Approaching Rocket’s Red

FOUR
You held her the last time before they took
You away. Her eyes, large pools of night behind wire-rimed frames,
stared at you from above high dark cheekbones of brown
And her full red lips pulled into a forced smile
Of clear African beauty.
A soft, smooth face rimmed with shiny black hair
cascading to her shoulders in calm waves gone to curl.
They can’t destroy us, she said. Not if what we feel is true.
Not if what we dream is strong.
You smiled sadly in reply,
doubting her words but hoping their truth.
An intertwining of pink and sepia fingers in a final
press of love.

THREE
These are the places of dreams.
These are the places of years burned out.
Of plans tangled with whispers.
Of ideals weighted with dusted paper.
Of sacred societies fragmented by
cracks and cuts.
These are the places of dreams.
Of catchphrase ideologies dug into
busted, rotted brains.
Of simple solutions
staining a complex pain.
These are the places of days dried up.
Of dark, endless nights illumined
by a mad-hatter’s moon
whose cold silver lights a lunatic equation:
Let All equal One
if One equals Nothing.
These are the places of dreams.


TWO
Rising through the swirling mists of orange sodium vapors
Like languid foam from a cracked wine bottle,
We surface on a cold, concrete shore
--plastic pygmies
who cannot dance,
with our feet stuck to stands.
Rising through the mists of orange sodium vapors,
we stare across an endless avenue piled with rusty wrecks
of cars and shopping carts
and arcade games and shattered records
and pictures browned with
stale ages.
Rising through the swirling mists of sodium vapors
like shimmering shockwaves through the stratosphere,
we alight atop the fractured vault of firmament
to see the world contained in a tight wax groove
circling a central sun
of off-key free jazz
and the cacophony is a
spectral play of party-colored lights
that fill the grid holes of our
haunted spirits.
We shall oil rusted valves of dead magic brass
and dance like wind-tossed confetti,
our clockwork worked past mechanical limits
till it breaks asunder
and we swirl in the party-colored winds.

ONE
Lights cloud in rainbow rivulets
over shaded pines and sleeping foxes
in some cool climb south of the pole star.
Mist in the grasses kneads its way whitely across
the meadows as red eyes scan from the dark places
in the foliage.
your hands are tied behind your back
with barbed wire stigmatizing bony
reddened wrists
and your hollow glass eyes
reflect the Northern lights
and water with the moisture of memory.
gaunt sockets darkened with accelerated
age hold your sight in a sunken skull.

Salt in the eye washes down a dirty, cut cheek.
Your lips peel like faded, time-worn paint on a wall.
Green-gold eyes mirror a smoothly dark pastoral scene.
A motel room painting.
These are the places of dreams.
You recall childhood visions of oils and acrylics
dabbed against a woven canvas
framed in faux wood.
A scene you always wanted to step your
child feet into.

Now you stumble and wade through wild grasses
that ripple with dry bass whispers.

Shattered concrete rubble hulks on the shadowed
horizon. There is memory in the shell of structure.
There is memory in the bones of your head.
There is memory in the meadow turned grey by dusk.
There is memory in a child’s vision: oils and acrylics
on woven canvas
nailed to a faded wall of peeling paint.

The sentries in black uniforms trudge in cracked leather boots
across a fractured concrete plain gone to seed.
Gone to weed.
Gone to the entropy of regenerative Nature.
Assault rifles are swaddled in leather gloves
like messianic infants.
You are a shadow spilling up the horizon.
You are a shambling, shattered hulk of a wreck.
You are a memory gone to seed
to regrow with weeded life
And twisting vitality.
You are a silhouette framed in the blood-red
shimmering of electronic scopes.
Free as a tumbleweed.
As a torn flyer riding the currents of breeze.
As a fragment of worn thought on the eddies
Of a tired mind.
You will sleep in due time.
You will sleep in this darkness.
A lone oasis on an interstate highway.
The walls worn with ancient paint.
The walls adorned with neatly priced
paintings.
Mommy and Daddy let a little boy sleep
in a bed by himself.
Just like home.
The journey has been long
and the price beyond money.
It is not over yet.
You fall on the leafy quilt and sink
in the night loam.
There is moisture in your eyes,
salted and dark and red.
A child’s dream
on an interstate highway,
Between Texas and Arkansas.
With grassy meadows on walls.
Love in the silence.
Love in the watchful eyes
That peer from the darkness
with redness of exhaustion.