out on life and its lonely highway

                              
                                 traveling down life's lonely highways
                                  hand in hand
                                 with every dehydrated desert pilgrim
                                    that ever drearily sauntered
                                     below radioactive
                                     tangerine moons gone clementine
                                     and
                                     bloodily phosphorescent 
                                     southern seasonal migrant workers
                                     all migrated north
                                      outta this vacant roadside town
                                     decades ago
                                     in sullen stem-cell years
                                     of sourly grenadine aftermath
                                     diseased horses and rusted microwaves gone
                                      rustic and defunct
                                      bleary eyed and DOA 
                                       from the baseboard outlet
                                       to the deadened pistol-whipped hatchback outskirt
                                       hillbilly locals rocked to and fro upon weathered bar stools
                                       rotted down
                                       to the withered oaken rooted floorboard
                                       splattered with cheap domestic beer
                                       stained with infidel
                                       semen
                                     
                                       

                                        old myrtle hayes triggered his high school sweetheart
                                        one quaint evening in an
                                        olden four door sedan
                                       off on the dusted shoulder of one of these broken roads
                                          as the vernacular has it
                                           he never made it home to his fridge that night
                                               guilt overtook him
                                         pushing up daisies somewhere down along route 409
                                             the invisible brink of the old abandoned quarry
                                          the other side of those grim county lines
                                          where the illiterate deputy
                                              that imminent hour
                                            sweated no drop of blood
                                                in no garden and
                                                 was ever so apologetic and grateful
                                                  he could write it all off
                                                    as a double homicide