Actually stuck in the tar pits for once,

                        The floor of a mobile home,

                 littered with yellowing magazines,

& dinosaur bones

and  textbooks regarding mythology

Complete with the most beautiful pictures of medusa,

And still no one was turned to stone,

and instruction manuals to children’s toys,

Lost in the mud long ago,

Left alone to be consumed by the snakes,

All this literature, still

Higher definition then  the paisley couch on which everyone sits ,

that is slowly coming undone.

                                                                                                                    Slowly turning to stone,

 and almanacs,

so many almanacs.

But the picture is still missing,

All of this,

The bones and the literature and the magazines

all  bound for a dumpster fire,

Instead of a funeral pyre,

Narrowly avoiding the luxury of being burned  and subsequently  evacuated excavated-

under the cover of moonlight.

By an amateur archeologist,

and then

Dusted off in some hotel,

In a room with no numbers on the door-

              By a man with quarters on his eyes,

By that same amateur archeologist,

Who is now

A gambler  at the booking window-

A glass window,

Which means their is transparency here.

There are ghosts here.

Putting up whatever he can muster,

Coins, and chips  and shell casings and tubes of lipstick,

Pushing the entire avalanche towards

The man in the plastic visor,

Picking his horse,

Picking this horse,

                                     securing nothing, but an eventual stampede.

A hood over his face as he walks toward the revolution,

Sand whipping up all around him like some desert wind has blown in,

The sound of

Galloping horses  and busy answering machines  fill the air

                                                                 and his nose

and his eyes and his mouth,

instead of the gritty sand.

Much better than the gritty sand,

Accompanied  by the light from a procession of torches,

Leaping over craters,

In slow motion.

The tar pits  clamped down like a hungry shark,

Taking with it  his shoes and his socks,

But not his resolve or his jeans,

Damnit, not the jeans.

He can still skip into the streetlight

(barefoot)

carried  by the calls of angels,

but they cant hold on,

He slips through the talons of the eagles that have replaced the angels,

his neck is too heavy with pearls.

his heart is too heavy, also

thinking of that lost picture,

                      The picture that he drew himself,

              He is no artist,

but it was him-

it was meant to be him-

A man getting a haircut,

Laid back  in that big robotic chair,

Dizzy from the spinning,

Head  tilted back in a sink,

The thought of drowning occurring to him now more than ever,

Staring up at hissing cats,

Feeling like an android now more than ever,

clippings of his hair falling into the basin below, and circling the drain,

                      But he cant see it.

He can see it.

He doesn’t want to see it,

That picture he drew.

he didn’t know why he drew that particular scene,

A man getting a haircut,

Why he thought

A picture of a  man getting a haircut would absolve anything at all.

Lost among pictures of medusa,

             and so many almanacs,

so many almanacs