Near the Salton Sea, East of Niland, you watch a God is Love hot air balloon run out of air.  Where pilots of the Enola Gay dropped dummy bombs—God’s law and man’s law colliding in desert scrum.  Past the rail tracks to your mobile home.  Poverty Flats, just north of Main.  Tempers run loco, dreams are of rich women, plans scratched in dirt.

Instead of changing truck tires, live in a hand-painted truck.  Looking like a bum’s the price for free parking.  Neighbors sleep with rattlesnakes.  Cult in a blue bus.  Child tied up for discipline, forgotten in the sun on cement where the old barracks stood.  A man who finds an unexploded shell, tries to make scrap.  You help pick up fragments once his legs.

Nights, gather at the campfire outside the Christian Center, try to remember our picket fence life.  Patton trained troops here.  Listen—you can still hear the boom from the far side of the mountains.