PW Covington

Mountain glowing pink neon at sunset
Night sky fading indigo to stars
Moon orb rising sexual and urgent
From beyond limestone granite
Hardness of all history
Waves and waves of atmospheric lust
Caress her skin and liquid things begin

The chains of fear she left road-side in Texas
Scars she wore for decades, so adorned
Testament to hopes of making it here, through years
Between the mountain stone and river flow

She’s claimed herself
On moonlit nights in Summer esoteric
More than that,
She’s found enough to share

Landlocked near Minot
December sets in with a grin
Ice on the edges of rivers and creeks
From concrete culvert drainage ditches
Winter marks its time in afternoon twilight
The end of all old testimony

Hospital shift work, a differential for nights
One AM lunch break blacktop parking lot
I hit my vape in my car with my heater on
Red and green navigation lights
Glow north across the windshield
8 miles or so, above
Trans-Siberian travelers and Korean air freighters soar
On polar routes, overnight, tonight

Aluminum flanked by red and green, it’s Christmas Eve, up there
Solstice afterglow above this prairie
Tundra cold, uncaring, and eternal
As they lay inside with cardiac emergencies
Cancer, flu, and motorcycle crashes
All their loved ones look to me
And to my lying caduceus for answers

They ask for ice chips and warm blankets
And I bring them, as IVAC alarms beep and shriek and weep

I exhale in bright white cloudy, strong sativa
Never known, above, by dreams of Mumbai
Cloaked by smokescreen self-care sabotage
This night

Lean into the chaos

You’re not the person
I fell in love with
Don’t be the person
I fell in love with

I can’t be who
Once I was
In days burned away

By ambition-fires and boarding passes
Movie lots and disaster zones dial tones
Yesterday’s dreamscapes
And highway happenstance relief valves
One-way trumpet sounds
With barriers, undermined, and failing

This ever disappearing moment
Is where I’ll meet you

Standing, staring, blindly
Into the shining, changing, futureworld

Casting our shadows
Ever longer
Onto the collapse
Of previous days

(The Center of America)

Little white boys and little white girls
From little white towns
Or mid-sized Midwest suburbs
With matching shirts
With matching haircuts
And with blue-green eyes
Shriek and scream their wonder and glee
At the Strategic Air Command museum
That stands in the center of America

Press here to bomb a random Asian nation
Press here to down a MiG
Press here to end all fear and hate forever
Press here to learn how the nuclear triad can prevent future school shootings
And the children of open carry
Smash those buttons with effervescent fury

Giggling in the penis garden outside
Unsheathed and painted grotesquely

Displayed as skyward caricatures of their creators
Seizing attention and affection from playful grade-schoolers
In matching shirts
And matching haircuts
And blue-green eyes
In the center of America

Forgive me sister, I’ve done it again
Given in, entirely to my decadence and whims
Airport signs and thin, white, lines, sometimes
I forget what I’m trying to find

Maybe I’ll remember
Come Wintertime

The songbirds native to my city
Do not notice when my feeder is out of seed
The transient, bright and novel migratory breeds
Care even less

The world is still accessible
To those that live on wings
And take no heed of human things
This is not the bird flu

Feathered beasts flew north then south
Then north again, blown about on wind, and Tweets
A virus stalked the streets
Reefer trucks lined up like hotel limousines

Masks and grocery delivery and screening
There is no aviary built for streaming
That downy, wild, unfettered things
Have not soared beyond

When my faded feeder is not met, full, with milo seed
Perhaps my neighbor’s might be
Should breathless death disease winter take me
Songs will still be heard, up in the trees

Forgive me sister, what have I done?
Sniping cigarettes and lusty glances, like a bus stop bum
I set out with nothing like destruction in mind
You wonder what the fuck I’ve done, this time

I’ll probably never know until I find it myself
And I’ve added your love to my souvenir shelf
Perhaps attraction
Perhaps, something else

The age of thunder lizards is over
Let songbirds take the air
Liars in Chief don’t apologize on the border
To soldiers banking on his yields

Let the frontier guards build their walls
Let the poets tear them down
Let the blood moon rise
and eclipse itself
With a twangy, country, sound

I’m alright; like the rest of us
Just a little stoned
And I’m okay on the right side
On the outside
Left behind
And, you’re okay
You’ve never believed

If time won’t tell, the weather will
Whether this lust will last
However this bust is cast

Would you rather be colonized or conquered
Absorbed or assimilated
Watered down or drowned
Served as soup or over rice?

The highway exits roll back upon themselves
Like the House of Eternal Return tends to do
Turning lanes and toll booths
Can go fuck the Catechism
As early morning greyness ensues

Liars in Chief cannot last forever
Reptile kinky sex can show us something deeper
And coffee waits in heaven on the dash

We talked all afternoon about maybe
Robbing a convenience store
Out on 550
Or maybe a bank
In a tiny Texas town
That Barbara knew

We all agreed,
It would be easier with a helicopter
Stashed somewhere
To make
Our get away…
Like Mexican drug lords

The football game was on mute
Pow-Wow music played on the
Albuquerque public radio station
We ordered a pizza
And packed the pipe
As a light snow began to fall

Sunset painted the Sandias
And, by the time
Domino’s® arrived
Our International District
Chama Street
Criminal conspiracy
Had ended

Up in smoke
Down with the sun
Like John Wayne’s Teeth
And the drums of the Northern Cree

She goes down to the ocean in hopes
Where tidal powers set hearts aglow
Like a full moon off a sand dune
The cycle renews itself

Quietly pulled to the liquid, unleashed
Free from expectations and experience
Universal flow is dancing

The streams and rivers that have scarred her life
Highways and streets, slashing through
Original wilderness, original paradise, original being
All return to where the sun surrenders to waves and depth

Poseidon and a million Sirens blow her hair
Into free-form tendrils
As she faces the maritime horizon

At the wet communion altar rail, she prostrates
With sand caking her knees and thighs
She petitions the ocean with a knowing smile
Her flesh exposed, like a tender bloom, too long in the desert

The elemental sacrament complete
She is quenched and restored
By the totality of Earth’s nursery and vastness

This pilgrimage to the edge of other worlds
Has renewed passions for divine and vulgar things
With the fortitude of sub-Atlantic mountains
And the tenacity of threatened coral reefs

She has never been alone.

I am guilty
I am included
I am crybaby, lecherous, disability welfare, pot smoker
Unreliable
I am victim, attacker, liar and clown
I am a thief, a scoundrel
A saint
I am praying
A folly
A collection of myths in the morning twilight
False dawn
The cork out of an absinthe bottle
I am slum lord of this Texas imagination

All these poems that begin with the letter “I”