RoAD tRIP

The night, the highway, is untangling my hair.  Seventy-five miles-per-hour, and still the sunrise is gaining.  On their deflated tires, the clouds race across the plains.   The distant terminus of the valley is where they congregate.  Angels are but refugees.

From this world.

Despair sits in the air, the thickening vapor.  The heat of the coming day is only the heat of the day just passed beginning to boil in the bright beams of my headlights.  July is always looking for something that was lost in the kiddie pool in the shadeless yard of the farmhouse that I remember best when I call it simply, "home."  Every memory is squared against a handful of facts.  Distance, like time, stretches almost exponentially:  until the day the elastic of the mind snaps back.  Whole universes contract as violently, and change everything.

And change nothing, I mean.

My sadness is sometimes warm enough to flood the sheets with perspiration.  On those nights, when I sleep on sagging mattresses in shambled accommodations named in failing neon:  MO----- BI-- SKY,  --GO- -HEEL IN--, RAN----O --ALIEN---- MOTE----.  We are all aliens, nobody is born here.  Not on this desolate ranch.   

By the time I have gassed the car, the sun has spun me in a web of dampened cotton.  I sweat therefore I am.  Impatient for the reprieve of fall and anxious for winter's wicked challenge, I have been running the air conditioner.  It pumps shapeless ghosts into the Cadillac.  Despair is suffocating.  Outside.  But distilled into its manageable contours of these leather seats, all is forgiven.  "They really do seem to know my body," I am thinking.  "Knowing is different than thinking,"  I remind myself.  And the GPS is tracking me, making sure I know a hundred ways to traverse the desert.  

Knowledge used to be a polite way to register the sins.  Imagine giggling at the text of the Bible at the age of eight.  This is a strange kind of pornography.  And the boys from Gideon don't get out here much.  So I left two issues of Honcho in the night stand.  The overworked/lazy maid will never look in there.  The pages still stuck together by the humidity and the spilled soda.

POP.

Every ejaculation is an epiphany.  Door to door and word in hand, you can trace this road trip by the magazines that mark the nights, and the berm between the highways where my piss is fizzing like hops and yeast treated to the long day of sun.  In night's cover, a lazy revolutionary, I hurl these half-hearted Molotov cocktails out the open windows.  The darkened air, cooling, creates a kind of vacuum.  I dispose of my regrets and urgency at 90 miles an hour.