broken suitcase

vast blue and vivid green
fill my dreams of then 
back when we were one long dusty highway.
we sliced through texas and its morning roadside breakfasts
glimmering with grease and our greatest expectations
as wheels spun past polaroid snapshots of vacant car lots
and bankrupt bail bond offices offering freedom for a fee,
where the slumbered homeless slept through the afternoons,
too drunk or weak or dead
to wake just yet.

and in these restless visions, sweat clings to clothes
and weathered veins bulge blue through tanning skin
and fingers twine tight as white knuckle drives
take us far from our origins to render us lost
cross country in that crisis-ridden continent
searching for a future
that was outlined by the poets of our past
and which we kid ourselves is hidden somewhere
in the desert's brimming, burning, ever-setting sun.

from greyhound station to greyhound station,
decade to decade, state to state,
the same sad hand grips a broken suitcase
and writes postcards never sent
because they can never be delivered,
like dead roads traced on crumpled maps
that can no longer be traversed,
that only exist on paper now,
inches long and miles short
of the vast blue and vivid green
that fill my dreams of then.