calculus

Lone Ranger, stranger:

kids grown and gone

not even a smoke signal; the

wife has taken her vow of silence,

face in a laptop screen or

asleep on the distant mesa of our

Ponderosa bed:

                This is the BIG Country.

Thirty million buffalo slaughtered

like my creativity, like those

wild Indians who couldn't

conform and died

not trying.  Abandoned bones

lay white in the elements,

worth more as fertilizer:

                the economics of resurgency.

Time passes

and time will tell where this life

is migrating as I strive to link the trajectory of

railroads creeping from east and west,

bisecting  the herd of my great ideas

yet never connecting at all;

relentlessly continuing toward manifest destiny

with the logic of those useless formulas

they taught us

in calculus.