Tucson Song

I’m in Arizona
and my throat is parched
at 6am and it’s dark as piss
looks after eating black sludge.
I’m cold and dry,
like a crusty old towel
gone to waste in this
desert wasteland where water
is scarce and saguaro cactuses
are plenty staring at me near
bus stations and hotel rooms and
shopping malls and parking lots.
Next to our room is a grapefruit tree

I thought that they were lemons
but alas they were much bigger
and rounder than anticipated.
I’m in Arizona, bone dry, sky dry,
fresh lips chapped and sleep deprived back aches and heart’s
hollow from all this driving and there’s more where that came from when we head to New Mexico.
I’m cold and dry and itchy but nice.
It’s a wonder I haven’t passed out from the weather change I guess my skin cracks and turns white like a pale ghost I guess soon I’ll become Mr. Data from the USS Enterprise Next Generation all white-out skin and yellow eyes all hollow hearted with no disguise.
He tried to love, but failed because he’s a robot. Am I a sentient sentimental being like him? Do I question the very folds of reality?
Am I even capable of fully loving another human being?

I’m in Arizona
and my throat is parched
and I’m wide awake
deciding whether to slip
into dreamland or subsume
to wither on the vine in my prime
of existence, or maybe it’s just the Southwest calling my broken dry-boned body out from the fire pit
where charcoal is my breakfast and dirt is my bedroom floor. Looking at how mountains shape the stark desert world around me now, their sharp angles playing tricks on my eyeholes, making me believe in a beloved space-time continuum
that scopes the outer world into my deserted drying heart as it become sun-dried and hard as leather. Will I ever be able to love again, like I used to? Or will I have to change my tactics, because whatever I’ve done in the past is not working for me now, in the present. All I do is jump from the devil to the labyrinth and back again. I’m in hell, my dry cold corpse peeling, shedding its paper-thin skin like how a zombie’s face looks when its skull pokes through
after all it’s living tissues have begun to disintegrate. I’m in another place so similar, with all this desert brush, yet so foreign because the earth is flat and wide, stretching for miles and miles it’s land so expansive that I know it would be a perfect spot for the USS Enterprise to land but if they did land, there would be no cover to protect them from attack. Like my heart, I would be exposed three-fold if I ever did jump before thinking; if I ever did leap without even knowing what I was doing.

I don’t know why I wrote this much, or even if this prose is worth performing in front of a live audience. Maybe it’s better to just land in the desert and forget trying to blend in. I am a saguaro trying to pass as simple brush, but alas my height, deep green color, and sharp spikes are too conspicuous to hide.
I might as well stand proud and tall, with strong arms stretched wide, welcoming whatever comes my way. Who knows…maybe it’s rain?