one-two-three, morning hours pass
Driving down I-40
bushes on my right, wire to my left,
Fleeing fast from Cali
before LA traffic clogs the roads
Tripling my trip time
i’d rather pull a Céline Dion
And drive the live-long night
but morning brings strange blinking lights
Below the horizon line
as sunrise glows like rust-crusted loam
—A sliver, a streak, red twine—
thin as the skin my eyes cower behind
These lights isolated beckon to me
from mountains of sand dirtied by debris
An eye here and there winking my way
which will soon wind past them with the dawn of the day
stretch-clamp-stretch-clamp
Refusing to pull for a pause
my eyes squint past the haze in my brain
To follow those lights to their cause
whether nomads, machines, a government camp,
Alien crash site, solar grid amp,
the lights multiply like stars in the sky
of a night on the run from the sun’s burning blight
A paintbrush that melts shades of white into one
then streaks them across this void cruised along
‘Til I soar like a spacecraft at lightspeed
and my mind from its course feels freed
For a second, then dawn hits like a wall
smashing millions of lights into one burning ball
That colors my horizon as dusty as Mars
with blinks buried beneath, their graves just as far.
Morning's Early Dark 