the hospital and the desert

The desert's red memory
of skittering lizards and ochoa leaves
mesmerizes our stance on the cracked ground of being
We've opened our eyes in the pulsing morning
to the drawl of dryness known as dawn and crawl from our sleeping bags
with mouths half full of sand to stand on the cool ground
as a road runner scatters his feathers across the flats
and the yucca plants tower, holding water up to the sky.

A couple of well executed bank shots in basketball
caused a commotion, the futility of sports
drearily reflecting the middle class attatchment to fruitless action.
I awoke with sawdust in my eyes to the approaching fiasco
of the rich devouring the poor amid the fabricated morass
of a life engineered with boredom in mind, all the provocateurs
vanished into office jobs and exposing themselves only in bar banter,
lifting the disease away as a veil while the others choked down whiskeys.
Nobody cared about basketball where I came from, the weighted matters
constituting depth discussed at the dinner table instead of a buffet of television
offered to the proctored roles of spectation.

They tried to sell my dream desert
by turning it into a series of freeways connecting nowhere
to anywhere, the land being perfectly flat
for the construction of a new wasteland.
I've seen the ends of consumerism in the halls of the mental ward
and it frightens people to know that the mad are unconcerned with expensive jewelry
or salaried positions leading to death by heart attack,
but few swim away in the natural currents that imply idleness
and labor with a human touch.
I drank a bucket of vodka just to get the stink of the strip mall out of my brain
and I danced with a pretty girl on linoleum who believed in magic
as the materialists outside stole and murdered each other over cheap toys,
we were launched into an aura of forgetfulness as blissful as the enrapturing night's
sight of diamonds in the sky and arrayed in asterisms of mad language made beautiful
by being true. Thunder shook us apart, the fetishisms of order and policy
dictated that we were not to touch each other, our existential rights as humans
were taken away and still we danced inside with our school child crushes, humming
with the back of the television as the news of the day unfurled in colored sweeps of waves
more real than bracketed car chases illustrated by cameras after primetime.

They destroyed my desert,
the place that solidified death into a doorway
with undertones of fuschia inside swirling like a flurry of wind
raking at the leaves of the mind. They took away my desert
with flights to Beijing and logical things that constituted a reason
tinted by a madness so terrible that it was thought of as normality.
They flooded my desert with Seven Eleven coffee cups and Taco Bell advertisements,
they disheveled the sand with banks of concrete, they tore open mesas to house
the rich, they painted over the red of my sunset with hues of hotel pastel that looks
like a child's vomit. I've been thinking
about how to take it back, but I've got no bombs
and no friends to tag along, just a couple of pets and owners
who I drink coffee with that own nothing more threatening than a ballpoint pen.

They destroyed something I had invented in my taciturn way,
that I keep now as fragments in journals and memories secreted away
with foreign lingos calling in euphony towards an oasis of the heart
that rests somewhere undiscovered by the cretins who own institutions
and unmapped by the morons gaping in fuck-pleasure at television sports.
I mean, I am still crying
but the tears mean nothing now but water
and we are still dying
in a place where they won't even offer us a grave without us paying for it.

I seem to believe in a common place where the public can rest
and iterate their sufferings to one another without fear of reprisal
or the existence of shitty ten dollar meals suffocating in fat. We can
build it, they can't make us go. We are millions, they are few. Our dreams
are that of the roadrunner, flitting but organic, and best when we run them
to exhaustion on the ground. Our dreams are millions, theirs are none.
Our dreams are millions,
while they have none.

Whoever said
that being rich
was a license to destroy our nature?