pilgrim on the road to nowhere

It’s not every day the rain hangs around, it’s not every day you get to feel the sun. It’s a story that was old before its first telling, it’s as fresh as the song on your lips. An old man laments and longs, wanting a world where it worked out once. The broken record skips and repeats the ancient prayer. Love me like you mean it, love is all you need, love waking you in the morning, love trickling down your skin. The years where we romanced the radio, where we planted flags on the dream of the moon. We long along ley lines and immortal hungers, we dance our ecstatics down to the devotions of our bones. Well below the shoulders of giants we bear the astonishing weight of the world. Kisses and incantations, copulations and the transit of our blood, this fever first in the ministry of the soul.

I am only fire bearing stories, I am only dull passions and the procession of the breath. I want how I want and I wish like I wish, though my steps are staggered and my welcomes all worn out. The world remitting untold pleasure, someone to hang around and watch the stars all fall. Simple, greedy, and unimaginative; a hunger fed by animal fear and moral lack. The knowledge that I am always arriving to the knowing, unable to follow along to these unsung songs, reading in forest and speaking in tree. Smoking lonesome in the night long after the fire’s gone died out.

Unknown by the words I claim or for the water I carry, I am still below the dusk. I write in clumsy groupings of letters, trying to favor Charlie Parker over the truck’s backing chimes, leaning over screen and cigar. I mouth out words and flecks, spittle in my whiskers and a knife in my back. Artless and unloved, creepy and unplacated, astir in the dross and filth of admission. The words follow my lead and take a hint, going nowhere with little purpose and meaning even less. A crow dropped a feather once and I caught it as it fell. I went to the crossroads in a George Herriman comic, blessed askew by the Pilgrim on the Road to Nowhere, phrase left like milk on the windowsill for the fey. Serving the great unseen with beans and a bindle, the foolscap all that fits.