I was born in December on the Nebraska plains, Box Butte County.
Moved out of there when I was six months old.
Life bled into a hard odyssey of trail dust and drugs and second chances.
This one time I couldn’t stop doing ******
walkin all night through the Ironbound over to court street project, Newark, NJ.
Came this close to getting swallowed up by the green monster
like Jonah and the whale.
so it came to pass that I had to join the United States Navy, to save my own life.  
Frozen cats and 12 dollar packs of newports and 7 dollar wax stamped bags
and I tried joining out of East Orange
but HQ said no - mix up with the paperwork
so I tried my luck in Atlantic City.
Jack ***.
Drunk for six months straight, almost top of my class, submarine school, Groton, CT.
My life was a lost identity; I’d be sleepin inside of a Matryoshka Doll,
i developed a taste for
Tequila and salt.
I won a coin toss and they shipped me off to Guam, top of the Marianas Trench,
just like that.
Some time after all the ***** houses and buy-me-a-drinky bars and
pokin around old japanese pill boxes and setting all my friendships on fire and
one month spent circling the waters at an unknown depth beneath the Pacific Ocean
sleeping alongside a 40 foot torpedo in the torpedo room
scrubbin CO2 from the air we breathed
and the dust off  from all the valves -
It came to pass that too much 1800 and bud lite,
boxed wine and late nights,
case of the sad sickness and a broken nervous system bought me
A nullified contract and a plane ticket to Big Sky Country,  USA
free room and board at my Aunt and Uncle’s house
in Sheridan, Wyoming, Powder River Country, shadow of the Big Horn mountains.
They’re the same age, with the same exact birthday.
We used to drive out over the horizon, shootin clay pigeons out the sky.
They gave me about as much a chance as anyone ever did.
It came to pass that after after my 2nd DUI I was invited to leave that room and board
and so I landed a roommate on the edge of town.
Second generation mexican, David Rodriguez,
born and raised in that that very same county on the Nebraska plains
wherein I came raging,
full power
Into the void.
What are the chances of that?
Alliance, NE, County seat.
I bear no living memory the town
But I saw it from an airplane once.
There was a radial pattern of railroad tracks trailing out in all directions, like giant cracks on the side
of a prairie blonde asteroid.

The fog has an edge today,
gashing buildings in two,
beheading the tree line,
dispersing the relays.
The sun dies in the east,
throttled by an accumulating
grayness that chews.
Watch the rain approach
on its blacked skate,
drowning the ironbound
fence-work that skirts
the blustered apartments.
This neighborhood
is lost to me -
it chokes and retches
under a slip of sick.
The moon is just
a drain plug.
Wherever I go next,
I will paper with you,
your ink-sugar eye,
the unconscious throne of hair
that throws me over.