Dreams grow on billboards,
some are painted on the sides of barns.
Out of Chicago on 66, winds at my back,
passing brick churches, racing freight trains
to St. Louis, where a river heads south
as I push past growing fields where families
work for peanuts while harvesting corn
as I move onto Oklahoma,
stretching into the sweetness of a Cimarron
Strip and up to Amarillo’s wheat silos reaching like
rockets pointed at the base of heaven
and in the distant Albuquerque sleeps at
Sandia’s base as I make the miles west to Navajo
Flats and arid plains of Flagstaff where ponderosa
pines stand like soldiers as the road ends in LA
and I walk the beaches of broken hearts.
Roger Singer 