Last week, I knew it was time to leave the city.

The way the sun glinted off window-panes, a warning

arriving on my front lawn with the morning

newspaper, and the shape of that funny cloud…

and those kids breaking stuff, it shouldn’t be allowed

one time, let alone — the way it is now — twice.

No, man, it’s definitely not pleasant, not nice.

So I packed and got the hell out of this shitty
place, filled the tank, beat it. Hey, it ain’t funny,

the way peculiar things kind of happen

in their odd way, how certain envelopes fall open

at the fatal news, the way your best friends just leave

and abandon you to your career, and you grieve

pointlessly. The Sheriff swings that rawhide goad,

and you take off down that dusty road.

Hey, do you have enough money?
Yes, honey… you turn to look back, but instead

the future appears before you, every day

longer than the last, your dog… say,

was that your dog Hobo disappearing behind that row

of tents? Then a male voice on the radio

speaks a special message just for you, and between

one gas station and the next, that pale green

landscape just grows darker, the blue thread
crawls behind your dawdling ballpoint on the map

as you plot your escape from the horrid Barbary Coast

to that new place, where you can honestly boast

of your massive talent turning out column after column

of prose as mellifluous and convincing as it was solemn,

read by senior executives and beatniks in cafés

along with the morning news of various calamities. Graze

peacefully there, half snoring, your lap-
top snapped shut, but the road begins to wind

higher into the hills, the hairpin bends and turns

causing the brakes to heat up as the rubber burns

from your squealling tires, your fingers crossed

as you check the map and hope you’re not lost,

not in these unspeakable badlands, not just here

where the good things fade into a pale mist, where

you realise you’re lost, and you think you’ll never find
your way home: time to stop and park

in this trailer park, yes, it’s late

with a bad moon rising, with the endless wait

until dawn — don’t nod off! — then you unpack

your flimsies, don pajamas, snooze in back

until you’re woken by the unbearable light of a star

gleaming and glimmering through the trees, as far

from earth as you are from your home, the dark
seeming to grow around you, the clouds to loom

over all the sky, dark now, your cries

feeble and fading over the low rise

ahead, now a train loaded with mounds of coal

pulls by, steel wheels on steel tracks roll

onward and upward, you hear the whistle sing

its mournful song, plucking the single string

of your heart, the low smoke plume
or maybe it’s a locomotive plume of steam

lit from below by a fitful boiler flame.

You know your life ahead of you is just the same

as everything you’ve left behind, the endless night

concealing the world, but then the unbearable light

of the sun does too, with its immense

and world-bestriding blinding indifference —

and, waking, you trudge ahead with your dream.
To keep going demands an awful effort of will.

You know that what you believe is just not natural.

Your life seems like a rusting, failed factory

that tries to manufacture little pieces of sky

but instead makes more dark clouds. You long for release

from that pressure to flee the horror, to find peace.

In the mirror no monster, just a girl who looks pretty.

Start the motor. No more self-pity.

‘Et in California Ego’ began as a draft using the end-words of ‘On visiting a

Borrowed Country House in Arcadia’, by Alicia E. Stallings, in  The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of “Poetry” Magazine edited by Don Share.