Come inhabit this room

I can stand growing old

So you've found out

Play it all back

awake

what.
awake.
raucous R.E.M.
"it's been a bad day
please don't take a picture."

before 6 are
15 milky minutes
where a girl I once knew,
acts as a caricature.

and oh nudity!
like painted carnival booths...
muscles and skin of delacroix
or el greco!

one more canister
of clicking slides--
noah's ark behind a cardboard city,
a curious and falling pilot,
and a perpetual staircase of escape--
time's up.

Ventura

On the bleached Ventura coast of California
salt and sunscreen combine and run
into the corners of my eyes.
Those eyes upon the pier's end: the meeting
of drunk fishermen and barefoot women.

Above fourteen thousand feet
of golden-hot atmosphere, sweat rolls,
singeing and blurring my vision.

What West Coast freedoms are sold for altitude!
For those sunned statuettes, those eager children,
the seagulls, the fishermen, and their prey
never visit my third dimension, my cockpit.

And yet, I find a second ocean,
more measureless than the first.
A new abandon of yellows, whites, and blues.

I don't expect to be buried

I don't expect to be buried in Noble, Guymon, or Shawnee.
I doubt my name will trace these cemetery plates
or be entered by letter in the records of Oklahoma.

No, the muted, mustard gold and the wet greens
of Easter farmland is but one palette I must process.

A process of ink-staining my cognition
with the odors of soil and tomatoes.

What raw odds

At eight past eleven, I stood outside
the roar of coiling limbs, the plastic alcohol.
Then down those slanted halls, but first ink
of two black crosses behind the knuckles.

Oh tobacco, you wash over us now.

What raw odds we give conscience,
where men prod over auction goods.
What a solid, silent association
now circles the transfixed and resigned.

Here is a commonplace exposé of the id.

The ink, a cursory scarring in comparison;
and again an immediate release to night.

A Thickness

At eight years, I'd sprawl across a solid bed.

Upon the monolith, my eyes soon dimmed.
But my fingers relaxed against a blank thickness--
a negative substance of my muscles' contraction.

Now, I romance the idea. I glorify it as a measure
of faces, of modern art, and of unfamiliar music.
Where my slackened mind finds substance,
there are bedsheets to lie within.

City,

City, I've read your gospel,
seen your banks erected
in plaster and brick.

City, your rooftops are familiar--
water towers and a highway.

And city, your avenues
will be mine again.

Draw and Pull

Ten hours out of Oklahoma,
and what can exist here,
with red Kansas highway spent beneath?

A livelihood amidst vacant storefronts,
and long-rusted steel machines?
Perhaps. Even Goodland has its way.

Morality under the dusty bedspreads,
behind the faded, floral prints of these motels?
There is a chance.

Movement past these crumbled streets,
a chance for East or West?
No, there can be none.

Night holds us--a motel room--
feet pound cement, a child screams,
a motorcycle snarls, revs and fades.
An urge for motion
and morning comes.

West again, the border and Colorado.
A deep-seated fear relieved,
the land still unchanged.

Denver comes muted first
in concrete gray and charcoal blue.
Then monuments--a gold-spired university,
a stadium, but ever less than
the edging horizon.

A city of newness, of remedies, and of wealth.
A ridged basin, a lake enclosed,
the odor of pine, sumac and we stop
fifteen hours out of Oklahoma.

The 232nd Fourth

I watch my city stop, fold up,
and sit wide-eyed across a bridge.
And the sky turns for us--
turns outward in three-four time
and fades.

The smoke remains draped
as a flag in still air,
listlessly moving west.

Now, a newfound blankness
as my city disassembles
and we flee.