My body is a reed folding 
like a Texas saloon player
playing it slow

and hands
grip to call more such
creatures to dinner.

I’m terribly picky,
and partial to oversized 
semi trucks—

the buses carrying 
Marge Simpson wigs
and hoverounds for the tourist’s

traps catch and chafe 
my intellect.  I’m better 
than the Alamo, I

the little armored one, you see,
ruling the highway, a flirt
with oncoming traffic. I

grapple to trucks 
like The Batman, claws 
scraping the asphalt, I

dangle, rocking
back and forth to back 
and clicking—klopfgeist.

This morning.
Breakfast 
with a psychiatrist 

treating me for rage—
I said
I wanted to matter.  

I wanted to belong.  
I am so tired
of the fucking armor plating,

this loneliness wears thin on
rolling fur bellied monsters 
that hide like tortoises—

those wee suicidal tendencies
that rival jaywalking opossums
and road runners.

I told the good doctor,
my leathery shell and digging 
paws would do to help me 

find my resting hole,
and as armadillos have a very keen 
sense of smell, 

home is easy
to find.  We are not easily deceived.
But

one morning
the fabled headlamp flash and horn
took me

sincerely 
and entirely 
by surprise.

In a close, dusty hole 
on the side 
of the desert freeway, 

his plates of dermal
bone still linked to his frame
where he’d been hit by a car,

and rolled off-road limping
to his home listening 
to the tumbleweeds.