i thought it was one thing,
but I was talking to another.
snakes in trees got my hair tangled.
you layed awake at night listening to Alex Jones,
the whole world a conspiracy against you.
i sat in your scavenged cushions under the New Years stars
and felt a galaxy away.
you came back from Vietnam and found the rifles pointed at you at home,
and you ran from spittled condemnation into the desert, alone.
“they’re gathering up the homeless and putting them in concentration camps!”
shouted the radio man from the small radio in your tent.
they’re still coming for you.
it pained me that you threw your trash in the bushes and complained
the food scraps weren’t enough.
we ate like kings from the veggie dumpster.
we slept under the whirling cosmos.
we had no masters and we did as we pleased.
you were a killer, but i wouldn’t be one till next month,
murdering the only friend i had.
i told you to put down the gun right before i picked up the hatchet.
was it grace that called my name in the desert,
or devils.
i looked down on you, judging an older version of me,
a part of me, a twisted mirror.
you gave me hot vegetable soup you patiently cooked over your little stove
because you were not dead.
i pray my mother's letter stamped love on your heart, that grace found you,
as it did me.
the desert blooms when you’re no longer looking down the barrel of a gun.
rivers flow from the deepest wounds.i came down from the mountains and found you all there:
hippies, global warmists, christian healers and jesus freaks,
and those too broken to be seen, eating scraps in a crystal desert
beneath the towering saguaro.
the five minute showers couldn’t rinse the lostness off.
i felt a fire burning in me but you could not catch it.
my world was being ripped to pieces while yours was collapsing
-the death that leads to life, and the death that collapses in the wilderness.
the prophet couldn’t heal you, serpent clothed in white,
speaking hissed and soothing words, murderers sucking life from the dead.
you flicked on your red and blue lights,
told me it was illegal to walk on the shoulder and condemned me
to the wild across the rusty barbed wire,
and i hated you.
you were just keeping order in the world i despised, loyal to a tyrant.
you invited me into your temple to worship your god, with painted face an uneaten fruit.
soup kitchen god who said bow or hop the fence, while you worshipped a man who could not laugh.
i’ve crushed you under the weight of the law, slapped you with my gods,
prophecied that you would bow to me.
you were all my teachers, fists to break my shell.
maybe all the rest of you are too,
each moment,
the story of a lifetime.
grace untangles me.