“the grass was Lao and the road a disaster.” Tim Page

as when the doctor shined a penlight
in her, nobody’s-home-eyes, missing
the room inside, tripped out on acid,
paper peeling from the walls, melting
paisleys dissolving into blood puddles
stitched into a rug, a black hole dead
center taking it all in, the poster of
Vanessa Redgrave from Blow Up among
the last images to go, along with the mixed
doubles tennis playing mimes, made up
for a game of murder and clay court passion
like the suicide drivers in the open car
headed for a Mulholland Drive of the mind
where the dead wake up and go on living
lip synching Roy Orbison duende,
a senseless sudade in foreign tongues,
never quite right, everything funneling
deeper into the worst kind of darkness,
night driving blind, all the rules of the road
suspended except the ones that say, “Go
further into the tunnel that has no light at the end.”