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i've seen you cry
felt your pain
i've dried your eyes

i've seen your worst
felt your anger
i've helped your hurt

i've seen your best
felt your smile
i've forgotten the rest

i've seen your heart
felt your pulse
i've touched every part

i've seen your love
felt your love
i've fallen in love
one gallon,
31 miles or so the EPA
guesstimated--163,680 feet
54,560 steps if he walked

he avoided
the major "arteries"
damnable euphemisms
for interstates

for what lifeblood
did they carry and what
did one see at 110 feet a second
1.25 miles a minute

at mile 3,
he spotted a cur crossing
the asphalt, or perhaps it was a coyote;
and until mile 12 he wondered

why he wanted to know where it had
come from, rather than where it was going,
because aren't road trips about getting
somewhere?

at mile 15, he saw a farmhouse
abandoned before time--or maybe when
a feeble old man died on a sagging bed
the month after he put his wife
in the cold ground

and told his progeny if their homestead
was good enough to bring them into the world,
and for her to depart, it was fine enough
for him to do the same

at mile 21, he traversed a bridge
over Red Bluff Creek, and he knew
there wasn't a bluff within a hundred miles;
perhaps it was got its colored calling, after
a poker player named Red, known
for his bluffing

at mile 30, he had a blowout;
no, he didn't careen off the old road
into a ditch, but slowly rolled to an impotent stop
atop the only hill in 50 miles

a man in overalls with an ancient pick up
stopped and offered aid in a drawl thick enough
to slow time; together they put on the donut
from the trunk--the man wouldn't take a ten
but said take care

and our traveler decided his helper
had to have been kin to the old man
in the abandoned shack, and perhaps he had
been there in the end, watching the wheel spin
on a tick tock clock, noting the precise minute
the old man passed--to write this time
in a family bible

because that is how it should be
of all those things he would see--beasts going
nowhere, mythic rivers from everywhere, and behind
ghost painted walls, men dying, men whose  
sons would stop to render aid to strangers
and help conjure the imagined tales
infinitely available of a gallon
of fossil fuel
a couch tale--written on my phone, reclining on my sofa, far from the open road
Tonight is for peanut butter
and blue dreams,
soaked in ***** blasts.
I feel okay but my friends are
dead and it will always last.
Don't count on me
to care too much.
Don't care for me,
because you can't
count on me.

I've remembered the neon signs;
all the life I've left behind.
It's not easy being lost at twenty-three;
my bark is hard but I'm
a rotting tree.
You were gifted
with intelligence -
to be ever growing.

You were born
to seek knowledge -
to be in the knowing.

Don't fall victim
to the infectious
  "brain draining" epidemic -
implemented to cut you short.

Listen to your conscience -
not to all of the crap
that you've been
"subconsciously" taught!

By Lady R.F ©2017
Walking in the cold rain
Alone and
Going nowhere
Just hiding tears in raindrops

Always dreaming of being lost
Lost and then
The endless fall
The gasping awakening

But always the rain will end
And sunrise
Put an end
To the cruelty of night

And life will begin in warmth
And hope
Blossoms into
The sweetest softest petals

                                           By Phil Roberts
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