THE aging men cheer
from their stadium seats
at the aging band
rock show and I stand
up to remember the energy
that pulled me
from the ground:
bone, muscle, sinew, blood,
air.
Air and ground.
The power chord metallic growl
still seems inside me,
the struggle
to free myself
from jobs in basements or at late night counters,
commerce shackles,
rooms where people fight
not to be stuck in others’
conceptions, to forge their own.
Dirt: It climbs
its way along my shoes,
over
my hands and fingers
walking,
the mix of sky
and earth.
The motorcycle roars.
Rise up and fall back,
rise up,
know who and what
I / you
say goodbye to
comes back down
among us again
as we come back down
Mark Wallace lives in San Diego, where since 2005 he has been working on a multi-part long poem exploring the psychogeography of southern California, The End of America, sections of which have been published in a number of journals and books and chapbooks, most recently The End of America 8 (Glovebox Books, 2023). He is the author of many other books of poetry, including Notes from the Center on Public Policy (2014) and Felonies of Illusion (2008), as well as several books of fiction, including the novels Crab (2017) and The Quarry and the Lot (2011).