Nothing in Altus

but the AFB
the glut of replacement
pilots training
out of one hotel
I applied there
for night audit
years ago
its streams seethed the flamingo
did not last

officially
the gift shop
closed its doors—

it was a field hospital
inside:

               we’re tired

               tired of
               your eyes

---

Check In

Don’t sweat the hot
diseases slushing up from ice
graves, nothing in it
you can use for inspiration,

shade from starlight,
dumb police,
a xeric biome freckled every street sign with its
auto parts mart, the lights aroar
on bare white pegboard, leaking toward a

vicious hairless stray in stark decline I know of through
my sources, Lord Aldo, shaking
himself out from his bad dream
against the piss-enameled steel shop door.

“You suffer,” Aldo goes,

“from
night terrors too?”

“I do,

I absolutely do.”
Lord Aldo, still a lord

you wanna tithe
for now

---

Lunar Hilton Elegy

 for Ernesto Gardner

And yes, I have searched the rooms of the moon on cold summer nights.
And yes, I have refought those unfinished encounters. Still, they remain unfinished.
And yes, I have at times wished myself something different.
—Bob Kaufman

What uncanny rosary & visitation
Fuses with the moon vacation slideshow?
If beating hearts we hesitate to bury ride exterior, as satellites, inside me
                       ticks the mechanism cast to seat my token,
Turn, dispense a lurid last go
At ogling new fences up around the future, throwing back the contents of the tiny
Bottles catching future sunsets on the Biosphere’s backlot.
I have until the synthesized bells
Have twanged for that.

                       In my lifetime will I know if we are any closer,
If there were ever solid plans,
Or if the rooms of the moon were just a smudgy Palm Springs
Thrift store art print,
& it makes no sense to live there?
You needed to have come & got your mans.
When you would have recognized him in
                        the ice of dark you nod off acclimating to.