Dreaming of Places Called Mars

Why I am sitting in the only smoking section left in the state of Arizona
Why do I have grin that reads don’t mess with me
I still taste like Texas
Why do all these license plates outside my window read
I would rather be flying
Why do I believe that by drinking copious amounts of iHop
I can grow wings
Tell me
Why I am flying west
Why I am following the stars to California
Tell me

Tell me of those games we used to play while lying on our backs
Drawing dragons and elephants in the clouds
When we made maps with the stars
Imagined intergalactic wars between celestial empires
Comprised of constellations that we did not know the names yet
Tell me
How did we forget
How did we get here from then
When exactly did this happen

When did my lips start talking of tragedy
When did they stop kissing my mother
When did I start to bother with grocery lists and girlfriends
Tell me
When did it become pretentious to pretend
To imagine that we are something that we are not
Like an astronaut whose job it is simply to fly up
And bare witness to the clusters of carbon doing their infinitely
Cyclical slow dance in the silence of space

Tell me
When did the universe stop making you dizzy
When did we start to believe in gravity
When did my pockets become heavy with the spare change left over from my mediocre life

And Tell me
When did we stop
When did stop building love from lego blocks
When did we stop imagining mountain tops
And when did we stop climbing everyday

When did we start to believe them when they say that life is uphill battle
When we know full well that even worse is the way back down again
How did we get here from then
When did this happen

When did we become a generation of muted ventriloquists
When did we stop breathing life into inanimate objects
When did I start writing eulogies to people and things that have not died yet
Why do I want to live for an eternity

Tell me
Is it so I can watch the world end
Is it so I can write naked poetry to nobody like I did when I was kid
Before I learned geography
Before I knew where California was
When I still dreamed or places called mars
Before the lights of the stage became so bright that I could no longer see the stars

for sailor dan

I once met a sailor who had never been to sea

I used to see him almost daily outside to shop where I would stop to buy a pack of cigarettes

And I would give him one

He would tell me that he used to be in navy

That he sailed a Spanish Galion across the Atlantic and back again

You see, I knew that he was lying but I part of me

A part of me wanted to believe him

Because this landlocked sailor

He was also a magician

I once saw him roll a joint with one hand

Saw him turn his monthly welfare checks into a navy pension plan

His name was Dan

And he used to draw the same picture over and over again

It was a perfect replica of that Spanish Galion

He started by doodling them on napkins before bumming enough spare change

To buy some big pieces of bristol board and a black pen

By now he’s probably drawn thousands of them

Every hipster kid in my home town has a copy

He used to sell them for a few bucks or a cup of coffee

But honestly I don’t think that’s why he drew that ship

And think truthfully, he wanted to sail away on it

He already had the sailors cap and the long beard that was going grey

And on a good day the vastness of the prairies resembles an ocean

And if you squint your eyes hard enough

You can ships rolling over the canola yellow horizon

And Dan, Dan could be captain of that Spanish Galion

I can see him now just off the starboard bow

Barking orders to squigy kids like they were his deckhands

Looking to me like I was his first mate and together we would sail towards the harvest moon

Testing fate

Smoking cigarettes covered in salt water as waves of wheat fields came crashing down on us

We would navigate our way through the dust kicked up from farmer’s feet

Dodging icebergs carved from hay bails and sheaves of wheat

Because we were the centre of the universe

We could see the end of the earth horizon in every direction

And together we would unearth that anchor of alcoholism and in-affection

Pull it up by its roots

And cast off into a sea of impossibility

A place where the same black pen drawing the same black lines over and over again

Can make homeless dreams a reality

A place where we can be sailor

Even though we’ve never been to sea