An Old Man Dying of Shame in a Red County

My neighbor explains: we live in code:
at the center of Pride Month
is the call-word DEMON.

He has electrified his white picket fence.
His ecstatic pit bull drools at my spaniel.

It’s a foggy autumn in the foothills.
The cliffs all the more superb
for being invisible.

Highland of dray horses and apples,
ruined mine tipples, a padlocked server farm.

I’m commanded, love thy neighbor.
All night his motion sensors stalk the pines
for a ferret, a bobcat, the psycho owl.

I’m told, I’m no longer a person,
just a wrist scribbling in an extinct language.

Don’t bury me in this fascist earth.
Cremate me, let me be a wisp of smoke
in the hollows of the White Mountains.

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