and it howls on its course like an injured wheel,

and takes hot bloody footsteps towards the night—

that’s not right, but then, it never is.

I was saying:

around mile 80 on 71 in Ohio, a farmer

put up two billboards. one said

HELL IS REAL, the other,

IF YOU DIED TODAY,

WHERE WOULD YOU SPEND ETERNITY?

the trees were all bare when I drove by

in November. the ones far away

were foul wisps of cotton,

the ones closer up were absurd,

too complex: a tangle of equations

warped in nature’s mind

like the undersexed mind of the monk

dumping gospels on vellum. they all

looked small, so laugh-out-loud

small that the smeared gray sky

would have sucked out my eyes

if I didn’t fill it up with something.

we were all in a worn old

sack at that moment, and we’d all get

pitched from the ground

when God picked it up, or crushed

when He tossed more candies in.

so why not tie the sky back down

with Hell? and why not fill

the windy in-between with

a great brass wheel

to roll over the silos

and the tiny trees?

to squash the tiny telephone poles all tossed

in at different angles?

to howl like tornados? a freight train? fire?

and to leave a molten metal wound

wobbling through the corn?

and why not roar

like it roars

for everyone who hasn’t heard?