I.

Liquid speed, sleepless night
caught between the censor's abandoned cuts
of a vast American mindscape rolling leeward and down
into starry streetlight darkness,
the chilling haze of City,
and Big America, low on fuel, sits
idling
at
the crossroads.
Green light.
Yellow.
Red, she idles ready.
She's ready to move!
Into the little people
crawling about on her rippled surface,
strip-searching the countryside,
the Western Darkness, big
Western American Darkness
with her skirts up above her knees
leaning in close for you
to touch
to reach out into a shower of lights
the spinning sparks and neon vineyards.
Behold! The woolly underpinnings of madness.

II.

Speak to me of heavage, child
for in slender morning, pale as moonmilk,
sleep I gently, rolling and
with want unwilling
for a dump in the cold blue dawn
(not thy will but mine be numb)

III.

LA Poem

Where there is no nerve
there is no pain.
In a city this size, every synapse counts
ticking and twitching away the minutes in a
red-on-gray digital haze.
If night should come
upon you in the city
take your drugs
fast and dry
waterless, dirty, pitiful.
Take your drugs and give away change
for all change is spare at the end of a sharp gray day
and a grungy baptism awaits your morning in coffee-damage.