The crackling tracks
barricade sleep.
(Or lack there of.)
No, she will not dine
on dreamscapes tonight.
Unconscious colored camouflage
removed.
From plantation to incarceration.

A tin can chain now christened:
Foolish
Short-sighted
Immaturity
Failure
Wonderful.
Give it a minute, think about it.
Digest this outstretched space.

and again
right about
click,
clack,
click,
clack,
click,
clack
now.
Wonderful.

With each moment that she doubted
she would give the train a few more miles
a few more bridges and
overgrown branches
to scrape against.
A budget to round
the bends of her mind and
return her to being free and flying and
all reasoned neatly and golden.
Or unreasoned?
Tarnished?

The feeling was more akin to
folded eggshell linens
in a linen closet,
in a blank white hallway ,
in a factory regurgitated
beige stucco wrapped house.
Cut to-
Yuma
Mesa
Glendale

And now that
you’re all riled up darlin’
scream.
Release your hands from
their freeway hold and
splash red and orange pigments
all over their clone khaki world.

Rebellion Gravy,
clean up on aisle 9.

She was riding on a train named:
Abandon
Reckless
Gypsy Express
Rights and Privileges

She owned longitude and latitude
and nicknamed them Compadre.

I settle in,
my clove balanced in hand
and pour the smoke out my mouth
to release these unspoken ghosts
onto the roar below.

The thicket is nothing but
seething amber skewers
that impale the azure lid above.
An asylum housing a horrifying beast.

When,
not if
the flame arrives and paints all the
sage colored, cyan pigmented-
everything peaceful, mild
a garish, ashy gray.

A lucid dream of billowing and brewed
parts of wholes barricade the
flashing rumble, just feet away.
When all is hearth and we
are but mere logs awaiting.

The scent of smoke holds
our senses captive.
The heaving blanket,
mushing our toes with its
duffel of rain has blundered.

We sink into the river
among the tumbling stones
and the embers rupture through the banks;
charring riptides.
Glowing around our shimmering hair.
The wind is picking up and all is tinder.

Before it’s too late,
look to the other side of the river bank.
Look away from the
nightmare before you and
focus on the peace where
nightmare is destined to occur.

Remember these rows of trees chained
like Cavalry in formation.
Watch mouth agape
as you swear you see them
tremble in fear.
Their foliage beginning to curl
from the boil and bedlam
headed this way.

Memorize the living in the last breaths
before you hold your air
and plunge beneath the canopy of water.

Memorize their former selves
and how their branches reached up
to the sky to gather light.
Roots, cemented to the floor.

Wait in these hills crouched
on the rim of this canyon.
Next to the ruins of our home.
The chimney that still pokes up
like a springtime bud,
among the rubble of foundation
that was once our sanctuary.

Remember sweet summer days
when the trees held up the sky
and tangled
their branches round’ clouds.

Just , wait.

And even years from now
when laughter echos across
this forest again.
The ashes have settled to feed the
outstretched coils of roots.
Remember that we are but
logs on the hearth.

Wildly delighted to
diffuse among the darkness.
Bounding through night
in the form of diluted
moonbeams.

Before you’ve memorized this path
it is its most real.
Not yet a memory carved.

A fresh and fleshy green leaf
before the brown grimy, soot,
eats its way to the center.

Today -
is a machine
with which turns a massive,
devouring crank.
It eats at tomorrows toes
and culls its victims off the
line-
one by
one by
one.

And tomorrow?
A pawn,
today’s scapegoat.
A fool enslaved
for the price of
momentum.

She and her teeter totter hands,
weld together a bedtime burial.
like the old oak tree’s
shroud of bark.

Her claws skitter scatter,
projecting spider leg shadows on the walls.
She looks upon me,
hunched at her feet————— ————-wind”
and murmurs———– ——the
—————– ———– ——the
—————“Fear

Treading-
liquid ribbons choke my ankles
he cups his eyes, making a crimson blinder
as a distant, junky rhythm suffers in the corner.

With each stomp we soak our jeans.
He pauses to roll them into cuffs
and the slop’s pulse flutters in fatigue.

On the floor kicking at the drain.
Dancing on the metal slots, peeling back
the rind of rust to liberate the rain.

The burrowed moles and tunneled grubs
all night long feel
the thump, thump, thump,
of our balded biped hooves.

Smoke break-
Ribs shake and rustle in the cold.
The salt mines -
finally melting in the front parking lot.

Two Gulls flitting about,
cawing out to red and white.