I’m back from my trip to the Deep South and our trek across the country. I’ve got some great video footage to share within the next week, but it will take me a few days to get it edited. In the meantime, here’s I poem I wrote somewhere in the middle of the country.
Oklahoma Poem
Skin brushed, roused and rough
and to the touch, consoled
and doled out in tiny squares
a steak chopped on the plate
white collared greens, candida
safely alive in between teeth.
lawrence of arabia and a camel toe firmly imprinted
in sand; forever embossed and forever changing
in the sands of sahara
or the great plains and tall.
We are undying, ungoading, unfoiled,
spoiled rotten and forgotten
boiled and baked, sunny side up,
charred and barred from loving solid
mass, and the density of each eucharist
becomes the transfiguration of transubstantiation
a mutilation of the morose figure
jesus, the wheat king, enslaving our endorphins
to a grain cult love sport. Each of us target
tumbling torpedo tossed and touched on the
altar by papal bulls and too many rules.
Can we kiss the ring and swing and sing
like massacred motions of loco lotions
tossed aside by airport security? Why worry
that freedom isn’t free if all our pockets have been
emptied?
Where is the metal detector of our mind?
Our body is 70 percent liquid, but that’s
getting too close to, yes, there’s no place
like home,
like Oklahoma.
——
Here’s another one I found in my notebook:
weather-ford and fortune fivehundred
manicured mastiff mountain head massachusetts
moby dick denver dandelion dolemite dalmation
managed master too late bait create the crevice
of cancer cockamamie motor mayhem mink drink
drive deem tattle tale lay awake shake and bake
mental deviance delete dent the can rang and ring
rung and dung, sung and fun too many syllables
short and shiny, shutdown and crumby, crank
and shank, jail cell bell and southern lovin’
last late limp lipid languid viscosity, vicarious
and loving it. I am alive and in charge, a barge
floating as if the sky is the limit, boxed in, travel size
plaid and sad, have said, too much, lost on, all of us.
The tv is on, the tv is off. We pull out our pockets,
we give our portraits in lockets, we hold them close
to our chest, we drive in the dark out to the west.
I followed a pair of footprints that ended in the ocean.