Moves like a fist through traffic
Anger and no one can heal it
Shoves a little bump into the momentum
It’s just a little lump
But you feel it
In the creases and the shadows
With a rattling, deep emotion
It can be healed, mate. But the fist always rises to abrade the wound wide open again with a steady flow of faceless traffic trauma.
Nobody inside any given car is faceless and it can be proven with a simple glance in the rear view mirror at the roof top tent. It’s a paradox. Can a line of cars go down this slow? Yes and down and yes and down mostly except for those tap bumps on the accel pedal into the break light.
This moment there is a mammal under my parked truck, scampered there out of the frozen midnight stars and abiding without snow under its paws for this while. I watched it go.
I can’t help it. I wouldn’t begin to know how if I could. Every one of us is a mammal and maybe even that mammal.
Genuine emotion will always rattle
us.
The cool, cool river
Sweeps the wild, white ocean
Ocean of wind, sea of cloud, tropical until crystallization into sleeping epiphany. Ba
ja.
Then inland. Higher.
Yes, Boss–the government handshake
Yes, Boss–the crusher of language
Yes, Boss–Mr. Stillwater,
Mercenaries of Nicaragua. Boardrooms full of back doors; humanitarian missile silos. Boss will always, find a way to thrive cha-ching, and no man knows the day and the hour and the cost. Pentecost and Eisenhower warned you Man who did Korea himself. Language as a weapon to fight back with? The same language they wield? Absurd.
Not untrue.
Crushed like grapes fermenting messy and inexact. Wordslinger also finding its inexact blurt of unintended consequence for the boomerang swings chopping the air in both direction ways.
The face at the edge of the banquet
So what? What the fuck are you fucking looking at? I learned to love the edge.
There is an illness called putting up Christmas trees
and another one which is being genetically incapable of understanding why people really put up Christmas trees.
Very little is understood about either. Follow the science but blindly. Murder the baby spruces in the name of Jesus, but get a permit from the Forest Service before you commit to the act.
(The cool, the cool river The cool, the cool river)
I believe in the future
I may live in my car
My radio tuned to
The voice of a star
This living in cars
is not for pop stars
any more than living under the truck is for the skunk. MalibuWhoWho. Paul would do it slumming Santa Fe. A girl in trouble is a temporolicious thing and a lady of the canyon is something else, else again. Reset the navigation beacons that’s what the winter solstice is for and the odometer never runs backwards. There are times when it seems too cold to go out for a drive, and one skunk is glad for that.
A radiotelescope in my Impala as unlikely as it seems. (Mammal.)
II.
Song dogs barking at the break of dawn
Lightning pushes the edge of a thunderstorm
And these old hopes and fears
Still at my side
In your side rather, like a thorn, of crowns of course or a spear of water gushing, but other than that I’m witcher.
They will always be song dogs to me now. And the edge again. So blessings.
Anger and no one can heal it
Slides through the metal detector
Lives like a mole in a motel
A slide in a slide projector
A mole is a mammal too even at the Red Roof Inn. For all I know one is living under the living car. The cool, cool river sweeps the wild, white ocean. Possibly wide. Definitely wide too. About a hundred dollars.
The rage, the rage of love turns inward
To become prayers of devotion
And these prayers are
The constant road across the wilderness
These prayers are
These prayers are the memory of God
The memory of God
This next part is the religious part. My qualification to comment is limited because I lost touch with Him years ago and neither of us ever got a twitter to speak of. Like so many souls I intermittently idly miss.
Love I’ve seen it rage or maybe surge but rage isn’t of love? These prayers are though the sometimes constant sometimes inconstant road, but the very definition of wilderness is that there is no road across it; just saying. I have memory of god but that’s not what these prayers are about either. I have loved this song from day one but I mean c’mon.
And I believe in the future
We shall suffer no more
Maybe not in my lifetime
But in yours, I feel sure
Your belief is mistaken, Narrator, unless perhaps you speak of the life past lifetimes. Where there’s breath there’s life and where there’s life there is the suffering, of chill moles, of stray cats, of the poor here and the poor there. Far be it from me to judge your feelings of certainty or anything else, but when I say far be it I’m speaking pure rhetoric and impure metaphor. I’ll judge the shit out of you or anyone; I do it all the time and so do you. We just do it quietly for the sake of diplomatic and civilized etiquette. I feel sure. Say persay when you mean per se.
Song dogs barking at the break of dawn
Lightning pushes the edges of a thunderstorm
And these streets
Quiet as a sleeping army
Send their battered dreams to heaven, to heaven
Songdog and lightning is the central perfection that no heaven can hope to achieve. It is born of the work we do you and I.
Streets do send and what they send is battered. Beyond that the less said the better.
For the mother’s restless son
Who is a witness to, who is a warrior
Who denies his urge to break and run
Who says, “Hard times?
I’m used to them
The speeding planet burns
I’m used to that
My life’s so common it disappears”
And sometimes even music
Cannot substitute for tears
I have broken, I have run. They will tell you there’s such shame in that, but the ones who tell it that way have never been warriors. They were given 4F exemptions for fallen arches or manic-depression. They hid out in college or Canada. They got good jobs with the government and started the next war and the next. I won’t deny my urges because they are all I have. My urges are the only foxhole buddies I have ever known and my best imaginary friends.
My life is common my gaze, not so much.
I have cried and I have sung and the burning’s just begun. It will consume everything we know.
Maybe not in my lifetime, but in yours. I feel sure, sure.
III.
I’m this darkness before the dawn. The ice that knocks and the wind that hurts but this entabout me.
Who denies his urge to break and run? The better people maybe.
We all of us cry just the tears don’t always fall sometimes the lids just brim.
If a snow morning dawns bright but no one is there to see it, does it glisten while you listen? Double clutch. Mmm yeah gotcha. Sliptyre Catch is a town up by Mangas Spring half a mile onward.
If poetry isn’t a mirror it is nothing at all.
The empiricists have a theory about when the longest night is. They have theories too about the wind, but I never yet heard a right one rustling in the leaves. Yes they measure.
It don’t measure up can I get a witness?
Everybody needs a good cult, but you can’t have mine.