Motel Checklist

[Nazz]

Roar of eighteen wheelers in my window.
Bonus, within earshot of a restless train.
Deduction if train shakes the room.
Some mixture of cracked plaster,
sloped floor, singing pipe, peeling paint,
fuzzy carpet from the Carter years,
worn patterns like dry riverbeds,
splintered table, broken chair,
whiskey snifter, antique air.
Noisy fan to drown it all out.
Bonus, if dented swamp cooler.
Look for old neon cruising Main.
Bonus, if letters missing.
Check.

Literary places, faces nicked.
Echoes of fine, battered craftsmen.
Tales from sturdy, grim early days.
Workmen sawed majestic boards,
built huge casings around doors
under twelve layers of paint.

Time to go, high country.
Bruno's Motel, dust and grit.
Where? On the edge of nothing.
It offsets too much of everything.
Why? Sere oceans at six thousand feet
rimmed by hard rock mythic span.

Check.

[Nazz]

"Range (and basin)"

On Pancake Flat it descends,
blackened sky on radiant amber.
Darkened bedrock rims the battlefield.
Up this high it can't thwart every storm.
It comes quickly, no time to hide.
Ride it out, cover your head.

What if I had to make a living here?
In a soft desert pastel, in pure quiet?
Quiet doth not a living make, but noise.
Since I found no noise in the desert
I conclude no living is being made.
Most of it is expired cattle country.

It's unhealthy.
The air is too thin,
the climate is too dry,
the corridors too long and burnt,
the prospects too wide and fruitless,
pointed up at spiked black and nothing.

It's a blank sheet and bumps on the edge
pointed up at smeared blackness.
How could you build a life there?

[hester_prynne]

Okay, well wow Nazz, these just blew my mind into a fine place. This is like, truly some of your best...I mean I enjoy your writing always but these have a new.....sort of feel, that is fantastic.
Bravo Sir.
H

[constantine]

this is top rate, nazz. it really is.

[Arcadia]

enjoyed your questions and checks, mnaz!!!!!!! they also reminded me to an Spinetta album it´s been a while I don´t listen to!!!!!!! gracias!!!!

[Nazz]

Thanks Hester, Dino y Arcadia.

I wrote a little more.

“The maverick”

Small rock the size of a boulder
on the edge of a great dune, no sense of scale.
Trucks roll by miles away and forget the dryness,
or unexpected dunes at six thousand feet.

Root for a maverick, root for a cloud.
When rain comes it is clumsy with vengeance.
Too many times it tried to touch down gently,
to be turned away in dissipated shrouds.
Forget the dryness of this place
or which freight goes where.

She stands on a cloud, sees over peaks.
They seem so far away but trouble comes.
Root for one of the strays to get loose,
lost in the next valley or two,
picked up by the next road.
You can only make it so far.

"Ecclesiastes (again)"

Who wrote that book?
Boredom of screaming subtlety
Yeah, nothing new under the sun.
Geographical lines bleed, that's all.
Deals and weapons get bigger, that's all.
None of it explains the rock as a boulder,
at six thousand feet, in unexplained sand.

[still.trucking]

<center>

[mtmynd]

these poetic ruminations sound so smooth but rustic, whose sounds and smell surely must draw the memories into returning one day... one day... once again... soon?

i agree with the others, Mark... fine writes (special)...

[saw]

what a picture you paint, alive with passion and a profound love of what once was, the stories behind the stories, the majesty of it all...
reads like Edward Abbey or Larry Mc Murtry....I dig it ........