tonight

Tonight the only headlight squints into the desert passing at it's own pace. The motor thudding a fetal rhythm. White lines are faint suggestions while mile markers peer out of the darkness, specters to remind me of the distance between two ends of nowhere.

I didn't mean to steal your necklace, but you hair had tangled in it and my hands were convenient. While you complained and danced I opened the latch, and pulled the hair until it broke free; you were gone. A gold filigree heart now spins from the rear view mirror catching the pale light of the dash.

The speedometer needle shakes in the vicinity of the truth, the gas gauge refuses to give a fuck and has fallen through the red becoming less than empty, and the clock is satisfied with 3:36.

There is a styrofoam cup of of what used to be coffee, I rinse the residue of smoke, stale booze, and pointless talk from my mouth with a swallow.

Your mouth a red blur drunk on laughter swims through the stream of your hair. Wearing the dress that shows your collar bones, arrowheads shaped from shadows indicating the direction to your heart. I cannot afford to think that smile will ever touch me, my poverty is complete.

The animals come out at night, cloaked among the weeds that encroach on the road, colorless beggars skittish in prayer for any meal

A pile of rocks marks the turn into the twin ruts through the barbed wire, the place of bomb craters and wasted munitions, the place I sleep.

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