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Lights flash green
through quivering blades
of grass. They move,
I realize, to the rhythm
of my unsteady breath.
I am lying atop a lone hill
listening to the roar of engines
coming and going from a single
ashfault strip just below
my horizon line.
This burning desert sun is
rising somewhere as it sets
on me and my town, I sing
to the tune of crickets,
coyotes too add yips and howls
fleshing out the emotion
seen in a strangers eyes
when set down to mama's
peach pie.
I picture her now,
flour caught forever
in the cracks of crippled hands,
like the scent of lavender
twisted into her charcoal ringlets;
they fall in perfect form
around the kindest face you
ever saw.
The pitter-patter
of spiders along corridors
of packed dirt reminds
of father's careful footsteps
along our wooden halls,
his feet blistered
from a new pair of cowboy boots,
all shiny and new,
soon to be creased
like his tired brow.
I sit up straight like a soldier
and crane my neck to see
the night's first star,
tonight like every night
for the year past
I pray for my brother
only twenty but like a man
of seventy, a limping gait
accompanying his tall frame,
the shrapnel's scream still
waking him in a cold sweat.
The faces of family and friends
come to me with every train whistle
that has drifted across town
like a birds song through an open
window, and I wonder
how it feels to bored
that last train home, the one
crazy Jack says glistens
white as purest snow
and conducted by the Virgin Mary,
his stories often punctuate
my own wandering thoughts
and I debate with myself
whether this should be so.
Blowing a kiss to the full moon
I turn and descend the hill
opposite the airstrip,
my sandaled feet
scattering stray moths
from their resting places
as I head towards my own
simple place of rest,
the attic has become my domain
decorated and adorned to my
hearts content, a self portrait
with a whisper of someone else
in the faded background.
These walls groan beneath
the weight of my secrets
yet remain a constant pair
of open arms, and into them
I fling my mortal body
when the world turns a blind eye
and covers its shallow ears.