This is where the road begins or, rightly,
this is where it ends.
That mostly depends on how you see roads.
The desert harbors calloused oceans of trash,
rubbish rolling in tides of wind.
The dust collects the scenery,
the scenery collects the eye,
and the conscience collects the mind together
forming a debt to what withers.
With all this raw material one has no choice,
become mother or creator.
Slab City.
The last free place on earth
is nearly uninhabitable.
It is here the anywhere is built.
This East Jesus.
The fingers of the sun tap on the shoulder,
turning the body with a touch of blindness,
skin to scales of salted earth.
The horse flies make rounds as the hands of players
take turns testing piano keys for pitch.
The throat is cleared for song,
the last resting place of lesser lakes
that ripple melody, parched for harmony.
E J, a of population One,
remakes refuse with aesthetic:
The sculpture garden houses
cities of paint cans rusted
to find ideas of art in the sound of rain.
The wind chime, Cosmos, shadows
the zodiac on the ground with heavily oxidized metal.
Rusted half orbs moan spin in circles
above a cracked mirror
that cuts the clouds into quarters.
It is the most beautiful and terrifying
wind chime I have ever seen.
The mannequin, half buried
in clay, is chained to his loss of life
a keyboard plugged into the earth.
The TVs are painted over and at one time became
a stash for the pipes and pot that need not
pass border patrol on the way out,
that need not ever be switched on.
The art tower, surrounded by ducks swimming in the dry,
hangs a chair by a illuminated noose. It’s LED point points
to a sky it will not yet be able to reach.
Nailed to its support are the plastic dolls escaping skin
with a leg kicking out the mouth of babes.
And beneath heaven’s flame, the piano upright rests
under an overgrown magnifying glass
with every page of sheet music reading, “play on.”
In the crashing shack, Zanadon’t,
the dictionaries are nailed
with the pages open. The mouth,
aghast, unlearns speech to study.
The shoes hang in a bouquet from the ceiling,
reminding us how to walk.
At night, the home of One
lights up like beacon bedazzled.
Christmas lights housed in shotgun shells
and bottles lay the border down, warm the corner
of each jagged edge.
In these nights I have learned
a new beauty of music, surrounded
by man’s many masks,
and the subtleties of I/we/One sound. I have shed
and sang out, booming the beauty of a voice
that goes, just goes out uninterrupted
like an animal that will never be captured.
This is where that animal goes.
This is where we invent new animals for One to become
out of the pieces of ourselves we would likely throw away.
This is where the road ends or, rightly,
this is where it begins.
By David Gale