Desert Dreams

dried out and sunk up to the neck in hot red sand

head clear in the spotless blue sky

an eye that open a thousand years ago when rain and wind finally won through

and you became a windowed rock

cute as a bug cactus poking it's head up above the dunes

dry gray spines sticking out in every direction

captured on the fly

some desert gerbil left tracks in the sand

it is only safe out here at night

or it is it.

everything that eats meat at night can see your living blood in the dark.

oh well

eat or be eaten

A path blasted through your stone face

forcing you to crack and smile

and paving your dome and forcing molten black rock into your viens

we are faster than nature but less permanent

We almost never build a thing that will endure a thousand years

and even when we do, some fool comes by and shoots off the nose

or destroys it because people with the wrong faith built it.

Red rock opens like a flower

a forced bloom

pried open by a million years of wind and water.

A cathedral of rough stone

carved and abandoned by forgotten waters

rock like sculptured flesh

sensual, open, smooth

yielding to light

trusting it's secrets to shadow

Laying down the bones in layers

silting up the earth in lines and grooves

When rocks where so young they were still molten

they made shapes like these as easily as blown glass.

Now they must be beaten had on the anvil of winds

and cut deep and long by rough and tumbling waters

for ages and eons

scultpted by nature into a playful loop

lost in a hidden cave.

A history written in stone.

Histories written in the stones.

A stone on a potters wheel

smooth by liquid fingers over a thousand years.

a monument to monolith

stone stares over still waters

Joshua Tree

A withered soul lost in a southern desert.

You began your devotions at birth and prayed every date that your heart would freeze.

You must be frozen to have babies-you won't bloom until ice touches your face.

You will have a child here in the southwester wilderness.

A Child who will be born to reach withered hands toward heaven.

A child who will pray every day that here heart will freeze.

A mirage would have been better

a wavy dream of water in the desert.

This is where dust devils go to die.

This is a town built on the bones of the dead men.

This is a town best viewed through mud streaked windshields on the way to something better.

A non dead thing come slithering out of the desert.

Revealing a cracked tongue.

There is an errant breeze on occasion.

Ovens are more refreshing.

On the way here we saw so many dead, deserted, died out buildings in the middle of nowhere.

Someone built something in the wilderness.

Time and again I asked myself: didn't they know?

Even the telephone poles don't come out here.

You are nowhere. This is nothing.

An outpost on oblivion

But when the pressure further west became too great

someone put enough spit on his hands and rubbed them together hard enough and long enough

and I will be damned if there isn't a sepia toned town here.

Thank God we will not be here for long.

Drive faster, the ocean beckons.

pockmarks amongst the wrinkles

naked earth held up to a burning sun by day and a cold and indifferent moon by night

fire and ice over time reduces rubble to wrinkled dunes

a giants hourglass broken and spilled out over a hundred miles

the shortest distance between you and death lies out there in desert in the wrong direction

The land aches and creaks and shuffles it's bedraggled ass toward an abandoned horizon

a bleached shack abandoned even by the bones of men

nothing left for the rats to eat either-anymore

desert whispers

desert dreams

a scream at midnight under a bone white moon

and exhalation

the wonder of white hills in the moonlight

where the stars come down to play in the desert

when the moon is full and the night is deep