AIR TRAVEL

For over seven months

my eyes have seen
the coal-colored tarmacs
of several cities.

Long, hot runways of Los Angeles,
dusty, dry landing strips in Las Vegas
wet, frost laden jet ways in Denver
landing gear shrieking in New York.

All have these things in common:

They've all have seen me

drunk and stupid
lonely and frightened
angry and lost
worried and wishful

twisted and yearning
standing on steel stairs
leading to the door
in the skin puncturing rain
praying to the only deity I know:

the filthy gray-white floor
made by the tops of soft clouds.
This prop plane
glides over it all.

There's a planet down there
uncharted, frightening,

over-paved, uncivilized - 

I'm told I'm from there.

They've assigned me a social security number.
They say I've had a childhood.
They say I've been in love.
They say I have a job, debt, and a mortgage.

An ex-wife, bank accounts –

apparently I enjoy mountain biking.

But I can’t believe any of it

even though they offer undeniable evidence.

According to them

my mother did run over my child hood dog,

I did publish my complaints
on the pages of their bible,

there is a parking spot for my car marked 42,

I once got gut punched by the handle bars

of my banana seat bike from JC Penny.

I gasped for air;

feared for life.

My phone number to my child hood home

was 516 669 7587,

my first crush was

with a blonde named Kristin in the 6th grade.

But all of these memories
are fed to me by fraudulent printing presses.

Safety deposit boxes cannot be opened –

they contain their own keys

The fields have been delineated
by the geometry of
an all too specific
draftsman

Below is a patchwork of rich green disks
rows of wheat in postage stamp shaped fields
strip mall parking lots - 

abysses to the center of the world.

Everything shaped by an unforgiving trowel
invented by the occupants underneath me.

Its atmosphere can't possibly
be safe for breathing.

Of its billions of life forms
of all the happiness squeezed
from their guts

all the wishes
rung from their soaked dreams

the wind of their souls
swirl into the spinning and chewing
centrifuges.

They are all hovering.
Their organs are molded gas.

From up here
none can reach me

none can grasp
and yank the weeds from my gut.

None know
how to drain the acid from my lungs.

None except you
in Albuquerque.

I can't even pronounce it
without feeling my flight
drop through the turbulence –

me grasping the arm rest
knowing the clouds
are not dense enough
to stop my fall.

Landing
would be a fiery explosion
of wreckage

scattered across the surface - 

the embers
first formed on this rock
so many eons ago.