Birds of Malaiseville

“You like that PDP there?” the farmer asks you. You’re a spoiled 12-year-old with a blood condition. You hand him your new racquet made from spaceship.

I began the eulogy with a literal truth: she was the tallest cousin in the family.

“Thank you, please, but no,” I say when offered the soup. Dead people can’t eat in dreams, so it seems best that I don’t either.

This long in heaven my grandfather sees limits to perfection. When the weather turns, his scars itch.

A fancy pair of arm-in-arm pigs in top hats and monocles. A hayseed pig in overalls demonically roasting a fellow pig on a spit.

This is mostly how I remember the group and me in 1984: we talk about Jesus as brightly as we talk about Magnum P.I.

Recent feats of strength: I am carrying, one by one, six railroad ties across my yard. I am hoisting them into the bed of a dump truck.

Older still, I lit them off my zipper, as I'd read Jim Morrison did.

A bugler will play “Taps” but not “Hail to the Victors” because I lost the nerve to ask.

“Sometimes you just have to get it out,” He’ll say, louder because of the wind and the passing traffic...

"He's taking what Mr. Trump is taking," my mother-in-law told my wife. "Don't even," I said.

Gray had once overtaken black, and then gray became white: the diffused color of a cataract, of milk making clouds in water.

He drives a truck that looks like a fighter jet and backs it in so it’s face-first. Always flexing.

I'm watching Jesus on a YouTube TED Talk. “Don’t be afraid of hrr-risk,” He says. He’s made his money in fashion design.

I closed my eyes like blind Isaac and patted my goaty cheeks. “Esau? Is it you, Esau?”

Neither married nor given in marriage. That’s rich, tell her, coming from the world’s most desirable bachelor.

It’s late afternoon in eternity. Early spring. The cold and the sunshine make the blue membrane of the atmosphere look taut.

Nightly I aimed it to avoid the afterglow of God and received what I could in the static.

My sister would want you to know this about her: after I came along, her debt clock began clicking and remained dynamic all her life. She was owed.

Sweet gum maples. Blossoms like muscadine grapes on the locust tree I planted in our backyard so she could see it from our kitchen.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar held my father’s face in His hands. This was it. “Earvin?” Kareem said. "Earvin asked."

Will they learn to clear tables? Be led expressionless by expressionless service dogs? Stare when a gift store visitor makes nervous conversation?

Orange mercurochrome stains from skateboarding in culottes in those abandoned apartment complexes in Santa Clarita.