Driving my car up to Wichita, one of those blue-gold perfect days out on the edge of a faraway time.
Waylaid by beauty, breath driven out, hearing all the slow parts. Memories. Scrawled on a stoop with my legs pulled in. Day drunk on a street of brass and gauze and floating motes, amazed. Defang me and nobody knows we’re here.
You, telling me again about that time you met Angelina.
Me, feverheaded, recalling a dirty tile floor, pale sickly green and up close and impersonal like a blindside gut punch.
We can barely get out of our heads. When we say the sun came out, we actually mean the clouds parted. We’re lake trout puzzled by air.
Here on the side of a road listening to residual wisps of tent revival songcraft hovering over the fields. Ready for this? The sweep of traffic brushing our calves. The quiet then the full throat. Your raw voice, its every rasp, meant as an escape hatch but like Amy’s becomes a trap.
Maybe don’t sing for now.
Padlock in hand, ever think about how sorrowful a place this is? Featureless rows housing unremembered stuff, abandonments? Long unseen. Yet somehow paid for? If I were God, the first things I’d eliminate from this earth would be storage units. Pallid grey worlds lost beside land borders, anemic and interstitial.
Placeholders for better times that don’t ever come.
We ought not mortgage hope.
Pray for us, my sour candy atheist. My heathen henchwoman. May we scour the margins for sufficient grains of beauty or joy to help balance the psychocosmic scales against the cold adamantine indifference and harrowing cruelties that beset and burden the opposing plate.
There is no storing such things.
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Image © Todd Hido