Long days
And excessive miles
On desert highways
Warp my mind
But it’s a good warp
Ripe with strange insights
As the desert strips away
All but the essential
Tag: United States of America
Comet From the Vanishing
Dusky desert sky
Offers not
A single star
So look ahead
To where the road
Is vanishing
A comet glows
Slow to grow
But soon enough
Comes streaking by
Whereupon
The night sky falls
So stars may
Come alive
When the Sun Shines on the Bay
Some places draw me in
With the embrace of an old friend
Not seen in far too long
Sea to Sky
In the valley
An empty basin
But for lingering salt
Where once a lake
In the sky
A saltless sea
Atmospheric bounty
Held aloft by the winds
Infinite Rhythms
Finite tracks traverse
Infinite space and time
Every passage a new road
Every road a new story
Played out in the rhythms
Of dashed lines and power poles
Where even the vanishing point
Vanishes
Into futures unexplored
Haystack Rock
A seductive rock
On ocean’s edge
Half the day
Surrounded by the tide
Attracting thousands
Nature’s iconic monument
To a monumental coastline
In time with the waves’ ungentle caress
They saunter near, then scramble back
This flightless flock of sandpipers
Photographs and selfies
Arm-in-arm and hand-in-hand
A deep breath in, a longer one out
The calm that comes on any shore
Where the surf rumbles and sighs
Some may say it’s the rock
But the rock is a draw as any other draw
A pier, a lighthouse, beach chairs and gazebos
It is the sea which helps us remember ourselves
The Streets of San Francisco
Fabled Streets
Of San Francisco
Car chases
And cable cars
In nineteen hundred and ninety six
I take my 5th wheel down Powell
Forty-five feet of feelin’ cooler than
McQueen, Cage and Connery
Past the bottom
The truck’s brakes fail
So I drive the city streets
Using the trailer’s brakes
Impressing a parallel trucker
“You’re one of us,” he tells me
Eat your hearts out
Movie stars
Dust Storm
Sometimes
Life moves at a pace
I cannot keep
Or rather
Life moves
I simply do not
And in my disastrous stillness
The dust storm rolls in
Without hesitation
To Roll
Over
Me
Move or don’t move
Retreat or don’t retreat
Seek cover or…
Let
The dust
Take me
Nature’s Dance
I like to imagine
Mother Nature kicking back
In her Adirondack
Enjoying the majestic dance
Of her creation
Choreographed with geological rhythm
The chuckles she must chortle
As all her little creatures
Scurry about the stage
Like so many Keystone Kops
In a silent era comedy
None more ridiculous
Than we
Carapace and Claw
What’s left behind
On this near side of eternity
Shell of existence
Shadow legacy
Husk of memories kept alive
By those who’d known the shell
But never the true nature
Of what it protected
Too the trails
Footfalls left in the sand
Evidence of passing presence
Echoes oft anonymous
No matter all this
Tides soon enough erase
While echoes fade
To silence
So cling to hope
For something beyond
The far side of death
Or suffer the fear of oblivion
Pix to Words 