Devil's Creek

(album: Failed States - 2012)

Take me back to those sweltering summer days.
Bike down the gravel road to the creek outside the base.
Sun on skinny arms, chin on knobby knees.
Squatting in the cool of the rotting of the reeds.
Enveloping.

No one here but me.
Never understood the other kids.
The adults even less.
So I hung out by myself
in a backroad drainage ditch.
I called it Devil's Creek
so it wouldn't seem so sad.
When you can't have what you want,
you learn to want what you have.
These adaptive preferences
have their way with you. Shape world events.

In the wake of an ancient, shallow late Cretaceous sea
just this side of a clay-packed extinction boundary
a biome breathing, buzzing, humming in the heat.
If I seem like I'm somewhere else, it's Devil's Creek.