Red Road

Features of a
Landscape like Hell:
Leathery gnarled limbs and
Harsh-postured shrubbery
Crying mercy to
Silent waves of heat
Like spirit-blooded fingers
That tempt you hither
Across the plane of
Fiendish vegetation.

Cracked and parched
Places of ground.
It’s a choked and dried throat,
Disdainful of water;
A ground that is
Wickedly pious in its thirst.

Most notable feature of a
Landscape like Hell:
Red graveled roadway
Cutting through
Long and straight,
A red slit across the orange valley.

Traveling down this road,
Rubbery burning soles
Bring unrest to
Then settled now trampled dust;
Clouds of red confusion swirl.

No peace in such environs.
Gray boulders waste to
Piles of orange rubble to
Wind-fettered specks of red;
Red specks that bounce
Throughout the burning valley,
Till perhaps a flooding rain
Pleasantly rushes to drown,
To carry trapped substances to
An imagined bed of peace
At the bottom of an imagined sea.

Weary and feverish you
Trudge halfway upon your hazy way
And pause in the depression of
A natural sluice to
Gaze wistfully sideways.
The teasing, waving air
Watches and yet beckons.
A fancied watery wall
Approaches with intentions of
Smothering as you smile and stand.

Now crawling low,
Red road presents
Magnified features:
Sundry scraps of metallic relic machinery,
Rusty razors embedded in Red Roadway;
Fitting implements.

Dead wooden sign
Suspended from a
knotted Joshua tree
(the tree itself recalling
a shrub-assuming
shade of Dante’s seventh circle),
crudely contrived and engineered,
the crooked hanging of the block of wood
more noticeable than its words:
“Beware flash floods.”

This is a place of spillage,
Red rusty water or
Red ripe blood
Makes no matter.