Andrew Halsig

To The Road to Denver

You let us ride like

Sleepy captains

Over your two lane road

That swayed like a river

Through your

Utah valleys

And the death

of the Nevada mountains.

Your sun lived as a

Supporting character,

Showing up for an episode or two,

Then leaving to

live its own life behind the raining clouds.

Jessica

With her small

Four door build

And a trunk that carried

All our lives

Fought

One hundred miles fast through the

Serenity of your haven.

We were refugees from all the disappointment

I’d put in our lives

By putting

Too much excitement

In my own.

When the ten foot tall white avalanche

Truck abused your

asphalt with such disrespect

You appointed me and Jessica the official

Seraphs of the land

And with everlasting purity

We raced his thousand pound

Ego off the road

With nothing but her, a four door sedan.

When my Brother asked

what great adventure had allowed me to

abandon him

You answered him

with the only words

he’d ever heard.

My Mother never asked because she’s always understood,

Only to a point of course, as no mother wishes her son to be more than

a few million miles away.

When the Denver Skyline refused to tease me with

naked breasts

I thought back on the canyon walls

that could have been

my death

Or the calmly rushing rivers

that surely were

And decided that this

ending

was not so bad.

Oh, but if I ever felt peace at all

It would have been on your holy

Burger King

Where only four hours were left on our seventeen hour drive.

The decaying sun dimmed

the valley that became my final

memory

Or will become eventually.

Andrew Halsig is a twenty year old poet form a small town named La Habra. He moved to San Francisco at seventeen to study writing and experience a life closer to The Beatniks. Since fifteen Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg have been something of a religion for him. His first real publication was of a poem called America Part 2: In Honor of Allen Ginsberg. He has lived in South Korea and spent time traveling around America and Asia. http://goalsandsuchandstuff.tumblr.com/