featherbed

The lullaby arrives at unseemly moments, amid the freeway glare at 75 miles per hour, as you wait in the parking lot feeling that hot wind seep through the open window. It sings along to the sound of tires dissolving against tarmac, it sings with the air conditioning rattle, with the hum of bass-swept glass. You long just to close your eyes and listen, but you aren't free to fall. You long to lay down your head just for a few short moments, but this time is not your own. You would slip into sleep, into those sweet dismal sacrifices where the world is lost as you mingle with dreams. You would sleep deeply, and disappear at last.

You awake to the shock of dreams lost at once, without trace or remembrance, the whole world rushing in. There is no slow roll, no subtle exposition. The change is more lift than tense. The change is more exorcism than operation. The sky still dark, the stars still bright, the litter of leaf and twig half hiding the morning paper. Lost gods and revealed constellations, no consolation for the life that is missing pieces, that life that is mostly the spaces where the revel ought to fit. Another day of drying tears and the tide of traffic. Coffee in a paper cup, the cut out feeling of the suspended weight of the moon.

The freeway was painted in taillights and gusts of dust and litter. The whole world just swayed on a wire. The whole world went out of its way to never say your name. There aren't surprises, just the familiar things you had never before witnessed. There aren't miracles, just the mirror in your head bending the light just so. You couldn't find the rhyme even if you ever had a reason. You couldn't read the signs even if any one ever asked the way. You will sleep and you will wake. The road is the only border you can know.