The highway changes when you travel it
At different times,
In different seasons,
Weathers, road conditions, or decades.
The places you pass and your final destination
Will change entirely from year to year
Or day to night.
The highway will tell you totally different things,
The signs change from year to year
And day to night.

The sky goes dark, the lights come on,
Some letters are lost, and new meaning found.
A roadside motel becomes simply a mote,
There is vacancy where before
There was nothing at all,
Just an abandoned fruit stand, which by twilight
Becomes a small house—
The siding might be yellow or brown—
With dark curtains and neon signs
Proffering readings, psychic insights, an open palm.

The other night, I came to the end of the highway.
I would have crashed right through the barrier
But God or my survival instinct intervened,
And my journey continued
On a different highway altogether.

A wise woman once told me
Anger is no trustworthy emotion for a poet.
Thus has my hot heart's spring gone dry:
Pain and fury sapped it,
Soft tissue stripped and bitten from without
And within, leaving only smoldering bones,
Teeth dulled and nails blunted;
Calcified soles to carry me
Through desert darkness,
Where at last brittle, broken
They fail. No more strength
In clenched fists,
Nothing
But hope in a desert of light,
To join there those equal to anger,
No longer its slave.

As stately as a Redwood and as strong
as the gray cliffs of the Sierras,
as warm as the sun on the kelp-strewn sand.
I remember her musical voice and I hear
the murmur of the waves
and the whisper of the wind
in the Eucalyptus trees.
I see the limitless ocean and sky,
remembering her beautiful blue-green eyes.

May you find your Polaris
when fickle starfields shift
behind dry eyelids
no constant but movement
too deep for volition
no feeling, only the throb
of an unquiet pendulum heart
marking the numb, blind hours
between midnight and winter dawn

We soak our travel-weary feet
Together in the deep end of a sea of clouds;
Take pause on the immortal steps
To inhale Yellow Mountain mist,
Coal dust, incense. Smokeless
Digital fireworks and sky-high butterfly facades
Sprout like corn stalks in autumn haze,
While we navigate this land of a billion characters
And more with only a phrase to go on,
Past the shops, libraries,
And reading rooms packed
With a literature only seen;
Poetic place names set
To a music only heard;
Guided by subtext, courteous,
And often as odd
As we find ourselves, on another side
Of a world only passing through.

At the brink of worlds I could
Hear hammer blows on coffin wood
Drink headline ink 'til doomsday falls
Taste newsprint paste on gray cell walls
Fissures deep in split flesh stung
With gritted teeth and muted tongue
Where endings chewed in unplacid fever
Slake only the fat of the world-eaters

I am a creature
Of movement and pain.
In movement and pain I exist
And have always existed.
To cease movement
Will be to pass from existence.
I am a creature
Of movement and pain.