Everyone's trying to figure out where to go next.

California was good until some of it was swept

into a furnace, the rest suspended next to a target

over a carnival dunk tank. Nothing is good forever,

not even a thing of beauty, no matter what Keats said

about joy in that really long poem I could never finish.

Chocolate was good, especially dark, now they've found

cadmium and lead. Eggs were cheap, then pricey,

then astronomical, as in probably cheaper on Mars

where no one wants to go except one megarich clodpole.

New Orleans was good but then it snowed in New Orleans

and those levees won't last forever, either. Today
the White House announced reality was canceled

once again, maybe to be reinstated when the Styx

freezes over. I spent the day alone in my friend's house

in the Arizona desert. Wandering from room to room,

asking the mountains, Are you my mother? I wonder

where she went after hospice care, if she joined

the few souls flitting from that armless saguaro

to the dying mesquite tree by my friend's pretty pool

she never swims in, fluffing their wings as they settle

and coo. Detroit is supposed to be good in fifty years

but I'll be dead then and if I lived there now, I might want

to be dead. Everyone wants to breathe

but it's getting more difficult, all those boots crushing

everyone's tracheas, all those trolls under the bridges

trying to devour us as we bleat our alarm. Baaa! I'm bleating now.

The mountains reassure me but the sun's going down.

Soon I'll be left with nothing but stars, some of them

fake, space filling with satellites while the blazing

bodies drift farther away and the moon

trails hopelessly after them, crying for love.