Haunted

silhouettes of moons rising boxcars are stencils
the shape of projections made by performance
poets who’ve never fallen in love wincing through
their routines screaming call a doctor (a doctor’s
haunted holiday home the leafless trees the free
shots administered at dawn the freezing branches
stacked with animals cries like a gurgling brook
an owl falls from a telegraph pole it disappears
before sunrise jack frosts (interred like jackals
highways streaked with radioactive delay yellow
buzzards playing banjos the courthouse gang that
put their own spittle on trial beef jerky (tales
of harvest balloons let loose in the ballroom as
deadwood slurs drool from the corpse’s mouth