Pockets Empty, Heart Bursting.

1-6-11, 8 am, somewhere in Mississippi

My pockets are empty and my heart is bursting.

I volunteered myself for the early morning driving shift, and found myself perfectly alone, sliding down Delta highways, pointing northward just outside of Slidell, wide-eyed and dreaming about porcelain skin. I drive until I hallucinate, the pixels blending and swirling as I cross imaginary dotted lines that carve the South into a variety of altered states. Looming ghosts of pine tree are made corporeal as the sun oozes through the Mississippi fog.

[...]Houses come and go, are built and abandoned, are relished new with novelty and forgotten as soon as we lug our stupid empty cardboard boxes back over the doorjams and out into the yawning trunks of our cars. But I know, redundant and cliche though it may be, that I will always relish the feeling of familiarity within unfamiliarity of being a shark always swimming and living and eating these trampled paths that have turned our country into a patchwork of possibility.

I will smoke one more cigarette, though my throat is sick of me, and then try to catch up on some rest as Seth takes the wheel and we are guided by patient satellites to Birmingham, where we plan on checking out the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame museum.

Why bother with travelogues and Beatnik bibles, though within we may find the wisdom of perspective, when we can drum the "book of ourself" out on the sun-bleached dashboard, when the stories we tell will be overshadowed only by those we keep as intense secrets, more sentiment than story, prone to cheapening as soon as sentiment becomes thought becomes words balanced on the tips of our tongues. May these blessed and haunted days and nights season my dreams with visions of fingertips in flesh, of distinction being lost between the graceful press of slender bodies, between dawn and dusk, between boundless oceans and endless highways.