Are you trying to disappear  

Is that why you hold your screen so close to where your heart should see   

Compass driving, Enterprise rented  

Your face but a foot from the window before the world –   

Rays of light can pierce through glass but do they even know it’s there?   

Lower the veneer  

Let the air wipe the jerky-stifled air out of our cabin   

Let it bounce and burn, all of it  

Direct contact  

The singe, amber hue of promise  

Southwest of our America 

Landscape of dreams your father promised you 

The Wind our God, the stability of its billowing wallow 

Given to us for today and yesterday and hopefully tomorrow  

It keeps us  

A presence  

Tick and the tock of the world  

Quick  

Lower it now  

And let us breathe

The brush of the desert crunch   

Soil burying untold legends,   

Arid cough of dirt  

And Turbine breeze 

Wiff of rattlesnake and canyon –   

Our interior-dried Slurpee, 

Crumbs of banana chip and scattered tic-tac   

Planned sips of Seven-Up Zero

Or your un-known, done-branded bottle of berry-serumed sparkled drink, 

An act of forced away from the projection of your purchased lens,  A yearning to capture without process,   

Without concern 

Or placement —   

Don’t tell me that’s what you’d prefer to breathe? You capture so that you may not see,  

But you know that, don’t you? You must, 

My God  

At least I hope you do.  

Knowing that you photograph to look away, I mean   

It hurts to assume otherwise 

Although

I’ve come to settle a knot in my own stomach 

That perhaps 

In truth   

While you may know what you need you may not know how to keep it.

Or analog   

To you, to document with time stamps 

Blockaded lengths of moments in which one may memorize over time as only those   

select   

Fragments. That were real. Even only existed.  

Maybe   

I get it.  

We had been fighting just an hour before. 

Come an hour later, everyone you and I know will come to know we’re having the best of times, aren’t we  

Can’t you see that you’re beginning to disappear? 

The alloy before your gaze,   

The blockade,   

The yearned desire to redirect while still facing dead-on   

What you capture   

Is it to re-remember?

Or is it something worse  

Something like to disregard  

Or the preservation of a tale? Are you tired?   

Are you finally set in what has become of you

And in doing so Come to assume what will become as me  

Fabled promise of your wisdoms  

Another deviation from the truth that our world has decided for you?  

Is that why you face the window to your side? 

Yes.   

Yes, I told you of a secret. 

I do not know that I want to be what I always knew I’d become   And that my home has always been a stay-away 

From where   

The heartbreak of nostalgia tethers at my sternum   

The falsified promise of a future never lived   

A shadow dancing with a glisten

Over points of constellations but of paralleled skies –  

I’d left a trap for a chair in the corner,  

For a disease of the blood, 

And another of my society,   

The lust for wonder wander fading like the pink to the blue of a lip,  

Lungs filling with sand 

Ashes of the American Spirit 

I’ve admitted the fadation — the process of fading 

I’ve just made it up 

of my soul –   

That is the stamina to yearn, 

To yearn so much it has already been said three times 

Now four I suppose I like the word  

No longer your boy I am now only my name.   

Our anger with one another now stems from the fractaled realities of two separate lives   

Skies, remember   

Yours and mine,   

Mine with consideration of you and yours in consideration with mine considering yours,   

The closeness of our time together has revealed just how far apart we truly are,   

Not laterally of course  

Again 

Constellations, plains  

Sliding Doors, Gwenyth Paltrow, that guy from the Mummy. 

To live is to suicide by grace if you’d like, 

Mine by twist of an arm  

Or the drip of the drink  

All of it  

Chosen disregard for the abbreviated chapters of a man – 

They’ve chosen marriage, Rite Aid backyard furnishings, 

Trips to cabins with pre-frozen chocolate-covered strawberries,  Shared Facebook spaces,   

I think I’ve chosen Joshua Tree

My patio   

Take-out preselected my lover.  

I wonder if you see me drive and speak without awe,  

No wow’s   

No Look at that’s  

No wow’s –    

No points     

No jabs towards rivers

No prescribed desire to the awe,   

You tell me rocks look like children,   

And those like men,  

Lions and Sons,   

How they kiss the sky  

And cut it so the clouds may stick their landing  

And then me   

I think now that you see it  

My fizzle, postmortem pedal to the metal –   

Perhaps it’s not you who wants to disappear. 

You’d hate being an Angelino.   

Death Valley comes before landing in LA  

Granted it’s little North of that   

But what’s that say about the basin?

I fear you’d hate being me. 

About as much as I fear you’d hate to need me.

That’s what this is starting to feel like.  

I don’t feel equipped. 

That’s why I get so mad.   

Not because you annoy me –  

But because it feels as though the way I’m going  

We’re going, really  

I could never help you  

True  

Buckled knees buckle less when with woman with hope

At least that’s what I’ve come to understand from sharing this cabin here with you  

But  

What of a man devoid of any?    

Perhaps you see that of me too.   

No wow’s. 

I’m starting to see it now. 

I don’t think you want to disappear. 

No  

I think it’s someone else you don’t want to vanish.  

For your two lens,   

I’m beginning to think not both of them are just for you.   

Your timecards, points I convincingly feigned happiness, if only for you.   

At least so, I pray it’s worked.

If only that were enough.   

Don’t let me disappear.   

Mother who knows me no more  

Don’t let me disappear   

From the man that I’ve become   

Who still sings for the boy we both used to know  

Somehow still in me  

Gypsy-dancing over coals  

It’s getting hot and  

The car AC’s blaring blindly.