Voltage Terrain

Before 

high beams
at evening,
when dirty

desert streets 
make your mind
the only
available light ...

~

Kurt Vonnegut's
look-a-like, always
asleep in the room, 
died of pills

we were told

Twenty-two miles ran

away as summer flared

When blind bus driver

passed on by

my aurora took personal

Details of towers

growing more fine

A trucker stop

at Central Library

loading Alexandrian muses

Peaks of the Papago

red sandstone, pock-marked, 

once a holy higher ground

now helicopter overlords

hover overhead & overheated

High noon breaks

into the Valley stone cold sober

& the hazy dome of white shine 

shields rising temperatures

feeding visceral exhaustion, thirst

Clown car fathers

& firearm mothers

tore down adobe caches,

illiterate drivers mad on gas,

roofs made of mesquite beams,

replacing it all with joyride matrices,

concrete to waste, incorporated

First moon of June,

a sermon before the storm,

making Duck Dynasty 

role-motto crusty Christ,

lower vibration particle plasma

winning the argument

Same old grueling message

demanding automaton zeal

running again to softcore pawn,

winds of history to the back ...

Sunday's reliever never delivers

~

Grid fabricate. Stick short-ended.
Indian School Road bus
busted, income tax bunkered,
Maryvale cancer cluster,
dusted Conestoga shopping
carts, broken hoses, drones,
big boxes taco-laying those
who lost World War Three
long long long time ago

~

Violence silenced
Music & motion
beneath Kachina towers
tall, above our awareness,
atomic & electromagnetic

Indivisible, the flow

My Argument in Church (Before, During & After)

With my eyes rolling over

the quaint antique verses

presuming to direct-quote God,

I get Dante's "Inferno" in the gut,

a recipe fostering ignorance

& manifest destiny, division,

violence at any disagreement

Fables inundating normies,

deluding folks into delirium

that the Lord was actually speaking

when instead it was only a targeted

advertisement for bullies in the pulpit,

sure, sure, sure, black printed Bible

doing good slightly more than evil, 

but still but still but still ... Not worth it,

despite the human math. If mushroom clouds

hover over your enemies ... your many,

many enemies ... then you get a pass

from space brother Jesus? What a laugh.

No. No. No. Lessons of mortality

are taught by the Earth and the seasons,

and if you act not, breeding pestilence,

hummingbirds will drop exploding steel,

the fools errand to describe the afterlife,

that perfect lawnmower, 

that Mercedes mansion

is but moon dust everlasting

~ Douglas McDaniel

Tolleson, Arizona

Mythville Bookstore