or making love in the distant dusk: teenagers among
          parents who wouldn’t share their blessing, addicts squinting

their eyes to God, or the strung-out and rejected by the Mission,
          all arguing, wishing they had a few bucks to share stories

in the nearest bar, cold beer a pitiful excuse for healing
          their calluses. We drove hours that day, through towns

in Virginia we didn’t know, wineries around every turn.
          On every hill: those mansions, and as the truck followed

too closely with its giant wheels, we hoped it wouldn’t run us
          off the road. At every stoplight, crumbling: busted shops

and For Sale signs, weeds choking tracks, our love
          I hoped would last until one of us, gray light seeping

down on our face, regretted everything. I wanted to stop
          so many times, walk through streets we’d never name,

through rat-infested warehouses, breathing in the rot
          of every single city. For all the cities, love, are turning

in on themselves. And I swore—as the clouds turned black
          and the fences lining yards bobbed liked wooden snakes

as we drove on—that a deer would jump out, calming
          our nerves, just for one second, before everything ended.

Let us have this atmosphere, the otherworldly pink clouds
          seconds away from careening to black, all of it glowing

in this Technicolor world. The lone streetlight, illuminating
          something we’re both supposed to see, bleeds fluorescence

onto the Mustang, parked for days, abandoned
          in this lot, among the strip malls now, among the miles

and miles of roads taking passengers somewhere
          they’ll regret: an affair in Forkville, a baby in a trashcan

in Clifton, before we’ll read of it happening too often.
          What looks like a radio tower hovers above the building

to the left, the only one with a light on. I like to think of us
          in that room—smoking cheap cigarettes in black

and white, glaring out the window—thinking it’s beautiful,
          that somehow we’re never able to get things right.