The Runaway

… for Aaron Stevens …
… with undying gratitude …

You headed east from sea salt mists
deep into sprawling desert—our
memories safely packed away, our
future left entirely at your discretion.

Death was imminent either way—
and if there was a modicum of hope,
it lay in the uncertain grips of cold,
hunger, and other fears with names.

You would walk the crucible alone,
and carry nameless pain and loss
to the song lines where stars fell
every night from an angel’s wing.

You took the job of survival at any
cost—or death with at the very least
a degree of dignity. We had lost all
hope, and you carried hopelessness.

You gave us to midsummer deserts,
and they cradled us and sent us back.
You gave us to the mountains, and
they became lifelong companions.

You gave us to the rivers, and their
great spirits carried our deepest,
darkest torments into the dreaming.
At every turn you found allies—

Intangible allies that took the ear
at night and offered solace in
the yipping calls of unseen coyotes,
in the distant sound of thunder.

Tangible allies that for no reason at
all handed you cash and prayed so
hard they almost cried, or brought you
a plate sent back to the graveyard cook.

You searched not only soup kitchens
for a half-moldy morsel, but libraries
for old dusty words—You even tried
to nourish a soul crushed lifeless

beneath the systemic heel of ruin
and apathy. You tended fields salted
with violation and shame that could
never bear fruit, or even weeds.

You took this impossible job, and
carried hopelessness down highways
fraught with uncertainty to half-built
lean-tos and long abandoned homes.

You fell asleep to wind and woke
beneath shrouds of snow. You found
safety in the silence of ponderosa
nights and a slow stream’s murmur.

You drifted like autumn leaves, like
fallen cherry blossoms, like dust
kicked up in the evening winds—And
nearly every single night you pled our

case to the stars not knowing who or
what could hear or cared to hear—But
clearly someone heard, for each night
was followed by scents of new potential.

Knowing nothing, you struck out into
the wild, the world, the unknown—
for nothing more than a mote, a lottery’s
chance to survive the unsurvivable.

You carried us all, the weight of dreams
so broken they only cut to the bone
and injured all the more. You carried
a life discarded like trash, crumpled

and torn into pieces, used like old rags,
dented and rusting like a burnt out
windowless, tireless, engineless jalopy
in tall grass, crazed like a dry riverbed.

I look back now and see your tireless
will, your drive to become something
more than the nothing you were made,
and you carried us with you—

You carried all that would one day take
the form of man, human, dignity molded
from refuse never even meant for
compost, never more than toxic waste.

Thank you for your rage, my friend—
for your unwavering unwillingness
to lay down and dim, for your beautiful,
fragmented brokenness that scraped

with bleeding, calloused hands all the
dismembered, rotting pieces of self back
into being, so that something more could
become and one day find a way to thrive.