Stumbled back down paved ebony drives and lines while the incessant whistling plays listless down the main road of gas town,
now no longer bathing in that subtle blue darkness but awake with the vibrant tone reverberating and speaking that universal language. Tree tops gnaw at the fabric of the hazy sky-quilt, kneading it, rolled up around the edges. Drifting past the thrift store before it would be open, the intersections interwoven like the thread of small towns often are, the birds all talking at once in that universal language, the sounds permeating the silence of the pines.

There was that moment of really taking it in, feeling the vans at the car rental lot breathing like they had a new something to them. Change was all it was. Change was all it had to be. Wet road seeping into these worn down shoes and soles and feet,
another lifetime of painted marks and street signs and anchoring points and all the reasons you’d want to live here.
It was the ghost that had flown from the steeple of the church down main and left a hollow space
where organs play to people-as-concept, planets as a whole and dead deer and foxes in the bike lane.

The humming of electrical boxes overloaded, left running all night, hurried me back to the room in the attic,
and consequently, to sleep.

I guess there was something so succinct about the incident that it couldn’t help but be the finale to something.

Amber shades struck glistening like fresh paint on the forehead that reflects back like canned laughter in the empty studio,
where nothing is open for twenty-four hours and the lack of halogen displeases and seems unnatural.

Something so organic about that handwriting, ink spilled out of the fingertips and onto smudged glass, coffee-table stains and copies of borrowed books you don’t want to give back.

No strangling tonight.
Nobody was knifed.
I could tell, I could see it. Everyone was as awake as I was
and the avenue was a carnival that folded in upon itself a thousand times like a paper crane creased.

Blinded by a smattering of sounds that aren’t normally heard through oft-consumed ears that fly past in the sun,
We wore a smock flecked with iron and goldleaf.
There were points past daylight savings time where I cursed the fact that the radio would short out if I showered with it,
floating there – a plastic lifeboat set out without passengers, a death knell. Whatever that is, or could be.

I wanted to get trapped in the freezer in the garage,
with only the dust coated light bulb and the motorcycle covered by a themed tarp for company.
To play cards with, I guess, to bet money on, but I don’t have money.
I just have the viewing glass fingerprints that streak and ruin the view of the auto-parts store
and the rug inter-weaved with cat dander that gets sucked up into the fan above the vent in the floor and showers the place like rain.

I know that when I die, a collective of stray hairs and loose skin flakes will swarm and cascade.
I’ll be a bio-luminescent ghost,
to lie sleepless on the couch saved from the curb, by the table covered in graphic novels and collected works.

There are so many questions that beg answering, but I don’t answer them not out of disinterest but resignation,
out of the claustrophobic anti-euphoria that follows a three-day fever dream.
There will be an imprint in the shapes and segments of the human spirit on my mattress that wilts and sags and watches the overcast
slip its fingers through the shades onto the floor-boards, leaking.

You’re supposed to do this because you want to know what it’s like to be someone else, but I disagree, that comes later,
because you can’t want to be someone else until you know the crevices of your own soul,
a watchmaker that knows every cog as intimately as his own wife.

The fundamental flaw in our design is that everyone can only know everyone through a filter only they can see.
No one can walk a mile in one man’s moccasins, because the entire time they will remark to themselves
about how their own goddamn moccasins compare. 
I do this because I need people to understand, to hold the film on the projector until it winds out and
flops onto the cutting room floor.
This is a window, there is no pretending now.

We love Ginsburg because he let us feel what it was like to be Ginsburg, he let us get as close as anyone. We love D.H. Lawrence, and Bukowski, and Kerouac, and Yeats, and Doyostevsky, but we don’t love anyone else.

There is a great fracture in the essence of the mind, so many complexes. There is no pretending now, pretending that it isn’t there until it melts onto your rolled-up shirt sleeves that hang off arms prone in front of the television set, while the cat cleans itself up upon the staircase, kaleidoscopic gray scale picture frames and cardboard boxes covered in technical drawing tape shear like static.

There is no more pretending, pretentious and preoccupied false ivy-leaguers who occupy the beltway and sit in the empty reflecting pool beneath the Washington monument, bus-crawlers who scramble for the spare change they got from the head shop off of Easton, who want parents to think that they actually give a fuck about the future in all tenses, and that they don’t want to bathe with unreliable electronic appliances.

They want to tell them that they sleep well at night, and that they have the plan figured out. Blueprints laid down in metaphors and vagaries to satisfy, and they do, they tell them these things and everyone is content. But they really want them to know about how they don’t sleep well, how the blueprint is really a half-written sentence on a name tag in blue marker at an AA meeting. They want so badly to tell them they feel like they’ve screwed up the next fifty years even though that’s not possible. They want to ask for therapy, but they don’t because they can’t. They no longer want to be that burden, but they don’t know how to stop it.

But then, we were all windows, firmly closed in the night.