Not one damn person stands to offer
A ride or a fine 'how do you do?'
Out on the stretches
Of those long and lonesome
desert highways
Young and rangy
Not yet a tattooed canvas
And not quite any longer
A multi-colored, spiky haired punk
Not that you could tell
(from a passing vehicle)
Wrapped in an Army Navy store field jacket
Black, of course, my leather
with hand painted longhorn skull
Long since abandoned to storage
Or some ex-girlfriend's domestic care
Wouldn't do me any good anyway
The heat of crossing a desert alone
And on foot
equivalent, at least to my urban mindframe,
to walking across a lake of glass on fire
And inside of a microwave oven
I'm going to give y'all
the benefit of the doubt
It was the 80s on the cusp of the 90s
And maybe you didn't have your internet
set up right, at that time....
So you couldn't see the injustice
The complete uncaring,
The disregard for your fellow human being
Be he (or she) white, black, brown, yellow, orange, or sun burnt red
Also willing to admit, out on those desert roads, at that time, and unbeknownst to me,
Most probably trying to hitch a ride outside of multiple maximum security facilities
In my desperate state of being,left the children, in the back of the station wagon,
With eyes full of wonderment
As the ones in the front seat explained
'if you pick up people out here,
around the prison,
they might just kill ya!'
Great thing about America,
Land of the free and all,
There were Park and Rides
scattered across each state
Used to be called 'rest areas'
Some still are
I promise I won't go off on any half baked concoction of racial or sexual inappropriate touching or thinking or malicious doing
on my travels across the USA.
When you're traveling through the desert,
those demons are your own
aka The dark night of the soul
Meaning,
they are assigned or attracted to you
for some particular purpose
You're gonna have to work that out
You have to come to terms with those in your own manner and method
And inappropriate time frames
Most of the people who I ran into were kind and considerate or at least thinking
I can't lump them all together
But what I can tell you at this point,
The ones who cared were far
and few between
Now maybe you've hitchhiked all over
Hell's half acre
Or the devil's collarbone
Or inferno gulch
and you got about a million and a half
stories that you're willing to tell everybody
Mine is just one
Mine is mine
This is mine
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