Death Rock Classics

Can’t fuck in candlelight
No more kept watching
My shadow

A kitchen’s 
A machine
Of your psyche

Did you hear me
In the detached garage
Painting myself in cut-off shorts

Look at my face
In the microwave door
Defrosting the light in my eyes

I’m calling you from the bush
I’m calling from from
You are like yeah hey what

Heard me in the duplex
Heard me through the wall
Heard me hiding in every afterlife

The kitchen disappears
Like all machines will
Or should or want to 

Your list of motherless things
Telephone pole
Is on there twice

Language Spanish bombs
Anguish Spanish songs
Todo por accidente 

In the forest if the trees 
All are my manager
I am there

Forgot how to play guitar
I know it’s heaven
‘Cus I’m bored

Could not steal a pillow
So I sleep in your dreams
With a face that is my manager

Get in the Mob / Increase Your Memory

I wound up those chatter teeth
‘til the lord spoke through them
I had to put them out a window
My mom won’t play music
Your mom’s deaf and listens to the bumps
And hers is always barefoot gauzelike
All our moms live in a trailer in Hope Sound
Their lives sweat out through their bodies
Crates before the TV they move
Their avatars around a world they know
My hair cuts my hair into a shadow
I deleted every happy photo
‘cus they were sad
Every time your mom dies a self-
Driving cab circles the airport silently
With no passenger hazards on
Ad of a bookbag sinking
In a pool fucked me up bad
I’ll get simpler inside even empty
Walking in step with all my best
Friends who are everybody
My avatar dances to Viva la Vida
Listen to this lostness in a car
My avatar moves itself
Has pockets down to its feet
Nothing to hide in

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Hayden Nielander is a librarian at the Free Nashville Poetry Library.