3 In The Desert
    We stole anything that we couldn't keep.
    Paul Weller

    The point of it all is Out There, a little
    beyond that last rise you can just
    barely see, hazy and purple on the sky.
    Terry and Renny Russell

Utah in the fall:

the needles
sticking their warm sandstone fingers
into the endless skies:
canyons, inverted scars
dug into the red cartilage
of a million years
of geologic garbage;
high cirrus clouds
strung out like junkies
waiting for a change,
any change;
flatness
stretched taught,
rotting in the stink
of Big Sage and Russian Thistle;
Indian Creek
winding,
trying desperately to parallel
40 miles of asphalt.

The visitor center parking lot
netted a few stray cars
boasting out-of-state plates
like out-of-place voices
waiting their turn to be heard.
A man in the bathroom
tried to peel
the traces of desert from his skin
leaving them estranged
in a porcelain sink.

We were in the parking lot
lined up boy-girl-boy
on the tailgate of an F-350.
The Gang Of Three, smiling.
Smiling with a stolen desert in our eyes.
Smiling because we won’t give it up
to any porcelain sink.
Smiling at the whole fucking world.

I rolled a cigarette
with a torn piece of notebook paper.
The paper had been a note
no one had read.
The paper had been a tree
now stolen and dead.
I lit it with a stolen lighter.
Notebook paper cigarettes
make me nauseous.
They remind me of book burnings,
sending words to heaven
in a black smoke –
brains burning.

We burned the desert.
250 miles under our feet.
We stole the desert.
Three people with stolen finger puppets
on their hands.
Three people with a notebook paper cigarette
hanging from smiling lips.
And it was our game,
our rules,
our Gang Of 3.
3 warriors in love with life,
in love with each other,
waging a war of insanity
against no one.
But no one was the rest of the world
and against no one we had to lose.
Tomorrow was the avalanche
that in a slow second, sweeps
us from each other forever.
Like tracks washed from a canyon.

But they were our canyons,
our landslides,
our footsteps,
our sprung traps.
Sprung in the clouds
with our arrogance the bait.
Then we had time,

notebook paper cigarettes burn slow.
We passed it along the tailgate.
The act,
a simile
to our attitude.
Just 3 kids,
blowing up the corners
that god built.

Waist deep in Fish
screaming at the sky
or holding him at bay in Fable Valley,
while we choked on our dreams.
We jumped from the slick rock
into the sky
and called god on every bet he made.

We left dust through Beef Basin
and chain tracked clay
to the edge Dark.

There was no risk,
no lessons to learn –
just miles without a point
between us
to that hazy and purple on the sky
and the desert in our eyes.

We stole it from the Needles Outpost,
from the Circle K at the end of Moab
from the people trespassing in our desert.
We stole it from God
and the anaszi.
We stole it from each others’ mouths.
The Gang of 3
kids on a crime spree
with a stolen desert,
with notebook paper cigarettes that could have been roman candles
spraying yellow fire into the Utah fall.

Too mad to realize we had lost.

But that’s our secret weapon.
It is our notebooks filled with mad words
that will echo straight to heaven
when we role them into cigarettes.
It is our guns
built from pieces of mad hearts
against which reason will fall
and run like rain.
It is our lives wild
and mad in love, so mad
that even though we’ve lost forever
we’ll steal tomorrow
to live mad in love again.

I miss you man
in memory of Mike V,

    while with silent, lifting mind I've trod The high,
    untrespassed sanctity of space,
    Put out my hand, and touched the face of God
    John Gillespie Magee

rberk
Moab 1995