Poems by Lucas Heilbroner   To My Friends, Who Never Left HomeI
My brothers peel their skin and leer
-Eyes bugging-
Through exhaust and broken corner stops.
Reeling into thuggish scenes of postulated positioned stage and anger.
Where gangs of fools slide across towns
And see themselves glow-
In the night-
And feel the closeness
Between furies, and break their heads against each other.II
Scars came quick
we set ourselves up,
Quick to day-trip and fall off of heavenly faces,
Never wondering what parts of ourselves we were leaving behind
Through the fog, or quick flash electricity,
Of firing ourselves off
The face of each earth that we came too.III
When we get old
When we feel inessential
In case we left home too early
In case we let it all hang out
When boredom hangs off the shoulders
In case we fried ourselves to death  TroutTrout coming home
In the deep silted water
And the pouring rocks.To span the ocean,
To follow a sense of place
And nascent memory.I too cannot let it go.
And instead circle, and return over again.
Back towards some mineral taste,
I was hiding in the deep,
And mapping in my min  SmokeI remember how the sky filled up
With reflected clouds and etherous smoke
Clogged down and pooled in our valley
Like a gossamer.We would look out to the roads
That went East
And the long pass that lead out of the valley
And into the light.Everything darker.
The sunsets pink to purple,
With striations of bloods and rusts,
Measuring distance east and westIn the distance, trees,
silhouetted through
The dim,
Saw against an atmospheric body Magma!We know that underneath it all
Is heat.
Magmatic pulling aparts,
Amalgam of drift,
and dense sets of elemental combinations.
Re-combusting among the total pressures,
Roiling out as slowly as paste
Crumpled from its end.Our earth is round,
And it holds all things.It is a coagulate,
Melting down out of fantastic experiments:
The golden hearts and tin
Ideation long deposit in the soil.In such heat, the
Lines and distinct tables of rock
–Our Measurements of time–
Are incinerated.And has its true center ever moved?
Has it changed these cosmic years?
What iron center held its place
And brought all else to it?
Brought the sand around its coating,
And gathered particulates of rare blasted metals that combust in starts.     authorAuthor about himself
          I grew up in the mountains behind Ashland, Or, and a lot of my poetry is about rural life. The history of Southern Oregon is something that I think a lot about, from its violent annexation and re-settlement to its extensive agriculture and timber production. Growing up, I remember seeing logging trucks coming down the steep mountain road that we lived on. They would be loaded up with massive tree-trunks, many of them hundreds of years old. Through it all, the population boom of Portland, the Bay Area exodus, and even the damming of most of our rivers, the land still feels wild.
         Many of my friends still living in Ashland are struggling with the problems that come from doing the same things for too long. Ashland is such a tight-knit town that It can be very difficult to leave. Some of my poems are messages to these friends. My poems are also tributes to the craziness, addiction, and death that still exists in a small town.
         I am 22 and in School at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. After high school I worked and traveled for two years. I am currently studying English and Chemistry and working on a larger collection of poems. I have lived in Bend, OR. Olympia, WA. and Medellin, Colombia.