale you count the closet stash of Beanie Babies stuffed with cushy dollar signs or perhaps the dandelion stems of '94. You wonder why your mother's ex-boyfriend's T-shirt is that which you find most comfortable to wear to bed. You wonder why the motorized fan will blow the teabag strings out of the mug into miraculous air-steams like tampon cords hovering in underwater slo-mo but not your own tired body into sweet levitation. When the spores of dandelion fill the bulges of my closed eyelids— eyelids that kiss each other in awkward contact wake me with the news that the petty struggles of my lame ambition were not for not even if it's a goddamn lie as pathetic as the eventual man signing into his father's dead account to up his Instagram likes.

The things we want have already been secured— their celebrations dripped throughout summers before even our births. And though they wait to be secured again: we shouldn't worry. It is the shared wanting between us— the action and not the object—that pulses and matters. Our want wells us both with the same fluid that neither can see but hear only in the voice— trembling. And if we've forgotten as much as we've learned about the hot deck waiting for you and me to sit at the day's end of your teenage job or the contained infinity of college-town night or our sacred dogs' respective whimpers or our wicked cycles of this fucking country endless and fevered —if we've forgotten as much as we've learned then I wish to learn and then forget and then learn and forget some more over and over and over in our shared wanting forever. * I wait for you at a Leo's Coney Island immune to age— at the imagined nexus where Telegraph and Woodward will never meet. We are 19 and sunburned to our half-Mediterranean bronzed pinkishness. In a certain booth where the napkin dispenser is inexhaustible and, like a tide, the waitress is never not approaching with a circular grace— there, we will be this way forever.

Do you feel a letdown when the sheets and sweat of summer sex cool in the twisting aftermath and coat you in a chill? Or after devouring the Applebees steak upon remembering the existence of customarily gratuitous gratuity? Can you smell the air thick as a steak garnished with blossoms welcoming your waitress after closing as a newborn delivered out through the alley door into the welcoming night waddling home to feed her cat waiting in a pitch black unconsciousness? At least you know that you are capable of an impressive capacity for zen kneeling backwards into a car seat— sitting shotgun playing mind games with yourself to successfully start a stream of urine into the open mouth of an empty bottle of Vitamin Water. At least you are capable of returning physically to the sites of subtle moments in your life when something wonderful and savage was felt no matter what letdown may have followed. Take one last piss in the lilacs of luxury surrounding your father's backyard— in that ring of garland, walls of velvet and wax from secret lungs breathed suggestions into the flowering mechanisms of your inner ear. The tin wreckage of soccer rebounding nets encased in all that rotting satin will reassemble and stake a marker into the eternally locatable back bedroom fixed forever in relation to Square Lake Road and Middlebelt despite the desperate suck and pull of petty outer space. Make love beneath the crabapples' blossoms— white and heavy the soft pulpy bulbs squishing beneath two bodies into the sodden floor there beneath. Like garbage blooming beneath the raccoon's crafty claw and spinning upward into an umbrella of orbit when the pedals catch breeze: there is no letdown in the reversal of the hellish into the holy.

Let us make an adventure of how little we deserve the spring's return. When my mother calls telling me not to bother with anything special for Mother's Day but reminding me as well in that same breath— there is a genius in cunning timidity. I'm made timid by the robin's relocated stare. I am undeserving of all that is re-awoken and unsure what must occur to allow myself to re-awake as well. Only in my memory do I recognize the plump currency juiced out and dripping from all things. Only there am I deserving. When my dad sells the house involuntarily I torment to imagine what we will find in the backyard shed permanently matting down the early June grass. Perhaps some force will have collected there an eternal catalog of things thought discarded: the broken-arm lawsuit cast, Teemu's collar and lock of fur, the missing key, the secret note from Jackie's organ, the blender of sleepover chocolate malts, the baby bunny skeletons, the discontinued maxi pads mom wisely hoarded, the enormous front teeth my young mouth produced yet could hardly contain. Display for me these things or strew them about a springtime world where the garage doors grease with a slicked-up fury greased by the eager juices of teenagers sneaking out and teenagers sneaking in where the robins' wings clap out horrific remembrances— a springtime dusk that I hardly deserve but would rather die than to divorce. Display them for me or let me make an adventure of finding them there—in the one corner of the neighborhood left somehow untouched (maybe in the Banish family's garage that always smelled of older-brother-age waiting just ahead) where I wait for myself in perfected form naked having lost nothing with eyelids clapping in a fury of disbelief like robin wings lost in the density of night.

I am stranded in gravel and the shrapnel of forgotten recyclables 30 miles south of my early heaven. Like a mallard's neck caught in the 6-pack rings— a strange dead city has looped me captive to pace blocks of sun-bleached detritus. In the spring I left my apartment and learned to digest the flowering garbage. My insides— like a lakebed sunk in tarry muck and the eellike sways of twisted vegetation— blossom in bulges of silvery trash and the internal blemishes of bruised lilac. I remember though kinda clearly a banquet to the north. We did not pace in abandonment then. We wandered and slinked between the inland lakes freely like the beery breaths of newly not-children too sweet-hearted or enraptured by each other's raw stinking summer alive anatomy and greased underarm similitude to ever be embarrassed. When I escape my pacing crawl north through endless layers of scorched living rooms and backyards skewered together with arrows impaling soccer balls legs broken pets maimed and whimpering in the shadow of the barbecue— when I return: will the Ferris wheel of the St. Mary's Fair spin wildly unmanned and propelled by its own centripetal longing will the little lakes flush in whirlpools sucking toward a past that no longer has form? Let me arrive at the cement shore of Sylvan Lake and roll into it. And in that motion through closed eyelids let me find that exact afternoon light— of drawn blinds in the back bedroom of my parents' house that one day when so tired from teeming life I fell asleep perfectly before the sun dropped dead.

I broke your mug (the one with the woodpecker) today, while doing the dishes. It wasn't on purpose— I don't think. But when things slick up we sometimes relax our grip when it just feels right to let it loose. It's getting hot now but part of me is still on the frozen bike trail kicking snow into your face in the most playful exhibition of fearing terribly love's inevitable dissolution. Even there in the horrid lighting of La Rosa Market where we warmed with the complimentary coffee which all but melted through the bottoms of the styrofoam cups your face glowed with the ideal personification of every moment I've dreaded would eventually burn a hole through me and drain out similarly: with all the cough syrup and all the chocolate syrup and all the syrupy Vicks VaporRub massaged into my chest by mother at midnight draining out like all the coffee— small lakes of coffee— we spilt on Sundays like a ritual and never bothered to clean up (also like a ritual)— draining out with every fluid I ingested in our carport kingdom before fatal eviction. (The fumes have been sucked into the lilac lung and it is me— I promise— that drips there beneath its petals.) Now more summers have passed than the number that we spent combining our sweat into a rare and potent concoction. Skipping across the whitecaps like stations on someone's dad's boat's radio searching for a place to land. If I land in some foreign future back at the forsaken place— with the length of St. Joseph Street breaking its tiny bones to reach Morristown or Canaan or the tongued caverns of my back molars I will scan like a radio melting in the sun for an identical replacement to your woodpecker mug right in the place where we found it all the first time and you know I will search helplessly there for you as well.

10 a.m and I'm standing here holding someone's Best Buy receipt from 1996. Suck me back through the automatic sliding doors— were they automatic by then? Suck me back like a pneumatic tube at the credit union's drive-thru. My overripe body is the retroactive glistening deposit. When I awake by a voicemail 10 minutes before my actual alarm from a woman at some doctor's office asking if I, a doctor, have the test results for a certain patient— I wish that I did. I wish I could do more for everyone. Let me be the newly trapped housefly that got in through the crack you leave in the window while showering in summer— when it is still full of vigor and curiosity to explore the space (like me, too, I think: the day I moved in some sorry March). And though the fly becomes anemic— like this metaphor undoubtedly reused each spring (when I rewrite the same song in different words finding creative ways to rebreak the same tongue)— it'll growl to a halt (the fly) or sputter in bursts of desperate response to the outer world's ghost trains and barbecue birds gliding with cartoon halos above Nana's potato salad at the glorious moment of death. And though I secretly release Papa's gerbils from the tennis court traps before he can dunk them in buckets like powdered donuts in a final Folgers— there is only so much I can do. I wish I could do more for everyone. Such cliches are the dreadful housefly and train whistle and ambulance dirges drowsily pissing their sounds into the hot and bothered stillness of early summer bedroom at the moment of morbid masturbation and imagined climactic death. Bless the cliches of joyous depression. Bless the evictions from our holy lands. In the petty struggles the glory is emblazoned on dead receipts. There is a rash across my overheated body alone and outstretched in a bed of sunken time. There are two wiry hairs deriving from the single follicle. With the creatures of summer struggle sweating or panting I am married to a single origin of death's birth and birth's death. It makes no difference and I will still smile in ecstatic gratitude when the next arbitrary wonder slips through the ever-ajar crevice to startle my fancy.

Wondering to what forms the green grapes and cantaloupe of that perfect day have now decomposed and scattered. What is there left for me to love? I love the juice of what was. Still tarting a region of my tongue when I bite it by accident and feel the stab of you. I love the unspoken feeling and, less so, the language I desperately arrive at regarding it. If I were to skin my knee continuously along the trailer park sidewalk spanning Keego Harbor— where we once floated like mercury on heat a perfect summer element— then I could feel it again more acutely than if I were to, say, list every business establishment linking that distance. I do wish though that instead of cells my body were the connection of nail salons coney island restaurants optometrist offices pet groomers and the gas station (the nearest one, that I loved so much [prior to renovation— where the bathroom was identical to the domestic ones in our uniform neighborhood adjacent]). I will always love the things I ever loved. My love for my world local and enormous cools unconsciously there face-down on the wetted tiles of my father's bathroom (the larger one, clean as it was [when my mother still lived there]). Let me die on that midnight bathroom floor in the lovely world stilled and frozen with perfection. I will be reborn instantly from a mysterious litter inside the cabinet beneath the sink. Like Teemu— slick with birth in the Vankers' mud-room turtle sandbox I will exit and love it all with newborn blinded eyes all over again.

Yes, I'd like to be captured in the summer infinity of doing the dishes after that great meal you made with the silver bass Dave caught from Lake St. Claire caked in animal cracker crumbs— doing the dishes in the rushing water turned a bit too hot for comfort but stinging and warning of wild activation and laughing at settled dusk when the questions "how are you" and "what are you doing in there" are infinities in themselves.

Overnight there are foreign profusely dripping blossoms in the trees outside the Greyhound station on the brink of downtown. Why does the still spring air through a window screen at dusk resemble the soft static of diagonal rains buzzing in a bloody pink? Overnight you have quit your job and moseyed back to the pockmarked highway half-covered in fallen rotting fruit in the ripening season. Why did I hurt my mother's heart when she had me unwrap the framed photo she brought me as a gift on no particular occasion? How can I communicate to her that my heart cannot bear another reminder of the pounding love relentless and severe between us that cripples me daily? Overnight murderous sirens distancing and approaching turn back to the barks of morning dogs and confused birds. Overnight your social media statistics have dropped to dismal figures. Overnight someone cut your father's hair and improved his mood and notion of self-worth dramatically. Overnight your grandmother can hardly make it up the set of stairs without creaking like a floor of crushed popcans. Why do you hear such footsteps in other rooms of your apartment overnight when there is no grandmother present? Sit with me please both sets of grandparents dead and alive in my cramped apartment in this neighborhood of foreign profusely dripping blossoms that can smell of heaven and death at once. Sit with me and let us admire this immaculately framed photograph a gift from my mother— it is of the train station (the one at the end of my street collecting wind like an open mouth left chapped and gaping overnight).

Elatedly poisoned with the bourbon your grandpa gets for cheap at the military base out by some forgotten airport— turning your secretive insides a suburban green tarred out in tennis courts and virginal gardens before you: is this where you flirted with expiration dates— with glistening mortgages and the slick wires of orthodontic summers? I've staggered upward the endless ramp of the landscaper's trailer to brush the back of my hand lovingly across this perfect subdivision where the windows no longer wish to break the bones of our forearms with locked jaws as we grab at scented money from the early June sky. When the wind and light change with an abrupt unbecoming aggression— nothing but hot breath insisting and repositioning our houseplants presumptuously— I sit then in Papa's immortal den with Dorito-dust fingers sucking at my annoyance. So fragile is our perfection that even the bitchy weather can brutalize it with a pushy punctuation. How horrid— how wonderful to madden with the stormy breeze that commandeers the maple branches for its tongue its larynx its showy operatic hissing in a circular pounding of intensifying vanity. Could our perfection be any more high-maintenance if it tried? In Papa's den— even on the outdated desktop monitor, a dense paperweight morgue— the Facebook profiles of not-so-recently-deceased high school acquaintances will load in unpredictable waves of resolution rushing and lulling as if manned by an invisible wind within the system. But to suck at the greenery when motionless— as if the new summer has stunned itself by the chemicals of its own existence (like the pubescent himself frozen in his parents' bathroom agog at the odor and hair germinating in little summers across his every crevice)— to suck at the puberty of the world as the grandfatherly blowhard or the late-20s heir to the wilting garden of car batteries and fertilized carnage our sweet sour bodies compost to suck at the puberty of the world to suck and suck and suck is the only heaven there is.

Where the coughing white men in cargo shorts and this season's knockoff Tigers jerseys smoke long cigarettes fuming like gestures toward the older black men at the railing— men beautifully slapping the panting fish silver as glinting coins onto the fresh blacktop— I wonder what it is they really store in their cargo pockets and what it is they really aim to hook there at the ancient bottom of the overheated automotive river. * For all we aim to protect or assail a final summer arrives— broken and motionless: the summer of toenails piling behind the headboard of sex frozen in its fever mindless July snowing in cellular flakes concealing the 5th grade ulna splintered inside the wilted white cast of moist skin reeking of its own dank containment— there on the torn-up carpet of the once perfect home intruders laugh wickedly and peel at our heaven the rind from the flesh.