Sharks and Winona Ryder

Playing to the cadence of my footsteps leaving town. The timbre is always fresh. I lick it like dew, every morning, off of their lips and their hips and all the bent green grass. The way it tastes is always nostalgic, my heart straining to grasp onto one little piece of some childhood memory of Christmas or summer vacation.

Each day a different flavor; sunlight warm on young skin, cold snow against sharp teeth, a feather's comfort or a dog's loyal eyes that punch through your guilty guts with a heavy sadness that just wants to go back back back.

But you can't go back, you can't go home. So baby arch your pretty little spine. There's a righteous train a-comin', curated by cowards. We're all ticket punchers with punched tickets, cradling baby bottles full of gin and pretending we don't recognize the engineers.

We're all sharks here, and the currents are warm with blood and sex and we swim with our mouths open and our lungs full. We lick each dewdrop gently, like sunshine acid, and it sizzles on our tongue and puts the scent of a fresh kill in the heavy water and we're off to that same cadence. Wheels hum and transmissions grind and lovers hum and grind and fuck and smoke is inhaled exhaled. And someone is tapping their foot to it, and if it ain't God it may as well be one of us, by God, and we may as well write a song to that rhythm, that anarchist drumbeat of the whole world spinning and fucking and breathing.

And the dew just sizzles on your tongue and everything gets heady and you learn to bend color and create your own stars when the ones that someone else already put in the sky just don't suffice anymore. You realize that you can feel the whole world's heart beating. It swells triumphant. Rachmaninoff.

But then you realize that it's only your own heart but what's the difference and it's all the same. And you're just a shark, sniffing for blood and any other living heart that pumps it. And when you find her, you'll want to stop swimming and enjoy it for a while, to dance a ballet in the pink smoke and gorge yourself. But every shark I've known is invariably a coward, and death looms over the stationary souls. So we flee and play songs to that same sad cadence of our footsteps leaving town.

This is not part of my tour journal. I wrote this last night.