Adrift between lust
and sleep, the highway unwinds
behind closed eyes, in scratchy sheets
and stinging heat. A one-way street
on repeat.
Cracking the veneer, stripping it away,
in the obvious light of day.
Coming from nowhere, going nowhere,
but never far enough.
The same signage mile after mile.
Interminable layers of fast-food landscape
surround dried-up downtowns
where nary a soul strolls
and bluecoats rigorously patrol.
Most of the time is spent spitting bile at strangers,
and making unflattering assumptions
based upon surface appearances,
just as the same assumptions
are presumably being made about me,
but with less authority.
I continue driving south,
un-driven, through flag-ridden towns,
and receive the familiar hard-eyed,
tight-mouthed looks from suspicious matrons
in floral-print dresses, presiding over
their so-called antique stores,
with anything related to Elvis Presley
carefully preserved under lock and key;
thank them graciously when I leave,
and receive, by way of return,
a begrudging noose-voiced grunt,
indicating that I’m undeserving
of verbal communication,
just more Southern hospitality.
I take a room on the second floor
of a defaced motel room
in a faceless town,
turn out the light
and sleep for a few hours,
until awoken by a television
pounding through the floorboards.
It feels like the end.
It feels that way for a long time.
Then the television is turned off
and I go back to asleep.
I wake up in the morning
and it feels like the end again:
a ghost in an unhaunted place,
seeking any perforation into the past
in an unyielding present. On the street
a panhandler says “This town ain’t shit,”
a statement that it’s hard to contradict.
I play pinball in an empty pool hall
and split, ascending to new lows
of dromomanic dysphoria,
my woes, such as they are,
thrown into stark relief
by the impervious world
I pass through, marveling
at the nothingness of it all.
But sometimes nothingness isn’t enough,
and those days, those rare hours,
sometimes just moments
of losing oneself
in one’s surroundings: sometimes
they don’t happen at all.
The rock-hard resignation
you strove so hard to find
is now yours to cherish.
See where it found you…
ignored potential, stuck
in the experiential, with no itinerary
and no more patience
for mere experience, not knowing
which road to take, knowing only
that it’ll be regretted either way.
That’s a given.
