It isn't like that.
It isn't a left turn too early,
a lark awake at night,
thick brown light in an open field;
unpredictable: a bad or counter-miracle.
It is only wanton.

You know how it is
Suddenly, something trapped between your toes:
the world has a strangled voice, it is
unroofed. You want the comfort of normal walls,
normal light, normal noise; in your hand
is a hot brand you'd halfway use
to smith it back together
and halfway swallow.
I had different plans for this vacation
than destruction.

I had plans. You had plans. The earth
planned its axial tilt; the weather planned
its burning; we put aside too little water.
A few plants were familiar -
the ruined piñon pine I remembered from the placard.
One lonesuch tree that made a little niche
at a defiant angle into the air
and outlived all except its orphaning.
How we thought we could fare better, I cannot say.

Ten feet up by one hundred feet over:
one liter water per mile climbed:
fatigue. Fatigue.
The quiet supremacy of all these rules for living like
transit and occultation
refraction and dimness
exertion
hunger
peristalsis pulling down
huge loads of sunlight
into the ***** gully
like bread and meat.

You will not see the bottom
no matter how hard you look.

If blood I am, then what kind of blood?
Unsettled and unsettling. The circulatory system
has an apt name: sometimes I can feel yesterday's blood
in the same neurons, saying the same thing.
I have no choice but to repeat it.
Time sheds its significance.
I have no continuity:
I have rhythms.

The new day, on fire and sitting in the trickle
you held a golden fish in your palm
as if you had made it by will
and cupped, it circled in the valley of your fingers
and I ate from the vision of care.

Erosion: isn't that what made these furrows?
I beg it to unmake me
flat like a seabed and many fathoms green
where the sun will never reach me.

In the penumbra of your anger
I do not fear dying,
only dying unclean.
Heights are all the same.
They would all break me and none would enough.
The grasshoppers and gecko hatchlings
all die in their way, rubbed in the hot dry dust.
Parched, I gnash my stone teeth
and tongue of chaparral -
I am making a song to say
die with me
but smile at me.

Then I see it through flashes of temper,
frame by frame, like a fingertip behind a pinwheel:
a dream of something distant that is also true.
Dreams of freedom alongside dreams of dying.

I
Taking advantage of the milestone age,
Prowling the night by myself,
I pull into an unfamiliar stone ring of parked cars,
Locked the car, and walk-clinked against ground-level stones
Until I pulled the handle of the main door
To my first bar/club entry.
Hesitation and nervousness showed up
When I presented my license identification to the bar staff...
But if they let me in at all,
Suppose I don't give off an adolescent vibe anymore.
Seeing my work boss rock out with his band bros,
Freak Show, turned me from nervousness and silence
Staring at a random TV channel
To responding to Jamie's audience calls,
To dancing like my mom, Robert Barone, and anyone I could think of,
To dancing with other people I never met,
One woman swooning over my self-initiative to dance at all,
And resulted in clogged eardrums
Rock and rolled
Give it time,
This side of me is awakening.

II
After circling Berkeley Springs
And realizing I passed up Hillbilly Heaven bar
[I mistook it for a car dealership],
l crossed the street into a new-to-me adult audience realm.
Outdoor setting, speakers and techno-colored lights,
A mechanical bull available for riding,
*******,
Rock music,
Women grinding each other playfully to the music,
Busts that only my eyes could see to believe,
All under a starry curtain of a sky.

III
Closer to home,
The parking a trick
That took one circular trip to land a legal spot.
Another unroofed setting,
Downed three Sprite sodas,
Pretending to make a pavilion stake
a stripper pole,
dancing slow up-and-down,
Dancing the same stand-still body-rocking moves each song
Only to support the music being brought by Freak Show.
I sat next to a Dr. Pepper co-worker
Who laughed dangerously the entire night I saw him.
I shook my ***** with a stranger woman
Like two Newton ***** clinking each other rhythmically.
Thanks to supporting staff and benefactors!

IV
Taboo Gentlemen's Club,
The security check-in churned my feelings
Into thinking, I was lying,
Lying to myself and to security.
But I wasn't negotiably.
I passed the metal scan
And paid my way in.
Strippers, poles, birthdays
With spanking.
Luxury chairs,
Flying money.
Maybe there's no club I can join,
But there's always room to join the club.

It haunts.
You still want to see the―
beheading, piecemeal
in borderless pain.
The war had defrauded my life.

An unsoiled moon
was taking depressed steps tonight.
Faith healing had stopped.

Floaters swim again in view.

A forbidden place.
You do not want to visit the
Blood-soaked turf.

Darkness enters
the poem.

When she ran,
she actually flew
and started a storm
that unroofed the palaces of the norm
the old birds in the sky
couldn't believe their eyes
for they waited for a millennium
breathing out the last sigh of hope
to witness the realization of the prophecy
and the patience paid off every second
for it was utterly and divinely DOPE

The Richest Country in the World

A concrete sidewalk for skipping to school:
A busy flower shop, the picture show
Post office, the hole-in-the-wall café
The general mercantile, the old feed store

The school is gone; the sidewalk hasn’t changed
Except that no one walks it any more -
Just archaeology, weeds and bricks that tell
Of once-upon-a-time along Main Street

No townsfolk now, only unroofed walls and sky
Not far from where the four-lane passes by

Of the torn down-home, the vivid color of the rooms, tell the stories of the lives lived there.
Captures attention.
Shows more than that meets the eye; the pile of planks, unroofed base, the windows holding the dark,
of the torn down-home.

The pain physical.
I carve it in my mind, to
set it free― like the leaf going
to meet the ground.

To carry myself, holding
within, the desire to seek liberation
from coming and going.

My unroofed walls, taking
in, the sun, the rains―
the storm― the snow.

And my hurts―
my poesy.

I am confronting myself
for the final count.