Sam Cooke and the Last Days of Summer

“Sam Cooke and the Last Days of Summer”

In these,
the final days of August,
we’re sliding around the curves of a winding two-lane highway,
rattling through man-cut canyons in a classic car,
Sam Cooke’s soul is pouring through rattling speakers,
straining and popping to be heard
over the wind whipping through the open windows.

In these,
the cool, cloudy final days of the summer,
the brown and green of the Wyoming prairie is unending,
the skyline is punctuated with telephone wires.
The wind is thick as water, as thin as sunlight.
Red-dirt rocks tower overhead.
I strain my neck through the window to see the summits.

The engine hums a soft,
lulling death-rattle for a quickly-fading summer.

...

The girl behind the wheel is wearing a cowboy hat,
smiling, and saying something about the music.
I see her lips form the words “song” and “amazing.”
I agree, even though I can’t make out her words
over the rush of the wind,
and the buzz of Sam Cooke on the radio.

In these,
the last days of a rainy and bittersweet summer,
I watch her lips, moving like water over pebbles.
I can’t still hear what she’s saying,
but I watch her smile at me
as the speedometer eases past 70,

Summer, suddenly, without warning,
feels infinite.

"We're Passing Through Them."

If you've never lay in the back
of an old El Camino
and watched as the meteors tear their way
through our atmosphere,
like chalk-lines on a
speckled blackboard sky,
then you've been doing something wrong.

If you've never rested your head
on that spare tire
next to a beautiful girl
who is telling you her life story
in a voice that sounds like whiskey
flowing across her satin throat,
then I don't know how to explain it to you.

And if you've never let that girl
play you Tom Waits on vinyl,
pour you a glass of bourbon,
and listened as she sings along to every word,
until the record begins skipping,
and you press your lips against hers,
then you simply can't understand it.

"Know what's amazing?
We're passing through them,
not the other way around."

While the universe yawns, cracks its neck and reaches for a cup of coffee.

An interesting creative writing experiment for you today. I was recruited by Ian Wallace to participate in a group poem, with several other veterans of the Sheridan County Young Writers' Camp, which I attended throughout my high school years. My experiences at Writers' Camp were absolutely essential to my development as a writer, so I couldn't pass up an opportunity to contribute. We were each given a previous line of a poem, without being shown the lines that came before. We were then responsible for writing a line or two, and passing our lines to the next writer, again without revealing anything that came previously. It's sort of like that childhood "Telephone" game, only with weird experimental poetry. We went three rounds, so we each ended up writing about six lines of the poem. I found it interesting how I can recognize the individual styles of each writer, yet the poem itself seems to take on a coherent theme and voice of its own. See if you can determine what the theme of the poem ended up being, and maybe try to guess what lines I'm responsible for. Thanks and apologies to the other writers for posting their work on my blog. I think it came out rather nicely.


"While the universe yawns, cracks its neck and reaches for a cup of coffee."

by: Aaron Pierce, Lindee Warfield, Susan Wootton, Cameron Maris, Ian Wallace, and Emilene Ostlind


While the universe yawns, cracks its neck and reaches for a cup of coffee,

You look best dressed in my own obscurity,
My delusions cling to you like a nightshirt,
Never letting go their gentle grip.
Sweet, innocent breath on an unbathed neck
The pungent aroma of salty sweat and lilacs

Filling the room like a question everyone's thinking and nobody asks.
The unforgettable sound of Elephant Men and Elephant Women
With mirrors that lie and whisper 'buy, buy, buy.'
A gap in understanding, magnetic pull of the glass,
The memory stored but forgotten,
There was a tiny shard wrapped in your amber hair;
As I pulled it out, it delicately pricked my finger

Red like feeling
Appears grey to colorblind eye.
The meat of the issue, such food
As I am within another's eyes digested:
Passing through, transforming,
Becoming the crowd of myself.
Cells divide at the speed of bullets underwater,
Blending our pheromones, mixing our watercolors,

Motion hidden from the naked eye,
Yet the essence of all that is beautiful.

10 Things I Learned at The Battle of Old Wyoming

1.) There is very little cell phone service in Medicine Bow, Wyoming. If you plan on spending any significant amount of time there, bring your phone charger, because nothing kills a battery more efficiently than "Searching for Svc." all fucking night.

2.) The local children of Medicine Bow are every bit as backwater and disturbing as one might assume. We encountered round little girls with dirty faces and awkward little boys with filthy hand-me-down t-shirts staring at us like they'd never seen another human before. They hang out in front of The Virginian on their bikes like mosquitoes. I started calling them "Bowies." They were everywhere, just hanging out. One fat kid with unkempt, licey hair asked me if I was in a band. I said no, and he ran away, yelling behind him that he was going to go "do something cool." He later climbed a fire escape and tried to spit on me. I fear for their future.

3.) There are few humans on earth that are more badass than Tom French, Charlie Stewart, and Brandon Schulte. Unfortunately, the latter couldn't make the event, and though he was missed, his presence was felt full-throttle. As for Tom and Charlie, you couldn't encounter nicer, more down-to-earth guys. The first thing Tommy said to me: "We've got some beer on ice up in the Owen Wister Suite. Come drink with us." Later, he regailed me with sage wisdom on the finer points of "correctly" smoking a spliff. Tom French is a 40-year-old counter-culture hero for the Wyoming underground. If you don't know the men I am talking about, you're doing something wrong.

4.) Merry-Go-Rounds are sorely missed on America's playgrounds. While waiting for the kickball showdown that never happened, Andrea, Tim, and I discovered the Medicine Bow Elementary School playground, which is several decades behind the latest sensible and fashionable trends in schoolyard equipment. Walking onto the dirt playground is like stepping out of a time machine set for the third grade. I remembered how amazing Merry-Go-Rounds are, and simultaneously realized why they're not very common anymore.

5.) Jose Cuervo is not for everyone. It's not for my poor friend Will, who vomited after doing one shot with me. It's probably not for that girl Steph, who kept asking me for drinks, and who I realized later was underage. Tequila is indeed for some people, though, and one of those people is Radio's Trevor T. Trujillo. Another one is me.

6.) DYNAMITE FAAAAAAAAACE! Fifteen seconds never sounded so good. Or -- as I told a little Bowie that asked "What is this supposed to be?" -- "This is rock and roll."

7.) As I have previously stated, I believe that Tiger Gilliam may be the most purely talented singer-songwriter in the state of Wyoming. If there's anyone with potential for crossover success, it's her.

8.) The Antenacles, Jets to July, and Seeds 'n' Stems are great Casper-based big-name local bands, and and they're a lot of fun. But deserving of name-drops are the "openers," Super Czar, Carcosa, The Enormous Room, and Wake Megan. Maybe it's because I know the guys in those bands, maybe it's because two of them were repping Laramie, or maybe it's because they went on before I was too drunk to function, but they rocked my cock to a vicious degree.

9.) Room 8 of The Virginian Hotel is haunted. Actually, it's not really haunted, but Tommy French decided to start a rumor that it was. Even better than that is that because of the rumor, Room 8 was the last to be checked out. The best, though? Convincing Chase Harmelink to sit in Room 8, drunk, wearing a serial killer mask, for two hours, freaking out Tiger Gilliam's husband.

10.) Medicine Bow's claim to historical significance is a complete sham. MedBow is "famous" for The Virginian Hotel, which was featured in the opening scene of a novel called The Virginian by Owen Wister, whose cabin can be found in Medicine Bow... because it was fucking moved there from "somewhere near Jackson." So... the history of Medicine Bow is a fictional account of a fictional story based on a fictional premise. The Battle of Old Wyoming literally IS the greatest thing that has ever happened in Medicine Bow.

Summer is a Difficult Fish to Catch: A Collection

The walls in this new space seem a bit empty, so I'm going to decorate a little by throwing together some stuff to read, all previously published on my old blog, and compiled from the summers of 2007 and 2008, and sharing the theme "summer as the cruelest of seasons." Call it a highlight reel, call it nostalgia, call it goddamned creative recycling. I'm personally calling it Summer is a Difficult Fish to Catch: A Collection.



"Eviction Notice" (A Requiem for a Generation)

We live with woe.

We drink and smoke to avoid feeling things
or living long enough to risk feeling.

We shoot each other
because it's the only lanuage
that everyone understands.

We talk with our fingers.
We love with our symbols.

We listen to musicians younger than us,
in a format that isn't tangible
and we pretend to understand it.
I listen to music I can't touch,
and because it's too loud,
I touch people that I can't hear.

We drink coffee at night.

We're pretty sure there's no such thing as Hell,
but if there is, we're going.

We medicate.

We don't vote, or, if we do,
we don't know who we're voting for,
or why we bother to do it,
but it makes us feel like adults.

We will refuse to grow up and become responsible,
but it will sneak up on us anyway,
whether we're ready or not.
We're not.

We take pills for everything.
We take pills for nothing.

We hate our parents,
but want desperately for their love.

We are the oversexed,
underloved,
overfed,
underdogs.
The over-stimulated,
underappreciated,
over-priveledged
underlings.

We wear makeup so that people will notice us,
but we claim to hate it when they stare.

The drugs have changed.
The users have not.

We get married
because it's the only way
we know how
to maintain relations.

We have lived through disasters and tragedies
but we refuse to think about them.

The girls all love Jim Morrison
but they've never heard "The End"
The boys all love the girls,
but only know how to show it through sex and awkward compliments.

We're the bridesmaid and the bride
the entire fucking bridal party
The widow and the widower
The bullet and the gun
The white and the red blood cells
The music, lyrics, and bad reviews,

The eviction notice on the door
of the end of the world
that reads
For unpaid rent.




"There's Perfection in a Rain Like This"

There's perfection

in a rain like this

The way strangers huddle together beneath door frames

strangers who may never have noticed each other

now commenting on how "We needed the moisture,"

when what they really mean is

"I needed a reason to talk to someone."



There's perfection

in the way the droplets of water

form on a windowpane

and slide around aimlessly,

in gravity's delicate dance

until they collide with each other and fall,

like clumsy young lovers, grasping for each other

in the dark.



There's perfection

in the way the white noise of the raindrops

cancels out

the murmer of the automobiles,

the hum of the computers,

the sickening static of FM radio.



There's perfection

in the way we slow down and think

about when we felt loved,

when we looked at the sky

and saw more than the reflection of unnatural light,

when we remembered

what walking in the rain felt like

before we were scared of lightning and hail.



There's perfection

in the way her hair clings to her cheeks

when she's standing in a downpour.

And the way she looks at me

through the haze

makes me believe

in the perfection

of the rain.







"The First Rule of Fight Club is You Don't Talk About Fight Club"


So you'll hand him your red-headed Gabriel

with a note that says "Handle With Care"

And he will.

He'll clothe it in bubble-wrap

cover it with tape

tightly tied with tinsel and string

(make it look pretty for Mommy and Dad).

smother it with glitter

water all the plants daily

work out at the gym

three to four nights per week.



You're so close.

Please try not to lose control.



He'll say things like "I miss you" and "Have a good day,"

you'll never even guess that all along

He's not even really breaking a sweat anymore.

This, he thinks, is just too fucking easy.



Lightning almost struck the flagpole today.

And I was standing next to it, paralyzed

Not with fear of being injured,

but with the inescapable dread of

missing something

that felt real.



And the red-headed Gabriel laughed at me

from his corner where I put him after I finally succeeded

in breaking him.

His eyes transfixed on my tragic flaw

unclothing my reason, raping my sanity,

telling me everything I can't bear

to tell myself.



Make him look the other way.

Distract him.



The flagpole buzzed like the quiet taste

of a television left on for days

that your senses pick up on when you enter the room.

The hairs on my arm vibrated with anticipation.



There's two big rules in this game that we play.

The Quiet Game: First one to speak loses.

And then there's that rule about eye contact.



"So do you think that we could work out a sign,

so I'll know it's you, and that it's over, so I won't even try?"



And Gabriel

laughed again.

And the flagpole

was still.







"A Life in the Day (Part 1 [of 1])"


As I balance precariously on the precipice of an unexpected summer,

the sun sets on the tattered visage of today's spheric slideshow.

A field mouse scurries from his hidden confinement,

across the cold, sterile, white linoleum floor,

and under the door, out into the bitter, smoke-tinged evening air.

He doesn't seem to know if he's running away from this moment

or toward a new one.



I know how he feels.




"That Ghost Just Isn't Holy Anymore"



I know that spirit that swims in your dreams.

She's there in mine, too,

and she never goes away.



You don't have to explain;

I already know:



What it's like to press the knife in

the frustration when it's not sharp enough.

I know what it's like to pull that razor blade out

of its shaving-kit sheath

and wonder how deep you'd have to go

to make the difference.

To wonder what exactly you could tie that rope to

that could support the weight

of the fall.



Someone told me he had used a plastic bag

and tied it up with tape and twine,

that it was like drifting off to sleep.

But his sister walked in

removed the bag with her thin, bony fingers

and she never mentioned it after that day.



I know how Matthew felt

when he went to his father's gun cabinet

and loaded the shells

and the courage it must have taken

to pull that trigger.



Maybe that's the difference.



We're the lucky ones,

because we never wanted to stop feeling something,

we just wanted to know what it felt like

to feel something real.

Razor blades are tangible.

Blood is thicker than love.



I see you sweating, hiding in your shirt,

and wonder if that's what I looked like

wearing a turtleneck in the middle of summer

to hide those burns.



That spirit's still there, always,

in the stillness of the hot, lonely nights,

staring at me from her perch

in the winter of my mind.

Her face has become familiar,



but her divinity

is in question.



So the conclusion we've learned to live with:



Sometimes it gets hard,

and it never truly gets better,



but it's okay.

I love you.

It happens.



(It just

can't

happen

again).





"It Didn't Feel Like Summer Until Tonight"

We're obvious in silhouette
awkward, bathed in natural light,
but thankfully,
no one is looking.
The thick, heavy spaces between the words
are filled by the choir of crickets
and the hiss of manufactured rain,
and blessedly,
no one is listening.

I know this feeling; I've been in this spot before,
but, like all recurring dreams,
it's always a bit different.
Vaguely familiar and sentimental,
distinctly foreign and fascinating.

The rush of chemicals down a well-worn stream:
heart, brain, lips, fingers, skin.
Then:
skin, breath, eyes, hands, heart.

The prickle of mysterious, cold wet air,
soft, silver cigarette smoke,
faint floral perfume.

Skin like the surface of the water.

I find a pleasant spot to fixate on
perhaps the slight, curved dimple of the clavicle
or the gently jutted angle of the hip
and trace it with my fingers, over and over
trying to read her skin's delicate poems
written in Braille.

The sun is rising;
tomorrow looms, the city awakens below,
but honestly,
we're not looking.





"Fuck-You Haikus (204 Syllables Memorializing a Merciless Summer in Casper, Wyoming)"


a photograph of
you has a hole beside her
shaped a bit like me

transfixed on your face,
i didn't even notice
your eyes drift away

silver spiced rum flows
down the back of my dry throat
draining my heartbeat

ignoring all sense of
rational thought, i dove
into that abyss

summer's golden hue
a lost beam of sunlight fades
to night's cool repose

houses i used to
inhabit now seem devoid
of recollection

the people i knew
are gone now, scattered like the
ashes of letters

rage and blow, you clouds;
cataracts and hurricanes,
drown this city whole!

a new clarity
eludes my periphery
until the morning

i won't refrain from
giving up the gentle ghost
as much as i wish

laramie, awake!
austin, draw your shades all back!
the storm is coming!

these seven years are
a subtle reminder of
life i can't reclaim.





"Red-Dirt Cowboys Under the Blacklight"

The first thing I noticed about this town
was the red dirt
that smothers the narrow, unpainted
streets and sidewalks
like a faded crimson cloak
of silt and dead skin cells from drifters
passing through in the limbo
between childhood and "life."

No one stays here very long;
it's a college town
with two flea markets,
each filled with furniture pieces
that scream of stale keg beer
and awkward sex,
two bars that compete for the name
"The Cowboy,"
and two Starbucks
to remind the trendsetters of home.

A drunk girl with short, straight, black hair
and an angular face
who looked like a Sharon
(but was likely a Colleen)
looked pretty under the blacklight.
"What's the worst that could happen?
It's Wyoming, right?" she asked me.

I squinted at her, half-smiling
through the thick haze of artificial smoke
and the sense-numbing thunder of the speakers,
and for a moment,
I even considered telling her.





"Maybe I Would've Been Something You'd Be Good At (Dialogue for 1M/1W Who Were Once Lovers)"



"Tell me a memory of those old days."

"Most of the best memories are... personal."

"You've got to have something to share."

"I do? Mandatory reminiscing?"

"I'm just curious to see what you remember. We had some times there."

"I remember New Year's Eve on the roof."

"Me too. We had been fighting, though. But being on that roof with you was beautiful."

"But why had we been fighting? God, it was so cold."

"It was freezing. You had told me you had to work late. That was when I wrote that song for you."

"I was supposed to. There had been some huge New Year's thing planned, and almost no one showed up."

"I was drunk that night, and I sang to you on the roof."

"You did. I was so sure you were going to fall off, because you refused to hold still."

"I almost did. Did we kiss at midnight?"

"We did. And we had a shouting match with some drunk guys across town."

"I remember. It was perfect. Did we make love that night?"

"We did. To music. But I don't remember quite what."

"That's beautiful. I remember trying to make it perfect, because I knew I was losing you."

"You were. But that had started quite some time before."

"I was desperate for you."

"Why?"

"I loved you. I was desperate for us."

"It still gets me that it took you that long to see us falling."

"You had left long before I ended it, I know."

"It started when we went to Sheridan that day."

"I know. What Jake told me."

"But I also know that neither you nor myself ever let that go, you wondering if it was true, and me wondering if you believed it."

"I should have let it go."

"What baffles me the most is how after so long and so many other things, I still can't get you out of my head."

"I find myself thinking of you as well."

"Yet we ignore it."

"We have to. You know, before I left Casper, I went up to our spot one last time. I sat up there all night, thinking."

"Why there?"

"It's quiet. I liked it there."

"I still do."

"I'll meet you there someday."

"Might not. Casper has nothing for me anymore. I don't know if I'll go back. I tied up all the loose ends I needed to this last time."

"What about your family?"

"They'll come to me."

"So I won't ever see you again."

"You can come to me, too. Seattle is a good place. I'm not saying I'll never go back, but there are barely a handful of people anchoring me there."

"I know how you feel. Maybe we'll meet again. Life is funny like that."

"I didn't expect to see you when I was on leave, that's for damn sure."

"It was good to see you, though. I've missed you."

"As have I. I definitely hope to see you again."

"We will."

"...in every single letter..."

"...with every single word..."

"Take care of yourself."

"You too. Goodbye."

Blood Hides Dressed in Red.

Welcome to my second post on the new Blog-Machine. Tonight, a free-form poem reflecting the subconscious. Please enjoy.





"Blood Hides Dressed in Red."

There's a bug in my mouth.
He has a venomous stinger
and wings white
like teeth.

Sometimes, when I breathe,
you can almost taste the vinegar
in the air,
sometimes, you can almost see
the fog.

Don't. Now. Stop. Ah.
bang bang bang bang.
four down, one
to go two
still lingering.

Even bullets fired into the air have to land in something.

"See, that's the thing. We all have the same parts, we're just put together differently. Some of us have hands where our feet should be, some of us feel with our heads and think with our hearts, and some of us don't think or feel much at all. It's all part of the great experiment, part of the song that's being written about us. We're each just individual notes in a larger composition."

There's a bug in my mouth.

Some nights, the raindrops hit
the windshield with the same force and cadence
of the drums on the song on you're playing.
And in that moment, things make sense.

Brontosaurus: Epilogue (Goodnight, Chignik)

The first thing I see are the pictures, on my computer monitor. The burned, flaky flesh. The ashy smoke and glowing embers. The atomic breath of wind that swept across the snowy, wet tundra. The caribou. Fields and fields of dead caribou. Thousands of them, hairless and rotting, charred tongues hanging disconnected from jaw-sockets that used to be called mouths.
The first time, well, one of the first times... it was the words I heard first, on the AM radio. The words, “plane,” “terrorist,” and “tower.” Now it was the pictures. Pictures of dead fucking caribou.

I remember when I got almost no reaction from the first person I saw, my upstairs neighbor Chris. “Alaska?” He said with a half-smile, expecting a punchline. Something about Sarah Palin and Russia, probably, right? Some kind of funny political anecdote. I don’t know, why did the chicken cross the road? To kill a quarter-million American civilians. Snare drum. Laugh track. “But seriously, folks...”
Anchorage, Alaska. The city in which I was born. 250,000 people. Killed. In an instant. November 22, 2009.

I remember a lot of things from the first hour. At first, I remember feeling delusional and unable to function. Numb from the weight of a crushing thought, slowly becoming reality. Do I know anyone there? I was fucking born there, but I didn’t know if our family still kept in touch. How do I not fucking know that? I feel ill.

Then I remember Chignik. I’m told by my parents that I once lived there. A fishing village and hatchery, basically, with one school, where the sidewalks are made of rotting lumber. My father taught swimming lessons to grade schoolers in the fish hatchery, or at least that’s what I remember from a photograph. That’s what I tell people. Chignik is an anecdote. I look at John King’s CNN interactive map of radiation fallout patterns and blast zones. Chignik isn’t even large enough to be marked on the map, so I have to rely on my own faulty memories to guesstimate where Chignik is geographically in that big backwards-R of a state. Yep, Chignik’s in the danger zone. I had always kind of wanted to go back there and see it for myself. Now it’s Hiroshima. Do people visit Hiroshima? People must visit Hiroshima. But that was 64 years ago.
I am 27 years old. I can feel the cancer in my chest. We are all dying. That’s why we were born. I feel like I need to fuck someone.

When the immediate visceral shock of the loss of one thousand people, two-hundred and fifty times, begins to wear off, you start thinking about the rest of the world. What does this mean? Is this the first of many? Did that newspaper article say North Korea could reach Seattle? Or was it just Canada? I start scanning the internet for answers, and only then do I remember to call my parents.
Come to think of it, isn’t there a nuclear launch site in Cheyenne? That’s 45 minutes from here. Fuck. I fucking know people there. I need to talk to them. Do they fucking know already? What if we start firing back? Has it started already? I scan the sky for signs. I feel stupid.

My father tells me he wants me to come home. I can’t. That’s not my home anymore. But this isn’t my home either. Home is where the heart is, and my heart wandered off into the desert years ago to kill himself. He took a bottle of rum and a portable stereo playing Tom Waits tunes and a noose. He said he was going to hang himself from a tree in the desert like Judas Iscariot. I didn’t try to stop him.

I wonder about Cheyenne and George. They’re in the military. I remember joking with Cheyenne about trading her desert-camo designed to blend with Iraq’s deserts for something more fitting for North Korea’s landscape. I don’t really talk to Cheyenne anymore.

I decide to visit Marla. She’ll have something to say, some kind of song to play. The world is ending, let’s all get high and listen to records. Marla’s arms are warm and tight when I knock on their door. “You look beautiful,” I say. I always say it. It’s always true. Today, people have died, wars have begun, people’s families are gone, but the deep green of Marla’s eyes still shimmer. I can see my reflection. She’s been crying. Her hair is down, the way I like it best. She looks like a religious icon in a stained-glass window, all unnatural colors and perfect smooth white skin. I close my eyes for a moment and imagine making love to her on her kitchen floor, running my fingers along her thigh, pressing my lips against her neck, sliding my tongue around her teeth.
Eyes open. Pulse normal.

There are packed bags in both bedroom doorways. Thanksgiving is in four days, anyway. Everyone was preparing to go home, whether nuclear holocaust was occuring or not. Today is the 46th anniversay of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Anchorage is the new John F. Kennedy. Today is the new yesterday. Ashes on the collar are the new blood on the sleeve.

11-22. 11/22. 11.22. Eleven-twenty-two. 11:22. eleventwentytwo. 1122. Eleven.Twenty.Two. 11/22. 11/22. elvntntytw. ehntwo. eeehttwttw.

I look around. These are my friends. This is my life. I love them. I love them, I love my country, I love my family, and we are sad. We are angry. We are sick.
Marla’s roommate gets up and takes her cell phone to her room. I wonder who she is talking to. I haven’t been listening. I didn’t even realize she had called someone. Marla is asking me what I’m going to do. Am I still coming home with her for Thanksgiving? Yes. This is the proper way to panic about the end of the world. Be with loved ones, or rather, your loved one’s loved ones. Liked ones. Tolerated ones. Go somewhere safe and calming. Eat turkey. I kiss her mouth and tell her it’s okay. I’m talking to myself.
Who am I talking to? Who is reading these words? Is there anyone listening to us? Are we listening to us? Is this our great war? Will we look regal in black and white in someone’s text book someday? Will we have retirement parties and make toasts and age gracefully? Where are our suburbs? Where are our gated communities? Our social security?

Goodbye, yellow brick road.
Goodnight, moon. Goodnight, peace.
Goodnight, pale green stars on the ceiling.
Goodnight, Anchorage. Goodnight, Chignik.
Goodnight, caribou.

I remember Peter Jennings, and how he started smoking again after 9/11 after many years clean and sober, and soon after died of lung cancer. I step outside the apartment door, into the frigid air. I can see my breath. Someone is standing in the courtyard with his back to me, balancing on an icy concrete bench. I can see his breath as well. It’s begun to snow again.
I step onto the grass and look up at the sky. The wind blows, and the sun peeks from beneath a cloud. I look for God. Death and that pale horse. So far, no sign.
I spin on my heels and open my mouth, drawing in a sharp jab of cold air, and glow in the horrible, burning daylight of my own desperation.
Today would be a fine day. If it wasn’t for the fucking wind.