MOTEL BARGAINS IN MECCA

Jehovah’s tank

veered onto the freeway – a limitless force of nature rising out of

obscurity while the overseers were too busy giving tickets to glaciers.

My veins were clogged with gold and the soreness in my
knees was swelling into a zenith.
I am a thirty-five year old murderer, born this time screaming
into a room filled with balloons crafted by God’s corpulent fingers.
The hills outside, soldiers marching.

And so my brain cells are dead like old bicycle parts – and alive

like hot-blue steel, pulsating – my temple, pulsating like a Bullseye,

glowing like a firefly – a firefly or eighty self-inflicted gunshot wounds

when minutes taste like hours during hot afternoons at the post office.

What are the laws here?

Sunday morning indicated strangulation. Redecorating the world is complicated

like a cafeteria massacre when the only escape is dues ex machina.

Your last mortal thoughts will be held virtuous in a heavenly seven-sided mind asylum.

But we don’t have much to complain about since our mothers got plastic surgery.

I took a photograph of a brick wall and sent it to a man fighting a war on disappointment.

The growth on his brain birthed a conscious message all over the unconscious desert;

he broke from prayer as a survival instinct while viewers at home were falling just short.

and so Pleasure never becomes happiness.

(Quiet)

Then for a number of years nothing is relevant; all is bloodless and staged

to look like peace, everyone chasing that tall glass of quiet conclusion, the deaf explosion.

Maybe the world would be less demanding if it were a painting.