Now I feel nothing but tired,
even though I have no reason
to be up late, swimming
in my sheets and underneath
the lights of my television,
on and flashing, but humming mute
in a fuzzed out electric disco fever.

The sidewalk’s by my window,
by a fire hydrant by some cars;
I can see in the weak light
of the uninfringed dawn, because
we don’t like streetlights on my
neighborhood drive.

The cars are by my window;
they’re close,
so I have an escape
(if I need an escape);
should I need to steal one,
I’ll play a movie star,
I’ll just hotwire some
hot red one, the razor-edge of a
new sports car.
I have my own, but
I can see the one I like
from my bed, the one
I'd like to make mine.

But then I decide to keep my sleep, instead,
and my sleep, she secretly keeps me, too;
maybe she’s like this sweet girl in your bed
who will not let go of you.
You tell her you’ve business in reality—
she holds tighter.

Some mornings,
I see the news in my living room,
or from my bed,
with my eyes slightly open
while I’m laying next to a dead alarm clock.
I’m hoping that maybe now
soldiers know what they do well;
maybe they’re not happy,
but I’m hoping that they know, intimately,
how to heave their American guns
over their shoulders and walk miles
and not wear out or sicken or sadden.

I’m hoping the desert simply bores them, safely,
like an unpopulated baseball diamond
in the heat of summer.
I’m hoping they’re tracing spaces in the dirt
to keep those foreign men happy,
and those foreign women silent,
and their little foreign children out of sight,
in houses, hidden, voiceless and afraid,
a people no more there
than the tiny bits of air between
my clasped thumb and forefinger
when I snap out a beat
to match the punk song on my radio
in the car I drive to class on weekday mornings.

Tied up in sheets,
I’m slipping into a sore dream,
while people, any people,
ours and theirs, worlds away,
watch as a desert wakes up,
blooming light onto midnight skyline:
black, black, purples and cloud whites, sunrise and blue skies.
Morning fades our stars into a fill of bright stratosphere.

The first real noise of the morning:
sudden, brief gunshots,
censoring all other sounds,
if only for a moment, and
blood leaks on the sand, draining away,
and with that,
a living man is gone at dawn.

A Yankee’s there now, a photographer,
who shoots first and maybe asks some questions later.
Tonight, he’s sleeved tight in nylon
next to the relaxed fist of his nation.
Chests moving up and down, staggered.

He’s afraid:
the photo taker sleeps,
as a child hugging his camera
like a fluff bear,
under swimming desert stars and winds
and sinking planets.

Perhaps a proud and playful God,
His silvery gold signature
on our infinite roof,
His billion universes in our sky
flung spangled into Earth’s deep, unavoidable ceiling.
We shiver at this possibility:
that of other considering beings,
so considering that they might consider us,
lingering in the same shimmering lights
that we’ve known since we first lived here at all.

The photographer sees things
and then he can’t sleep right.
He can’t keep his eyes from watching—
Oil.
Fired gasoline spits orange on the distant horizon,
like rogue devils hemorrhaging flame into the cavity sky.
The photo taker can’t tell the sky and the Earth apart.
He keeps his camera even closer,
but it’s as blind as him,
and the photo taker can’t take anything now;
in this darkness,
the sands are sky and the skies are sand.

And for soldiers,
I’d have it the same way,
if I played their part.
My path would be decided,
the cards are dealt,
whether or not I’m
fighting till I’m killed
or living till I die.

And if God cares about
the toils of men, then
God knows all my lines
and my life is reduced to a script
for some divine play;
God has written in the stage directions
for the times I trip and fall.

So I’ll try and forget my lines
quietly
(Because I don’t practice)
and then later I’ll remember
and I’ll draw them in the sand,
and, right over my lines, I’ll stand,
to cheat my God and keep him
from looking at all my words.

I want to keep him from knowing
my decisions before they’re mine.
Who could want a world
of inexorably ticking alarm clocks
and soulless mathematics?

I’ve got class again, in the morning,
and I’m fighting my alarm clock
with a clumsy and angry right hand.
When I'm up, I'll throw a book bag over my shoulder,
and I'll notice that my books
are a bit heavy, but I won’t even think
about how heavy an automatic rifle must be
in the stifling sun of the Middle East.

My most distant mothers and fathers
who left their mark on this Earth
only by their patterns in my person and those in my relatives,
and maybe by a haphazard step or a particularly influential breath
or rearrangement of things,
would never think books to be such a burden
as I do on these mornings.

I’m so afraid to traverse my own
winding winter thoughts
and think of the frostbitten clay roads
of my neighborhood while I’m riding to school,
alone and cold in the driver’s seat.

Angle-parking in the main lot—
on these benches our collegiate teachers speak, eat, and drink;
they sweep the human race together
like bits of dropped hardware,
sorting them into refined theories—
and theses—
and hypotheses—
categories for the sake of categorizing.
This town isn’t mine.

This place is away from everything
I would ever want near to me.
on maps and in my mind alike.
In truth, I miss the South.

But home is a lie most often told by lovers and mothers,
and I try and resist its empty whimsy.
My idea of home is just a glimmer of fool’s gold
on the backside of the inside of my skull,
which I constantly attempt to ignore.
This idea called home—
it sits right next to
my most frequently recalled memories,
forever diverting my precious attention
from the things directly before me,
the things that matter.

And besides, houses are never homes.
They are wood and caulk and plaster caked to basement walls
and if you don’t keep eyes on your houses,
they rot,
just like every other thing rots.

So I try and keep my one true tether to humanity
as close an old winter jacket.
My mother and my father,
as vital as my own lungs to my being and body,
who wanted nothing more
than for me to live for myself,
and give the gift of being, and thought,
and to wield it like as a torch
to guide my own children
on their own discovery of the world one day.

It’s a later morning, and I step outside.
I trip over the doorframe.
I’m so dazed by the accident that I fall asleep—
for just a blink—
on the way to the ground.
But my dreams in that moment
are as long as any I’ve had in my life.
I lived whole days in that second to the ground.

I wake on the floor.
Here, I am slumped on the concrete by my own front door—
I think God laughs a bit, because, if He’s up there,
He has time for things like that,
and if He's up there, He surely had it scheduled.

But now, I’m not afraid anymore.
I’m panting, but breathing is as rewarding as anything I’ve done.
I slow, and take a deep breath.
God.
I laugh back.
Nothing happens.