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By chris Date: 2007 Apr 28 Comment on this Work [[2007.04.28.01.02.396]] |
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Every man a crawling kingsnake -Elvis Costello highways are the same from Memphis to Santa Monica. This Interstate, that Interstate, Elvis is still dead, which state am I in tonight? It all gets too, too familiar - the blind hope of the morning, the sun rising from somewhere, drying the ground from the rain of the night before (the rain you never saw or even heard because you were asleep), the first greeting of the road for the day when you wish it would not end ever. All this is the same, nearly every morning the same. You might have eaten breakfast but you skip lunch - always - and by afternoon the air has dried out (you must be west of the hundredth meridian) and the clouds are higher and thinner and you find that the hunger has returned. The hunger that has never left you. The hunger that has not a thing to do with your belly being full or empty. It's carried by the wind like plague. It's what brings you to that prairie dance hall in Oklahoma where you pick up that freckled beauty. You drink Lone Star and because it's hot you let her dab your forehead with the cooling condensation from the bottle. You would take her home but there is no home to take her to. She knows. She sees the road in your eyes and takes you back to her daddy's ranch on the end of a road that doesn't even have a name, navigating by stars. Her daddy's in Vegas with a woman so you sit with her on the porch and watch the lights of Oklahoma City blink like a distant grass fire before making love in a room with hay on the floor and shiny, hand-tooled shitkicker boots in the corner. And by the time you are writing this (or reading it) you have forgotten her name and all that's left are stray sensory impressions, like limp blonde hairs that fell across her eyes before brushed them aside - the damp of the small of her naked back, the clumsy clicking of your teeth against hers as you kissed and kissed and kissed. |