(final draft)
we can travel together
kick back in the lap of a classic
chevy ragtop,
engine block roaring bold
existence,
soaring down huckleberry highways,
the eyes of god
spinning,
and every loose strand of your
ponytail
painting the desert blonde
we’ll hunt down all the blind spots
eyes too wide to have corners,
we’ll make up names
for all the things maps leave out,
trash-heap landmarks,
lost truck stop civilizations, the
grand madness of utah
the dashboard decorated like noah’s ark
with your collection of plastic pez
dispensers,
mickey mouse and donald duck and
whatever
that
frog-looking-thing is supposed to be,
i’ll laugh at your cheap toys,
you’ll make fun of my hat
we can bum rush a million roads
or linger too long in
time-traveling roadside restaurants,
jukebox floored, reshuffling
hundreds of yesterdays,
eat hotdogs and watermelon in a
winnemucca parking lot,
pour bottled water over broken
radiators
in arizona heat
waves
you can make a map
of cloud formations, i’ll navigate
the radio,
we can kill the static with
philosophical gibberish,
or sing along with
hillbilly fiddles
scratching out lazy love songs
we’ll take shelter
in each other, and motel showers
too small for two,
take epic naps, and ruin most of
our clothes
in a piece of shit laundromat
we can witness the heartbeats of alien cities
i’ll admit i’m clueless, and you
can lead me
thru santa fe streets, explore the
festival of summer,
mingle in the heat of human nature,
make totem poles
out of strangers, drink the local
wine and tell wild stories
of exodus and diaspora
we’ll pose like stray dogs
in tourist
trap photographs, me in my ugly hat
you all ragdoll beautiful
i’ll merge in and out of u-haul caravans
in grapes
of wrath formation
across the
four dimensions of america,
black and
white and asphalt gray,
you can
crash in the backseat, paint your toenails
whatever
color you like
we can vanish into blue mountains
the way all
good expeditions do,
a gospel of
impulse,
nothing but myth
and a trail
of sunflower seeds
