Ride Wildhaired Poem by James Murdock

Don't you want to leave all this behind
and ride wild-haired on horseback through
the mesas of Monument Valley?
Don't you want to be the great rucksack
revolution? I got no money, no food, but
good god I got granite and crystal springs
and the blue goddess sky over El Capitan.
Didn't you mean to sell all your bullshit
and live in the dirt? Somewhere dirt is
king of open places and yet nothing is dirty.
Didn't you mean to build a raft of
roble de Santiago and from the whipping
ocean see the costa del fuego Magellan saw?
Don't you want to ride like Whitman's pen
or canyon like Abbey or be an aged apple in
the easy naturalist pack of a sage named Muir?
I was a fish on the alligator's back and
there I learned nothing's too pretty. Osteoderms
are the hurdled scales between our empty meals.
Don't you want a swirling inferno of radioactive dust,
a shopping cart of skulls, a straw out of your
water glass and into a sea turtle's brain.
Don't you need this meaningless world?
I want the wind at my back and waterfalls
at my feet—don't you? I want to send all the
wooly adelgid back to China and put a hemlock
spell on the forest for another 1,000 years.