Joy and similar discontents
break wheaten on the all-weather
radial steel-reinforced sidewall hum,
on the defog rasping for a service call;

Break on the near treeless plain
stitched loose to the sky with rivets
of silos and grain bins - clouds
dive porpoise behind the rise.

Joy and similar discontents
hang like flowers on a bleach
wood cross surviving another winter
to tread sobbing on the green ditch water.

Every X and Y coordinate of the plains
etched by gravel side-ways and field
entries too rutted and ragged
to suit the conglomerate need

or the tilt houses and stripped clapboard
banging against the thistle, milkweed
and swallowed dreams in the foxgrass,
with turkey buzzards circling thermal overhead.

But the crows plunge faster into red
fresh carrion sloughs of whitetail and ****
to breach at the presence of a larger scavenging -
and each bent marker tells its own tale.

Count the bullet holes and shotgun splatter
in the stops and yields when the road was empty,
when the night was dry, when the callous boys
had time on their hands instead of hog blood

and badger-eyed girls that left after graduation
for the starless haze, crowded parades,
sidewalk shops, umbrellas on the rain side
of things keeping each at arm's length.

But it was never about the city,
never about the glitz and pizzazz
of everything running baffled into gridlock;
less about the thick dumb flannel boys.

It was always about that low fog,
the night eyes in the beams, the manure, chaff
and split seams of the midwest furrows,
the haybales that bob like rafts over the horizon.

I am prone to tracing crosses
in near empty ashtrays.
I don't really know why,
but this behavior, perhaps
a tick of the mind to the finger
tips me into some grievous
absolution while slowly,
knowingly, killing myself
smooth, drag after drag.

But that, in itself,
is mere supposition.

Perhaps I seek direction
in an ashen compass,
ringed with bent
singed needles
piled at the edges
because not a single one
found true north.

But that, again,
is mere supposition.

Down,
in The Valley of Fires,
where three rivers converge,
a cross on a rock emerges,
scratched stone upon stone
by a hand more ancient than known
to pass unto me a pattern, hard-wired,
affixed in all our yearning - to seek
that single point - home.

But that, too, is mere supposition.

The ape of reason
wakes inside the primate house
throws **** at the glass
and the gawking apparitions
whose eyes align with his own reflection
but for a few seconds

waits for the one who knows
the one who carries the yellow bucket
stuffed with limp greens
sprung grain and stink meat
to spill the feast on the concrete slab
he calls a pedestal

scratches at lice
his only bedmates
small
irritating
but his own familiar feeders

calling dumb and barbarous
the macaque in the next cell over
calling loud the howlers
calling lewd the bonobos
calling brethren the chimpanzees
who wage war on the neighboring troop.

Blind slouched friar on a slow mule
that through ford and thicket sure-hooved
loafs on to a deaf peasant shack whose eyes
crackle afire in a sprectrum unseen to the seeing
and the friar feels the heat in his fingertips
reads the braille of himself in the scars
on the mumbling one's tools, hovel blunted,
dull, splintered hatchets and soft hammers
that never found a brick to stack against the wind.
The blind one in the deaf one finds
one full moment where a bread and a hot sip
of slack water postpones the ever-fording.

Longer rivers run to the sound
where the commerce plays out
its jangling game.

When once we were mountains,
no more than bare bluffs now,
each jutting a finger of mudflats
untrod and untouching for the tide
has turned once more, lifting the drift
and carrying our past verdant
intrepid days into the sea,
upon the waves, to be spat
onto another shore strange
with blunt shell, burnt pebbles,
and the neverminds of the locals.

But perhaps it is in our nature to weather,
to erode, to spill our alluvial fans
to any passing angler who'll listen,
perhaps the boulders we tumbled
to our own demise are no more,
no more than jagged or smooth grains,
packed, pounded, arranged
for the foot of a marveling toddler
on her first time at the shore.

wake
that one
eye may find
in your creped hip
in your rippled spine
in your slumber damp palm
in your night braided tresses
in your too hot for sleep dresses
on the floor with caresses and socks
reason to stand against time's august clocks

Hopeless is the hope
for a clean spring rain
the blush cheek of winter
the fall of the sane

The summer of once
is the trickle of soils
down the cliff of a ditch
down into our toils

Come all with a dream
down into the pits
where a ragged and spent
god wistfully sits

Confess to the deaf one
put coins in a palm
trench diggers care little
for us or our psalms