On the Way to WorkRichard Soberpaintings

Driving to work down Old Las Vegas Highway past a decrepit gas station, a red, white and blue dollar thirty-two a gallon sign standing in ruins at dawn. Daydreaming. We are a little wild here. Ghosts drop through my line of vision like a burning mattress falling past a window in a transient hotel. Shadows with names shivering in tents beside suburban arroyos between cul-de-sacs hiding divorcees on call-waiting and amateur psychologists who believe the self can be healed. I see Craig Barker in my rear-view mirror sucking on an American Spirit, an English woman wrapped in a sari taking him by the elbow into the Haidakhandi Universal Ashram in Crestone, Colorado. He’s jonesing for warmth, free food, and babes. A week later he’s back in his tent, says St. Elizabeth’s shelter is full of thieves. Weighed down with the lost innocence of an orphan. The furniture of the deceased fills a house owned by a man with shit up to his neck. Every swallowed-up town between Encinitas and Espanola. The wind chimes hanging from the roof of the potting shed are still as the air. Time turns its nonexistent back on us. We grow into the earth. The acequia madre meanders into the cold desert.

RS 2008