dive
keeps thinking about the desert
about getting high
about the girls he’s fucked in any number of
shithole apartments
finds the slight depression at the far
edge of the field where the horse was buried
no songs but the
songs of bees
the smell of lilies, of
dogwood and roses, clouds like mounds of
faceless corpses circling overhead and he
thinks he had a son
remembers watching the bus pull out of
the parking lot but has no
memory of it ever coming back
and so he’s stoned at the far edge of
summer, 85 miles an hour down the interstate,
hills in every direction, shredded tires from
eighteen-wheelers, crows at the roadkill,
all of these pointless metaphors for
a wasted life
he’s 25 and then he’s 43, a father and an
emotional cripple, sunburnt, unshaven,
no use for anyone’s god
he doesn’t support the war and he
doesn’t support the soldiers and he
doesn’t support the government
walls are walls, of course, and
every window is a target
the dogs are always hungrier when the
corpses are bulldozed into pits and burned
but he’s thinking about the desert,
you see,
or he’s thinking about a woman he still loves,
and the two have become interchangeable
in his mind
he’s thinking about this child he
may or may not have
about a poem he should but won’t write
he’s lost, yes, but only because
his eyes are closed
only because he never knew where he
was going in the first place
____________
the swimmer
there is no breathing in
your grave, there is no sunlight,
no guilt
no language
despite what needs to be said and so
fuck you
and fuck your
addictions
your
idea of god
there is too much beauty here
to waste my life
dreaming of death
deuce coupe 