Man Alone Poem by Stan Petrovich

He assails the desert Mojave,
Down the rockiest of dirt roads,
Thinks of the uses of agave,
But food, drink, those ol' rice & beans
Can now forever not be his goad.

Coming upon an old white railway station,
The kind the loves to find,
Huddlesd between two dangerous mesas,
He removes his boots in order to unwind.
A mass or sores & carbuncles covers his feet.

Written in baked blood upon one of the abandoned walls
He sees the dying confessions of another man alone:
'You are born alone,
'You live alone,
'Even in the company of others,
'And then you die alone...'

He happens across as sliver of a broken mirror
And regards the crags of his face;
He wonders if what he sees is real,
Whether in sunup everything is a mirage.
But he has indeed put on the necessasry mileage.

Suddenly capture by the thirst of being safe,
Seeing a sea of scraggly cacti surrounding;
Death is the fortress out there:
In the mystifying blaze of the heavy air.
And he gets the chill of the fact-

It might be simply better to die now, here,
Than to remain intact.
The birds of prey are regarding his own shade.