I'm not in love with anyone right now
and to be honest
it's pretty boring

Hands on the wheel
window half open
I stare down the road into the perfect golden sunset
toward the city and the sea
the verdant spring forcefully blooming me into mania
the radio singing me onward
All I want, all I ever wanted
to leave
I have my debit card and a full tank of gas
I can go anywhere.

I sigh
pull onto the exit
and drive slowly home.

I am in a desert town
Standing on the mountaintop
alone
Lonely growing up in a too-big house
seeing the world from behind the smeared glass of a
tour bus
while an automated voice drills in
objective truths
about culture
about what the Other's color of skin makes
them.

Being told to give money because God said so
Being told my daddy up in heaven loved me
whether he showed up or not
and I had to just
believe
and obey
Him.

I'd rather turn away
from that sunny desert sky, because it
burns
I'd rather jump off the bus
so I could stop feeling so ****
sick
and forget about what the color of my skin
makes me.
I'd rather not live to serve a god I don't
know
and never met
and a family who has never met me.

To be called a fellow person
rather than a tourist or
patron.
Because I know what it is to be patronized.

I feel my beating heart
and in between pulses
I see you all
feeling your own hearts
washed in midnight glow of computer screens
shining from your pupils.
Human
not abstract
Real
and very much
Alive.

The sea is dead so
come on and take a swim
let it pull you down
meet the horrors of the deep
let your laughter end their sleep
      as you drown.

The world is dying but
you seem just fine.
Somehow you are happy here
bafflingly impervious
to ethereal delirias
      and cosmic fear.

The shredded clouds
in complacent disarray
over my greening desert valley
cast a gray-brown light
on the softening mountains.

I want to go
and go and go and go
If I step onto the street I will not be able to stop myself
My feet will find the riverside
and then the Oregon coastline
and then the California valley
And maybe I will find myself
washed somewhere downstream by the river.