They can clog the road. They can slow the line.

They can kill the yellow flowers with laws and rules. They can starve the butterflies and cook the bees, and their own grandchildren.

They can rush in to the gaps in the melted ice to exploit what they find there and make things worse, faster.

They can put you in camps. Break up your family. Throw up a roadblock and search your trunk. They can make their dogs bark, and plant drugs in your backseat, and tow you away in handcuffs. They can pay themselves first and you never.

They can even take down a mountain, all at once in an explosion like they do in West Virginia, or a little at a time like at Santa Rita.

But still, there are mountains that are too big or too worthless for them to take down. Those mountains abide, they last when nothing else does. That’s why looking at them in the sunset is so healing.

And speaking of the sunset, they can streak and stain the sky with their white chalk marks, but they can’t take down the sky. The sky abides, and gazing at it heals.

So far they cannot touch the stars even a little.

Thus looking at the stars is a blessing that will abide, even once there’s no one left to look. A blessing for mutant lizards in the night.

Some nights I am one already.

I’m looking at the stars and this is my lizard song.