 The awful virus of it, the expectations of genius arising out of nothing mere attention to the banal. Over the years, I've learned to watch it and wait. There's an old haiku about writer's block. Disobedient poems, they never come when you call. Heal you some bitch, heal. But even if I sat still in the grass after a rain, there's no promise any words would approach. There are enough poems about rain. Is anything left unwritten? What melodies play between blades of grass? Does rain get an afterlife? Are there poems about sitting in puddles? One should never write a poem about poetry. It seems counterintuitive, like getting a receipt for a receipt. Yet I remain afflicted by writer's block. I toss, I turn, I can't break the fever of wanting. I've exchanged curious telepathic glances with birds, read articles on the myriad types of chili peppers, and gasped when I saw cloud forms appear to hold hands while skipping over mountains. But I failed to write any poetry on this because it's also obvious, right? I mean, you've seen it. Besides, I felt choked up with wanting. I was envious, envious of clouds, envious of the first graze of rain across a mouth. There are things I haven't yet written as there are prayers God won't take responsibility for. Prayers like dead batteries, prayers like toxic medicines. Perhaps I should ask here, what's the difference between prayer and poetry? Perhaps this is how to confront writer's block. Ask questions. What type of grass grows on Jupiter? How might you spend your day if you were a goat, or a dolphin, or a cloud, reaching out for another cloud while leaping over a mountain range like stepping over cousins asleep on your dining room floor? Every day there are miracles and moments of beauty that need poems. Unchaperoned flowers making love in a field of bluegrass. Cephalophotic clouds shifting color, texture and giggling rain. Animals that stop and appear to admire the lighted dusk. They seem contemplative, thinking, having realized something, if only, if only. All right. So this poem is, the reference here in 88 Miles is not about back to the future. This was written and inspired after a Facebook post posted by my biological niece who visited my birth mother, who I haven't really talked to in 10 or so years or so, and posted a photograph of her on her deathbed. When I saw that photo, I realized, as I was sitting in my office in San Francisco, there was 88 miles between where I was sitting and where she was at that moment. And this is what happened. There are 88 miles between us, rocked, raw, and dead-ended. 88 miles of asphalt poured gumbo hot. Meteorite roadkill igniting into white phosphorus solar flares, blurring what's left of Route 66. 88 hospice beds grow wild in a Fibonacci bouquet along Burmishave highways. 88 gray wolves hopscotch the distance while the dawn's sun branches the horizon like a plum. A squadron of 88 blood moons hover the interstate aboard a keyboard of crows pitching eggs like grenades. 88 days have passed without incident involving unwanted riverbank babies begging for bottles in the blackberry bushes. No matter how many flower beds I crawl into, they're not as warm as the grave of your final embrace. 88 bayous boil down to banks of Salt Peter bringing whole brotherless armies to their knees in service to shame. 88 deltas of bubbling crawfish the color of devotion roses, born again crustaceans pinching hallelujahs from the air. I am one of 88 men staring at a photograph of someone dying or dead. The person in the photo resembles a melting sculpture, its mouth loose as a child's shoestring, the yoke leaking from their eyes. I have been here before standing bedside waiting for the drop. Unsure of what to pray for, I keep clearing my throat. We are not touching. My hands don't know you so they hang from my arms like sleeping bats while death dings off the elevator holding 88 sunflowers dripping crinkled leaves. I am squinting to focus a memory having blurred into strangers. Perhaps I should hurry my apology but where was I going with it? This makes 88 times I've thought all scotch was consecrated while 88 tongues await the unleavened forgiveness of the body. I smoked 88 blunts at the double locked door of a no vacancy church where God keeps their eyes bashfully shut. I spent 88 September's in solitary casinos pulling shut slot machine bibles until one pays out in an infant coughing up its own skeleton. 88 days have passed and I stay climbing the mountainside wishing I were a son you found worthy enough to see rise. Um, yeah, yeah, um, damn am I? Yeah, I am going to do that because I made a mistake of actually submitting this poem to a journal and they're going to publish it in November. And I'm like, huh, I don't know actually how I feel about that now. Um, this is called, uh, this is called trigger warning. Having always preferred funerals in the rain. The casket, a husk, the body, a seed sprouting wild from a garden of ravens. See a cemetery in Oklahoma, the land a pancake of petroleum. A troop of clones file out of a minivan to floss weeds rippling around the engraved name on a placard. A name getting more attention than when he, she were alive, cornered and confusing phantoms from memory. Now he, she is the phantom preferred in photo albums over aged irrelevance. My mother once lit new ports with lightning between bong hits of prednisone, the habit of flavored breath being that hard to break. Stare at the ground or mounds of shoveled earth. Now think what do we really bury the black chrysalis in my mother's casket receipt in ashes. I was never clear what that was. Instead of her, perhaps it was what soured and sapped her into that furrowed fig, leaving us witnesses to put it finally into the ground, praying it stay there and offering a neat grave for ritualized devotion. The weakness of our humanity is not letting anything remain buried long enough. Years later, a new job but with a former coworker. Her first question was would I treat her to lunch having forgotten her wallet as I'd forgotten melody to the song of my own lineage. Her second question was for a list of all my exes without including family, pushing a stack of chips towards me. But I've always been resistant to the obvious. These are not casino chips, they are bullets, and this is a trigger warning. She tells me she was loved once, but that wasn't the word she used. A baby cashed out of her womb a slot machine clanging human cells. But what explains my dormancy? Who are my references in life? She called for documentation on the impact crater weeping stones in my chest. Then watches me load an inherited pistol with her words, a mid-century parlor trick. Aim it at my own head and pull the trigger. I told her just like I told the dead I'd rather be blank than rent space in any more arms of ashes. Everything I've loved has led to unmarked holes and wild grasses. The rain falling over a funeral is the only touch I can stand. Holes and wild grasses, I said. Holes and wild grasses. Let me do, thank you. This is so odd to me how the brain works because this poem I'm about to do now is older than that poem I just read, but it is related and it took place during the exact same weekend that that funeral I was kind of describing happened. And this poem is called Wicked Game, Oklahoma Flatlands, Night's Rich Perfume in Lightning and Oil. This back when I was clairvoyant in music videos. I'm with my cousin who's driving on a knife blade of asphalt neatly slicing the tundra. He appears rigid, fixed. He hard stares into the blue-black screen of sky tuned to nothing. We are together this week due to death and blood, both strands sagging loose between us. We are family without ever having made friends. Perhaps the true death is not his grandmother but himself since his heart remains this week in the purse of a woman who can no longer be bothered. This empty plated landscape, licked clean even of any footprints is the perfect metaphor for all I've ever known of love. But before I can figure anything out, just then a sudden guitar calls order from the radio. Between the silences we pass back and forth, the car fills with strummed notes. A swirling phantom embroidering the air. Sometimes, I said, gently parting our curtain of silence. When I hear this song, I imagine an astronaut bouncing along a moon rock like a yo-yo in slow motion. Away from the crumpled spaceship that he's just been tossed out of. And in the distance, beyond the crash, planet Earth spins, turns a perfect and silent ball as he crawls back to his smoldering vessel, his face a shattered web of blood. Some people, he said to the highway, just see things different. All right, so I'm going to end with this and I will sneak and tell you that this poem has... I actually did a psychic reading many, many years ago and kind of forgot that I had an audio cassette of that reading. Some of the lines from that recording I put in this poem, this is called psychic reading. My last therapist advised, I see a psychic. I did, but one cynical about the future who stopped mid-sentence and said, a lot of this takes place in Africa. I see you in a blue cave with a sunroof hand dug through sandstone, a natural telescope that doubles for a trumpet in case of blues emergency. I see you as a shaman scientist with a pimp's taste, enthusiastic about saber-tooth fur, simply because you look good in it. You're cold medicine and a candy wrapper, fluent in stars centuries before Galileo. The galaxy bears witness to everything it's seen. You eat ripe stars from the valley of the sky and let juice from the cosmos run sticky veins along your arms. You're an astrologer sending out a Gemini Eagle to gather roots and information. The eagle is nursed to the sky and you its spirit doctor with a voice like Tony Bennett. Your prescription of flowers will sing the gospel of water if you incant the right words at the right time. You know birds have a tendency to strip feathers in their sleep. They cuddle and dream darkness in fear of what the light might reveal. You have the tongue to communicate with gazelles, but what is there to talk about since all they do is gossip? They prefer the cobalt jazz of salt peanuts. I see you armed with a friendly whip, captaining a storm of pages, flipping in a library of haunted shells. The oceanic quilt of night is your chemistry set. You know how the origami of time is, everything folding into everything else. You practice an extinct magic, finger painting the geometry of light tickling the surface of the ocean until its waves open like a nightgown. Thank you guys very, very much.