Author Archives: John

The tarantulas are back daring traffic
on a road-full of weekend buck hunters
and Christians working the same mountain.

Going thirty, I can dodge them if not looking
for coyotes in the bare flats where no calf
can hide—the plodding now less encumbered

if you are a hairy spider or hungry coyote
on no secret mission. Moving slowly, I try
to keep my dust down. Everything is obvious

long-distance—we all know why—but
close-up you may find what you once lost,
something dear you haven’t seen in years.

We are absurd casualties of politics,
finding our cartoons more interesting
than real life, actually believing
in causes with mascots, symbols
that trigger plastic magic, pay pal.

We would paint the planet with it
if we could, smother the surface
with capitalism gone wrong
if the whole herd got along
and wanted in the same direction.

We cheer for the underdog
and hope that the outlaw’s escape
from town will be enough to hold him
apart. But there’s no getaway
nowadays, no way to be an island.

Not black and white cowboy songs
from New York City, I preferred
Cousin Herb’s Tradin’ Post

live from Bakersfield: steel guitar
and the nasal whine of harmonizing
men at work in dusty fields

between Saturday night fights
over a girl everyone knew
in every Valley town with a bar—

almost every intersection had one.
Cultivated in between, fertile
dirt for boys wanting to become

something other than a butcher
or baker, something bigger
and better than a job in town.

Still searching dreams,
I keep running into myself
on this same old ground.

A jagged black and blue horizon
divides my mind at dawn—between
the ethereal above and the solid
ground we’re planted on—each

day the line impressed unless
blessed with dark storm clouds
eclipsing the difference, clinging
to peaks and leaking torrents

I vaguely remember as cleansing
all states of being. The hills rise
to a broken edge on this divide
branded in my mind for life.