What I learned on the highway

 

Note

You're still somewhere in there
out there, angry scowl and sudden eyes
flashing delight and I know that because
no matter how much change that guy gets
he still begs for more change, and 
she has it all and still
feels fucked over, and he has three
beautiful kids and still is suicidal.
Her son is a heroin addict and husband
has cancer, as she slowly loses her central vision
and is having a great day. 
The quick and sweetness of the air
at times wherever you are now
(because the idea as we would
if not stay) is undebatable
even by you, saying into the night
(at least be locatable)
it's still you out there
in there

The scene

I didn't imagine it so much like the video: the dramatic stuff in slow motion,
boring parts where you fast forward, the stupid obvious music but you cry anyway.
Watching this come apart mid air like a marriage in a country song
as zombie movies have accustomed us. Close up shots, back story and nice composition that tells you someone is about to get his throat torn out. In our quiet neighborhoods
we can see people crucified on camera, wondering idly if they argued with their kids
or had a secret romance, or liked to tell stories. I wondered how it would feel 
when the power ran out, or the momentum, or luck or whatever, would feel conditional future as not likely, no bug-out plan, grain mill, ammo storage, embarrassment for those in charge, prayer. I didn't imagine it like the video:
the London fire, slowly spreading out of Pudding Lane, no water mains, no fire trucks,
just a few raggedy bucket brigades snaking from the Thames, two weeks lighting up the city, except this time everybody just sits there and burns. 

Thomas Morton

In his last years
back in Devon, good ale at the local, wrists iron scarred,
a shuffling curiosity laughed at by the young, peering at the morris dancers.
Beaten, yeah. Bewildered maybe still by the rancor of the saints
maybe a bullock's heart strung above his door bristling with pins
gift of an old family friend. The moor's foggy greens and greys suit him now,
shades that bored him so much once that he flung himself over the edge of the world
and found such beauty that once seen, could not stay. He was naive, yeah, 
dreaming of a better world as his neighbors killed people with dogs, 
"that twine in fine meanders through the meads, making so sweet
a murmuring noise to hear as would even lull the senses with delight a sleepe."
And the Mattapoiset girl, and that rogue puritan like him, hair flying
round the maypole. On odd clear nights when here the sky goes lavender 
he dreams of Merry Mount, that world now a dream world again. 

Letter to my American friend

When we met in that junkpile that is a convenience store now, our two countries were already making noises of war. The president was evil, although now in my memory he seems less evil. You would say between him and Trump it's two masks on the same monster, and you would be right.

We sold used clothes, made a newspaper, recycled tires, protested, and argued with each other; that is, an anachronism trying to fight against what we thought was an anachronism. Your columns were called Letter to My American Friend because you were not yet an American.

You were floating far from the place where everything was invented, also your clocks, sky, films, enemies, that is your self, and you were about to land just when I was about to try out the air. Those who are floating and those who are landing always see things they want in the other's life. At that point you actually cared how flowers smelled and I didn't, that was one reason. You fought and I was afraid, that was another.

Almost nobody who is around now knows how it was then. I'm not sure what you do now. I think you take walks by the river, and see movies that are mostly no good, and write great poems in your head, and keep up with your medication, and that sad pretty women call your phone and you ignore their calls.

I think that both of our journeys have taken some courage, yours more than mine. Most of the fish in the river can't go to the party in the ocean; they can't live in the salt water. The few who can are half-known, unseen in the season when they swim deep, and we don't understand how they find the way, or what they encounter down there.

Index

After, whatever I was, 3-7
Angel, broken: kicked off windowsill resulting in, 6; recollection of, 23
Baton Rouge, 16, 22
Bees: gravitation toward, 22; potential disappearance of, 23
Boy, foolish: at that time, 3-18; in some respects still a, 19-22; as a fundamental property of
    one's character, 29
Brooklyn, 22-26
Bullet Rye, 22
C Train, 22
Carelessness, youth and, 6-10
Daydreams: hazards of, 6, 16, 21, 27; persistence of, 28. See also Letter to Montana
Fuck off forever: demand to, 18; possible failure to, 21; recollection of demand, 24. See also
    Letters, Letter to Montana
Honesty: catharsis and, 3, 21; healing and, 23; pain and, 23, 24; irrelevance of, 26
Inaccessibility, emotional: possible attraction of, 25; having overcome, irrelevance of, 25
Letters: historic hazards of writing, 3, 27; disappearance of, 22; finality of, 27
Letter to Montana, 18
Minneapolis, 3-14
Montana, 18
Over, 18, 28
Parenthood: as a transforming experience, 23-24; as a subject of conversation, 23-25;
    relevance of, 25; irrelevance of, 25
Sex: common interest in, 22; eventual disappearance of, 23
Time: relevance of, 25; irrelevance of, 25
You: writing and, 13-29; surprising familiarity with, 22; beauty and, 6, 8, 12, 16, 21, 27; s
    sanity and, 24; fundamental properties of, 25; dreams of, 17, 19, 27; continuing relevance 
    of, 27; hazards of, 27; disappearance of, 28. See also Bees, Daydreams, Letters, Sex, Time

Soul

Is it the spell of this kid who bursts with stories
for whom the most offhand pedestrian is a journey,
a gargoyle, the battle of good and evil?

Or sunrise catching you on the way somewhere
and holding on long enough the speck up there
resolves into a faraway hawk, osprey maybe,
that when you think of it urges you to change the subject
of conversation with a basically stranger
from market share and personnel dynamics
to I love you?

If not all that caffeine or fluorescence beating down
all those hours you focused with teeth clamped muscles
wired up eyes blazing at what again?

Then what, that drives you out and back again
that says all this needs to have a beginning, middle and end,
that asks how it would feel to do something,
for once, with your whole heart?