Brad

In Idaho, you killed a man.

He eyed you funny in a tired bar,

so you broke his brain in with a pipe

and buried him head down like a lilliputian. 

Out in the dusty nowhere,

moon like a cut eyeball behind your bent silhouette, 

you give the earth a symbolic pat.
"God," you say, "He's my man. My one true buddy."

An ocean of pain,
a lack in every utterance.
Time crawls gut-stabbed and
clutching at escaped organs
under a sage-green sun.

You look toward the highway,
a calcified shrug of gray on the horizon,
out where the pioneers shook their heads.

A tumbleweed sighs past like a spitball aimed at the stars.