Milk Replacer

My friend Arlo is quite a poet. You can buy his book at Powells
Books. Here's a Sample for Ya...

Because You’re not Supposed to Write About the Moon

The moon is a neon globe in a child’s hands,
a slow motion bullet, a hand grenade fired by god
during genesis that threatens wooden skies and ashes
of highways, a temporary eye to splash change
on our canvas which is snow.

We are boys in this dream smoking cigarettes and
drinking mountain dew.I shove your hands in my pockets
and you bury mine in the snow.Every few seconds the
moon dreams this white field into a baseball diamond

and we are kicking up cold dust and slashing bats
through the smoky chests of our rivals.When I remember
this later we’ll be rolling each otherin winter’s soft
teeth like snow angel cigarettes until dawn.

Through the window a grey claw, jaundiced headlights
scratching the skyline. We are yellow nails on gray
fingers, choosing to drive through this, our future
sheets of paved fog, a gray sky gray road gray tongues
and gray words ahead.

We are still drinking soda, folding maps into paper
airplanes,blurring the borders of anytown new England,
sending them out the window to crash and freeze.
Three years later, home still fades into the fog

into the last cigarette and now the typewriter chiming

misspelled bullets and frozen snow globes. You left me
here years ago to invent this night alone and you are
shattering inside my head. What should I say?

The fog fakes your figure into smoke and I’ve escaped
from every photograph? That the snow is just dust
disguising a different past? If not why have I spent
all day revising an empty pasture and filling
your footprints with leftover moonlight?