To walk the same ground. Different shoes. Different paces. Different people throughout time to walk beside. But, same ground- for too long? Those years’ll oftentimes revolt- real threats to start rubbing together. Melting, one into the next- funneling memories heads into memories asses, making an undecipherable, lumpy chain. Or maybe the times’ll chafe. Summer thighs. Hot without room to give. Furthering from comfort. Friction. Pillaging an Eagle Scout’s deep pocket to find flint and steel.
A spark.
Approaching the apex, to ignite embers to a great flame. After all that time- dreaming of the big burn. The big burn, after all that time- made manifest.
To use these flames to propel forward motion. Call to action. Impetus to blast off.
Mobilizing 4 tires to black-top. Passing marbled fields, flecked with still cattle. Passing beneath dragged out cotton-candy clouds becoming moon-washed-white before soft, passive eyes. Intercepting lines of human lives of some with thumbs stuck out in the air, shadows growing tall against the dawn, and an eased pull of the wheel and a slowed roll to the right shoulder for a gambled rider. Obliterating stranger danger. Or being plum in the muck of it. Forms and figures.
In forms of different lovers in different beds in different counties, across state-lines, in different ways they call me baby, and hold my face, in different love lusts. Different starchy, faded flower print sheets to tangle in. Different bed springs poking my neck.
In forms of country-side, moment-determined-marvels rewarded only to few witnesses. In forms of passing pickups- brimming with hay bundles, stinkin’ onions, dirty coal, unknowns unnamed, shit-splattered damned livestock, pink weeping lumber, fresh watermelons threatening to tumble out and create ruckus. Imagine losing your life to a melon flying out at your windshield. (Six million ways to die.) Someone somewhere must’ve been this victim. Did you hear about old Josephine..
Highways: full of location-specific vices. Distinctly pertinent to mile pile upon mile of mostly smoothed concrete, stretching out like uncoiling arms in the longest known gravely hug, releasing. Warmth evaporating, forming snake like, peripheral heat dances, fuzzing sights of road sides with the forward world zooming bye. Tumble weed. Abandoned cars, restless, unseen, tadpole filled ponds, far off trailers, ghost stories, squats of tin, the feel of someone’s stare, dust dust dust. Nothing to see, everything to see. Don’t bother time with your has-been-metaphors, we’re here now. Just stay awake with frequent stops to fill up with the kind of coffee that sits snugly between quotation marks, stuffed in scolded-vanilla field flavors- strangled and spanked in hydrogenated ingredients. Settling right into the paunch. Yes, vices. Or glory holes in $4 truck stop showers, good glory leave it be, but entertain curiosity if you must. Life is art.
To travel is the judicious way to live for the writer. For the story teller. For the profane or profound seeker. To be sleepy while at it: the bi-product; the battle; the menace.
To give way and sleep roadside, pitching tents in quarries, behind lean-to’s, forgotten, untended structures, or weedy, wildflower meadows. Or geothermal magic pools.
To wake to the smell of uva ursi, wet earth, and piñon wood-fed-fire’s sourceless smoke. To light the Coleman burner and have tea time surrounded by cricket song and new rays of sun in splendor. To hitch a hammock between the Ponderosas and rub cheek to bark, waking up the nose to the knowledge of consistent presence of that phenomenal albite subtle scent of root beer. My goodness. Or the desert plants that smell of rain a long while of time away from watering. The peace of morning; the cool bite of it. No other life can know the cumulative sense of freedom. Can’t I show you what my heart has known? I’ve hitchhiked across the divide before.
