when you figure out that your government hates you

 

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

[asking for something, asking for anything]

 

each god as useless as the next

NEW WORK AT

THE CLOSED EYE

OPEN 

and everything beautiful will die in your hands

 

in love with the lie that nothing ever really dies

 

YOU KNOW ME SO WELL

once you figure out who the enemy is, you're halfway there