Our hands reach for the other,

feeling the hostile grime of the city expend

between our compartmentalized fingers

reaching the Virgin's Pass, one at a time.

Reborn, our public gaze waters, sobbing

at the portrait colored by an extended dusk

of indigo fire, Pauites whispering word

of our arrival into free territory.

A great and terrible time awaits joined birth

beyond the Sierra, across the Joshua,

my heartbeat's great invisible friend

while my body is given to the meadows,

the bluff warmth given to intruding

Caucasian rhythms stolen from the dark

of the neon sun. We force ourselves to love.

We sleep together in an abandoned silver

mine, force found in noisy wager and

suggestive, all-you-can-eat hesitation,

miming the tumult of no-limits passion,

searching for the light of vision.

My sweating hands met the nickle and copper.

Our tongues spoke with freshly-minted paper.

The random leer of the wheel met the chaos

of the out-of-neighborhood Bitterroot wind.

Our bodies were bet in a perverse, odds-on

scheme and met in penniless defeat, ruined

on the scalding tarmac of treeless compounds.

It began here. I was released.

Sleep

There is light,

emptying into the spirits.

Do you see it?

Listen. There it is,

hiding in the ancestors.

Quiet's pulpy murmur is part

of the rumble and clatter

of the wind's sartorial dusk;

Do you hear it?

Look. The clouds are glowing,

right there, beside the ruddy moon,

its full nebula texture

a father-figure of contentment

among the basin's stars.

Thousands chatter,

but I cannot hear them.

Do you feel it?

Taste. I'm trying to hold on

to the heavens,

smiling in my real joy,

my unimportance

my dust-to-solitude

in the high desert of my God

I sleep uncovered within.