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.

New Year's Eve.

12-31, Springfield, MO

Left alone with a tilting room, trying my damnedest to remain true. The night, she's waning, a few soft hours left before we both fade into the shades of day. The wet streets outside the door seem so alien to me; these same stained streets that ate the rubber off of my soles not so many months before have lost their familiarity.

I live my life with a taut heart, tensing to spring to my feet and leave nothing behind save the echo of my souls slapping pavement. I could disappear as easily as I was born, and none would be the wiser. I could make my arms into a cradle for my aching skull, but it would be a waste of flesh and bone. You offer a pillow to a head that is already dry and rattling, like a gourd stuffed with loose change, guitar picks, and muscle relaxers.

Have I a home to which I long to return, or have I lost my footing on the black beaches and cold cliffs of my dreams in utero? If I find my bridges offered to the stomach of the night as a crumbling mess of burnt offerings, will I gather splinter and sap to build them anew, or will I relegate myself to the churning river below, a plummet as perpetual and graceful as the ballet of starlight lightyears through the gentle abyss of space? Answers I expect yet never find in noontime certainty.

I will carve my own answers in stone, bury them deep in the tomb of the earth, and hope that my tender fingers will someday find the strength to claw through to the sorrowful honest depths, and I hope that my calloused eyes will find blind new ways to refract the sunlight through their lenses of ice so that the ancient words will reveal what my stuttering heart has been trying to tell me all along.

I belong to the night.

for Seth Moore, who taught me to see lakes as mirrors, and those mirrors as windows

12-29, Conway, AR

I belong to the night, to the sauna of smoke, to the women I barely know. I belong to the beautiful brunette who wrapped her soft arms about my hesitant stomach, if only to save herself from the slobbering mob of frustrated men, pawing at her though a sad haze of age and expensive liquor. I give myself freely to all these blessed moments, to all these smiles that shine a beacon of curiosity and sex through the clear air of a wet winter evening in the haunted American South. But, truthfully, none but the night may call me her own, for she asks nothing of me yet receives me fully, body and soul, with a patient understanding not offered to the cowards, and shares no quake of jealousy when I awake and consummate my affair with the sun and its illuminating superficiality.

And so outside I sit cross-legged on some sort of generator unit, between 4 and 5 am (Central Time), sipping a glass of filched vodka and pretending this cigarette pressed between my lips is the very tongue of my favorite bitch, though she may take many lovers, and despite my all-too-human jealousy I feel her hollow eyes trained on I and I alone, her ghostly fingers tracing down my aching spine, and I pledge to her my final and undying love. I am married to her, Our Lady of the Sun that Never Rises, and though we both have our thirsts, our loneliness leading to mornings cursed with the semblance of comfort granted by the selfless press of warm skin slumbering by our side, I know that as her stars and moons gracefully eclipse the overbearing babble of mindless blue skies, and as I settle once more into her forgiving embrace, I am hers and hers alone.

What have I to offer when I give so much of myself to the quiet solitude of the mute princess arcing above me, her cold body soothing and tempering my heart disenchanted and burnt by the selfish sun and its ignorant flirtations. I belong to the night, and she is mine. If she were yours, you'd be awake and by my side, though we may be thousands of miles apart. There is a mute bond shared by her worshipers, a stoic glance between two sets of eyes, each with their own set of dark circles tattooed beneath.

Conway, Arkansas is a cripple, abandoned by the studious to give rise to my triumph in this vacuum, interrupted solely by the intermittent roar of a train. My glass is drained, and I will walk solemnly to my pallet, heartsick and longing to that moment, twelve hours hence, when my true love reappears and whispers in my ear the secret sins of lifetimes lived without a second thought to the pleasures and pain reaped from an affair with the abstract.

My heart is bursting, and in each pair of moistened eyes I see only the reflection of dusk, that sacred second when pools of Arkansan swamp water become as mirrors, a pane through which I will force my slender neck, praying for a blade of glass to sever veins and arteries to finally release me from day's imbecilic adoration. I love you all, and love is unquantifiable, and I love you none, the human spirit being so fickle and emotions ultimately ephemeral. May death bring an endless night. I have no faith that you may offer me more.

Acid Poem 1

His features became that of a beast

and his teeth became that of a beast

and his thoughts became those of a beast.

Yet to all others he appeared as a man,

and he wondered if it was only he

who saw his bestial reflection in the mirror of their eyes.

Christmas dreams.

I had dreams, yawning wide open, of old gods that sat heavy upon the world, great engines that hummed with the om of life and death, ominous hulks whose ancient bodies obscured the horizon. They sprawled eternally like sphinx, frozen in the sand of a timeless earth, on treacherously lazy paws, morose landscapes in and of themselves, seething with atomic intelligence.

Followed angels behind bars into the secret shadows of my mind's alleys, realistic and painful sweet moments with angels reaching realistic and painful sweet conclusions. The sun burned blonde behind my eyelids, I drank a thick nostalgia, golden sand wet with sweat.

I had ponderous, crawling epic dreams of racism and social inequality, unexpected chilling visions of a great tree, rotten in trunk and leaf, rotten roots deep in rotten soil, and I had difficulty leaving the scene without feeling like a rapist.

I watched reality twist itself into a dervish, vibrate into a mirage suspended on the fragile shining spiderweb of a single song.

I saw a giant ruddy beast made of mud and crumbling masonry, with gasping slot machine mouths, and the jackpot vomited torrents of rusty water and mud dotted with muddy human bodies, the living and the dead, and even the to-be-born. I knew then as I know now that this was nothing to fear, lest we admit that we've been living in that same fear our entire lives. I knew then as I know now that the rivers of blood and mud and rust run freely with those of Spring and sweat and wine and light, and that when all these nebular rivers freely intermingle upon their absolution in the final ocean, light will shine through to its deepest depths, and it will remain clear as virgin water untouched by the sin of time.

Astronaught.

Big ol' eyeballs stretch thin lids. A day, a night, a week, a month, a night spent in fog, stumbling along the surface of the autumn moon, a cosmonaut among cowboys. I'm finding less things to believe in the eyes of fellow man, and more things to believe in nighttime and the magical realism of lunar-manic road trips, scuttling along the planet's cold surface like a bent crab. There's some primal vigor rendered superficially inert, kinetic to potential, by the melancholy weather and wistful indiscretions. I feel I could walk a thousand miles through numbing, freezing rain and be carried forth by the warmth that I carry behind my eyes.

Words lose their meaning. I have no faith in them, but in the shapes behind them, infinite fractal silhouettes, glowing neon silhouettes against ghost sky.

Astro-naughts. We have knight visions, night visors, sunglasses reducing the glare of a black sky and electric expanse to but a painting on the inside of your skull, a perfect Impressionist landscape from the other side of Proxima Centauri. The air is breathing for us, tastes like a frozen heartache on your tongue, crystalline nostalgia about being buried happily alive in blankets. We're all still too young in our eggs to realize how that heartache will warm us when we relent and let it melt.

Dot my tease. Crossed my eyes. It's my bedtime. Back to the incubator.

Man the observation deck in my leave.

Unlucky You...

It's 5:36, I'm nearing the end of a bottle of wine, and it just so happens that this is one of those startlingly lucid early-morning moments of inebriation that causes a boy to light another cigarette and nervously let his fingers do the stammering for once. I've got so much to say, but the world is asleep and disinterested, so my eyes alight on some fool target, someone that, upon morning's sober reflection, will still patiently observe me as a kindred spirit, a sooted little bird-of-a-father, and not just a drunken nuisance. That's unlucky you.

So I've gotten this far, and mild horrific bemusement sets in as I realize I haven't a goddamn thing to actually say, that I was mostly just reflecting on the past few months and the saints and sinners therein, and that sometimes when we're at our most self-righteously lonely lows, we just thrash around violently until we maybe brush against something recent and refreshing. If it was just the wine in my blood, I'd probably erase this whole scam, but I've amassed quite a varied collection of bad habits, and none of them point the way towards prudence or patience. Time to string my guts up like a telephone line and pray for a bolt of lightning to come along and set the whole thing crackling and arcing into the dry winter air. Sometimes we pray for a catalyst even when we haven't the wherewithal to actually deal with anything new and confusing.

But with that sort of introduction, there's no recovery, and so I understand now that some secrets are best kept until my lips are but a whisper from your ears.