Our bare feet danced on rocky grins
and we sculpted the mountains with footprints
until we became the poster children of lost causes.

God glared at our river through cloudy fingers.
They stuck paddles in his eyes
and sent ripples through heaven’s image.

There were skeletal faces in the bluffs,
an unsettling stillness in the trees
and a lethal sense of freedom about us.

Our hazy days brought darker nights
and we ran deeper into wooded revolution
until we became the monsters of a hand-me-down fear.

Natives watch us from the water
with all the same forgiveness of a wanderer,
but knew us with the bitterness of the choice they never had to make.
We saw them as the lucky ones.

We saved ourselves from the white picket daggers
that came with delusions of all-American purity.
You loved me enough to break a little girl’s white dress dreams.

Now we live in the dark chills of runaway fantasies
where thrill turns standing hair into pine needles,
and we cloak our paranoia in smiles.

You and I are inhabitants of an untamed Washington.
We’ll die out here in golden fields by the water,
without ever fearing what we know we should.
I became human under trees and sky,
and I swear I will never go back to the smoking houses.