The Neighborhood
I still recall the truck stop outside Bakersfield,
where the filthy mirror in the men’s room
tried to slow me down
but all I could see were those sad and honest eyes,
the ones that wrote my Bible,
so I drew wet fingers down my cheeks
and pinched the throat, and whispered yes,
the way Lewis did, and Walt and Jack,
and all the rest I’d driven into my companions
in that Mustang stolen from the shed of heaven,
for vast was all we needed;
but when I look into mirrors now
the eyes are not so kind—so many friends are gone,
and the neighborhood is shrinking back
through infant mind to memory, though if I touch the
glass the way I once touched my throat,
the world and all its catalysts can sometimes come again.