Each primal scream – resounding green gold, reflecting
off your opal vocals. Each cord an open window,
letting the creature out – lithe feline movements 
rewriting each vital desire – eating dinner at grandma’s,
seeing your friends, feeling blue, making it through.

And each scream is connected to another scream – 
I saw the shining thread connecting the sounds
like an eternal substance that would finally 
get us out of the terrible maze. 

Frenzied songs, each fragment of it:
The horizon at the park just before dark,
the lake eating its own face, gleeful, as the sun set
on the glittering beach roses. 
Each friendship with a girl I found difficult, 
sensational, and true. The promise in the clover,
the cicada corpses lining the green grass like wishes.
Rootless wanderer, where will you rest?
Misunderstood, misunderstood. 
That was the voice just before dusk. 

As I eat my tomato sandwich, 
olive oil gluing my fingers to that good bread,
I hold back tears as I watch you jump,
throw your heads back, scream into the mic.
Summer sustenance is more than 
the bowl of greens, the cypress brushing my hair.
Rebellion in small acts is daily nutrition,
as the dappled sun is part of our bodies.

The urge to be large, larger than 
what purports to consume you, even desire you.
To cuss out love only to come back to it
in the wet grass, the spirit I abandoned,
which was my own scream building a house 
of light out of my namesake, summer green.