I wrote a thing.

[sadie_cocopuff]

I started this poem several years ago on a road trip to California. Driving through the desert, I was upset/angry at the proliferation of tourist traps (frequently involving dinosaurs, because dinosaurs?), the commodification of Native culture, the blatantly environmentally unsound oases of golf courses and casinos. It never got an ending, though, and I just dug it up a month or so ago as I've been dabbling in the slam poetry scene here (which I really like and am sorry I ever mocked). Not brave enough to read anything yet, but I'm trying to get the writing gears turning again.

The American west is no poet’s desert —

No uniformly rolling dunes swept up in one glib, glowing, golden descriptor;

No articulate Sphinx’s paws ever prowled this dusty rock.

 

This is the dreamscape of a jaded documentary filmmaker:

A dull, rude, scruffy American desert,

Sun-seared face stubbled with scrubby sage;

Drab brown, muddy red, faded green: a peasant’s garb to a king’s gold.

 

Her once-majestic silence marred by garish billboards

Prostituting history’s remains,

She is a whorish desert — 

Nature, brown and wrinkled

In the peeling face paint of a two-bit courtesan

Peddles her counterfeit wares:

Scientifically inaccurate dinosaurs

Charge down travesties of teepees

In the name of commerce.

 

The desert, trollop that she is, knows her own:

Dull, rude, scruffy Americans

In their garish, guzzling automobiles,

Their lurid neon t-shirts,

Rush the plastic dinosaurs and painted Indians;

Gobble up this processed, pasteurized, pre-packaged historical substitute,

Yearning for a taste of their heritage,

Oblivious to their incremental contribution to the ever-widening gash

Across the face of Nature, history,

The desert.

 

This was once a poet’s desert,

The muse of ardent young lovers

Whose passion swept through her, consuming.

She has known an amorous touch,

The caress of brush and pen;

Has spread herself, wide and fertile, to be sown and reaped,

Bearing fruit to gentle husbandry.

 

Of late, grown weary and drained,

She has known man’s jealous grip;

Felt him thrust into dry, unwilling soil,

Unnatural liquid coursing through her like a drug.

Painted in garish greens, bedecked with cheap jewels,

She is an aging, spurned mistress.

 

A few still have loved her truly,

Asked of her only stark beauty;

Have seen she needs no adornment

And let her age with grace.

 

Others, too young to have burned with her passion,

Have yet taken her in, battered and used up,

Surrounded her with the flowers of her youth

And tried to heal her scars.

 

This is a poet’s desert, but I am no poet —

Am only a girl of trees and water,

Of raindrops on broad leaves

And grass underfoot;

A girl afraid of the open sky,

Turning pale eyes down from a paler blue

Only to be seared by the sand’s heat,

Ringed round by mountains 

Too far and too close for comfort.

 

I need a narrower heaven, a more crowded earth;

The solace of trees and the promise of water

To slake my fear of thirst.

 

I would be a poet, yet I am a desert

Of dull, rude words and scrubby verses,

Two-bit muses and counterfeit passions

A peeling facade of truth.

 

I am only a desert,

Yet welcome, poet —

Take whatever beauty you may find.