that summer, Born to Be Wild
and Mrs. Robinson were on AM,
A & W Drive Inns served frosted mugs    
and Tet’s blood had not long dried black
on Saigon streets

my thumb took me from the green tipped tongue
of western Kentucky across the wide world
to a café in Santa Rosa, where I spent my last
eighty-five cents, on a tuna sandwich
and chips

a bus bench was waiting for me  
when the cafe closed its doors
at 12:10, the old waitress giving me
a generous extra dime of time,
knowing I had to face the night  
and the bench, or the New Mexico road
I chose the latter and headed south  
under coal dark skies    

only eighteen wheelers passed, their screaming lights
robbing me of what quiet vision night’s monotony had granted  
they saw my thumb, but not one stopped; they did not know I had walked
a dozen dark dead miles, and had not closed my eyes in 60 hours  
nor did they care, about me, or my shadow on Highway 54  

I talked to pinyons,  cedars that dotted the mesas
and moved about like mournful buffalo, stirred to life
by a sound or a scent, perhaps my own foul road bouquet,
though they were mute, even when I asked them
if I was seeing god in their measured marching
across my desert dream  

long before
the dawn I begged to come
I saw him, dead center on my highway
so black he was blue, his eyes like two emeralds
hanging in some ethereal space, staring at me, the rest
of the absent world unaware he was there, growling
the rumble so low I tasted it, as he might taste me,
I felt our nostrils flair, as his would when
he devoured me,  I saw the blood feast
through our eyes, the last morsel of me,
a pale art form on an asphalt palette  

as he swallowed the last of his meal
the eighteen wheeler came, its high beams bouncing off him
only long enough for me to see his mouth was dry
and his belly empty, before he vanished
into the blue night