This is probably a good enough time
to lean back,
get my feet hanging out the window
and assume that we’re not going to get out
of this Amarillo stretch of hell anytime soon.

I don’t even think
we’ve seen living person in the last five hours.

Except for that farmhouse that crashed
into some field a hundred miles to the left.

I guess Kansas didn’t want them.

For a while it was actually bad enough
that we didn’t want to go to sleep. We wanted absolution
for slowing down when we were young. We wanted absolute
sincerity in our eyes when we told people later
about the things we saw. All those places around the world
where the end comes in a thousand different pieces
of animation from twenty or more imaginary countries.

There was that casino halfway into the underground
and halfway past purgatory. I still don’t know why
it was attached to an orphanage. You could never figure out
how the owners had managed to fit all those horrible neon signs
for all those horrible hotels into their museum of wonders.

Space didn’t mean a whole lot to the old-timers
who had seen the landscape come and go.
They didn’t have to know anything greater
than what was right in front of them.

It was a weird kind of magic. We saw it there,
and we also saw it in that fenceless junkyard
that turned into a labyrinth that turned into
a cemetery with thousands of miles of stacked cars.

Some of them stretched upwards for days
and leaned in all kinds of disastrous directions.

We lost three days off the trip,
but the view at the end was worth it.

I didn’t think I could climb so damn high.
Two packs a day will do that to your resolve.

You used to think so. It was your idea to take that picture
of me lighting up as I introduced myself to the world’ fattest Russian midget
and Twenty More Fantastic Outcasts of Oregon.

That was a good one, wasn’t it?
That was definitely the most we ever laughed.

I’d love to get that going again.
I’m hoping to get back to that ability
to blink and suddenly find myself flying down the backstairs
of some rundown city into the vast and concrete unknown.

Hell at this point I’d even take a functioning gas station
or an end to all this static on the radio.

I want something we can both sing along to,
because we’re not as good at conversation
as we used to be.

07/16/2010

Posted on 07/16/2010
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