World Afire

Shortly before we left Georgia, Janelle & I built a big bonfire in back of my folks' place. We've been in Iowa almost two months now and this is surreal. Our new home isthe second floor of a house. When I look out any window, I see the gridwork of streets where there used to be grassland prairie. Besides that, I see clouds.

When I was younger, I discovered that I could break clouds apart with my mind. (Putting them back together was considerably more difficult.) Later, as a young man, I learned that the clouds are my mind, and that the mind is all there is. This was a lie, however. I now know the truth. This is the truth:

Well, we did it.
We moved to fucking Iowa
And said goodbye to a perfectly problematic life
In Georgia.
About this, the levelheaded
say things like
“Solvitur ambulando” and
“Wherever you go, there you are,” while
the spiritually compelled lid their eyes gently
and assure me that “There is no direction you can turn
and not find the Creator.
Such is Creation.”
And so this morning I rolled over
in the land of corn and soybeans,
almost all modified, grown, and blanketed
by a malignant alchemy
that won’t rinse off with water,
where I have come to sit and stare at an empty page
and see if I can invent my own faith,
to see if wherever I might end up, I can maintain my
secret belief that I am crude royalty of some kind,
to find out if anything is really solved by R. writing,
and to divine whether or not
there is a direction I might lift my eyes,
away from this chemical world,
far beyond God, and even
out past the neighbors
and their television sets.
Not to end pain,
which would be a futility,
but just to try and retrieve from
the thieves who have stolen them
some of the right words
and to stare the dog down,
in his flesh colored jowls,
and snap back
with the kind of violence
that can give birth to a robin’s egg,
a vulva quaking with promise,
or at least a decent short story,
crowned with what I have seen.