Haunted Trailer Park- The Geography of Desolation

[I wrote this for an artist who was having a show in Joshua Tree, featuring his paintings about Joshua Tree. These weren't some Georgia O' Keefe nature images, but pictures of abandoned shops, ruined and forgotten cars, and the weathered faces of the desert dwellers. He opted not to use it, and I can see why. The people of Joshua Tree don't need some anti-desert rant knocking them down. The Desert throws enough low blows at them, they don't need some hack running up and kicking them when they're down. Anyhoo, here's the piece. No hard feelings, Jesse]

The Geography of Desolation—all across the desert miniature End Times are taking place, laying waste to random intersections of theoretical latitude and longitude lines—The flash of hope that gave birth to this place has long since died out—the beauty that high-falutin’ East Coast artists flout gets old quick when you have no options other than basic human survival, murder, suicide, or high desert evangelism—
It’s hard to believe that these cars ever ran, that they were once more than just rattlesnake nests and dented tableaus for sloppy graffiti—it’s impossible to accept that these ruins of a single-wide ever housed a person or a family, what with its rusted ribcages and tattered plastics, faux woods and shitty cabinet latches that never worked in the first place—it is utterly unfathomable that anything even close to a good idea was ever birthed here, nurtured, and allowed to blossom from a dream into a reality—the empty storefronts and shattered signage are testaments to that…
What breaks steel can just as well break flesh, break the mind, and it does so, slowly, with great patience and skill—look around, it is no accident that all of the plant life is covered in spines, and the wildlife hates you and will kill you if you insist on pestering it with your presence—this is no place for the soft bellies and tender blinking eyes of our species—we need love and affection to thrive, and there is nothing that is able to be hugged in these parts that will not result is massive injuries and discomfort…
But we have hope, and tenacity, and this thing called perseverance, and we believe we can, if not tame, at the very least co-exist within this harsh environment, but time and time again we loose to the desert—it does not want to live in harmony with us, and we are not worthy adversaries—so it happens, in the dead of night Hope leaves town—in the hell of the afternoon Sun ideas wither and die—the skin wrinkles and cracks, harsh lines Spackled over with the dust of 50’s era atomic tests that are widely remembered but rarely discussed—why do you think you can get 100 acres for $15 around here?—the toll is taken and glances become glares, chemicals become routines, our soft and rounded edges become hard and brittle, we become cacti, all unapproachable and only suitable for black and white photography—the Now is nothing more than a waiting game: Sun comes up, Sun goes down, and in between someone is murdered in a flash of insanity, someone takes themselves out of the game for good with a single shotgun blast to the face, someone drinks themselves to death in a busted-up Airstream, and yet another someone blows themselves up while trying to blow something else up—Time becomes a curse, dragging it all out, but it is also a blessing, albeit a delusional one, because in a Sun-baked mind it is easy to think that if one waits long enough…only if…only if…
And that is what you are left with, a stream of dot, dot, dots stretching off into the Horizon, down a lonely and forgotten highway.