TRAVELLING THE STATES

This is a travel song inaugurated with mad friends, and documented on a marijuana whim.

Sun, and moon, and hills, and, flats, and corn, and soy, and water, and murky water, and women with six names, and men in their mom's millionaire apartment complex overseeing the shore of Lake Michigan in downtown Chicago, and raced a stone turtle in the streets of suburban Baltimore at three in the morning until our laughter became loud enough that we ran three blocks over so we wouldn't get our friend who was putting us up in trouble, and road with waving false puddles, and trees, and shaved paths through the trees, and crowded dance halls where the Colombian girl tried to take you home and you were too drunk to say no but too drunk to act natural when you arrived so you came back at sunrise with a fat grin and no stories, and pissing on rooftops in Polish New York, and stealing a kiss from Hannah's friend when we all slept together in a big heap on the mattress we'd pulled out into the livingroom, and the thunderstorms making a Tesla coil of the midwest skies, and the solemn man who gave us a ride, and the excited man who gave us a ride, and the young woman and her younger sister who picked us up outside of Kansas City and drove us all the way to Denver, and the JUMP FOR JESUS Evangelical daredevil in the middle of the mosquito-ridden campsite in North Platte, and that umbrella that had a packet of cocaine(?) in it, and the withered old woman who punched you in the butt on the sidewalk and said something about cute kids walking around in the summer heat, and slowly spreading smolders in the grasses by the side of the freeway started when a Greyhound driver failed to notice he'd run over a mattress until it caught the bus on fire, and the Japanese lady who used my pencil and Moleskin to excitedly tell me about her time in California, and sunsets over the immediate Rockies as we slept in sleeping bags in a park in what constituted downtown Ogden after we failed to find anyone to put us up for the night, and when we played pool at four in the morning with some dready with a thick accent who called me White Jesus all night, and when we found out your dad was eating pills, and when Katie's mom was dying of cancer, and when drink put me in an angry stupor in Denver and I mumbled shit I couldn't even remember but had to apologize for, and when you got so mad about not being able to sleep on the train for 26hrs straight that you didn't talk to anyone the whole time we were in LA, and when shots of overpriced mezcal led to me sleeping with an old friend's old friend, and when we ate marijuana that the old man handed to us on the train and it didn't kick in until after your dad put me behind the wheel of a rental car, and when we found the empty chamber hall in the Chicago Cultural Center and filmed ourselves doing the shuffle, and when we ate Adderall and went for a long walk in Pittsburgh and you took pictures and then we went back to our friend's home and fucked so hard that I came over your head and into the closet and we just shut it and laughed, and when we laid ourselves down in the San Francisco sun in a park and a man came over and offered us beers because he was heading off and later a couple offered us leftovers from their wedding reception and we felt like the world could be magical, and when I saw my first firefly in New York, and the grandiosity of the Philadelphia train station, and the solemn silence of the Redwoods, and the unimaginable vastness of the Grand Canyon, and the long roads to nowhere, and the cushioned smash of the plane's tires on the tarmac, and the hiss of the bus' hydraulic lift, and unattended animals, and parking lots on roofs, and friends excited to see you return, and the same sun, and the same moon.

Bowling ball

I had been observing her my entire life, and a shadow of incompleteness sometimes hovered behind her. A dense shadow, three dimensional, thickening around a core of mystery. The mystery vanished when she mentioned casually a dream she had abandoned decades ago, pretending it meant nothing even as it dropped through the conversation like a bowling ball through old floorboards, letting loose a shaft of light. I could see something I hadn't before.

NORTH STAR

The story had lost everyone's interest a couple of sentences ago, so I glanced at a woman standing against a street sign outside. She was watching me intently through the glass. When I met her gaze, she waved to me by holding up her left hand and letting her long fingers collapse down into their palm. The mocking pout she affixed to her face convinced me to noiselessly stand up, leave the table, and walk outside.

Her Persian blood made itself evident in her nose and her skin and her hair; but her tongue and her hands were American. She spoke nervously of seeing me look bored among my friends and told a story about a time she wished she'd been saved. All the while, she clutched her phone in her right hand. Even when she used sharp or elaborate gestures to aid her speech, it waved along.

Last night

Last night your hands were in my hair. I don't know where the rest of you was, or the rest of me. But my head was in your hands, my hair around your wrists, your knuckles pressing into my scalp, the pads of your little fingers leading the way.

MOURNING HEART

It's four in the morning and I'm reading about defibrillators. "Defibrillation is a treatment for life-threatening cardiac dysrhythmias." She's downstairs with her phone off—been asleep for hours, I'm sure. A break from the glowing screen to the admirable consistency of her flawed handwriting in a Valentine card on my nightstand calms me.

Now I'm reading about circadian rhythms. "A circadian rhythm is a roughly 24 hour cycle in the physiological processes of living beings." Before I even wake up, she'll have ridden to work, showered, readied herself, smiling with the anticipation of helping the world move forward a bit.

I search "siw," expecting pictures of Self-Inflicted Wounds.  It surprises me to see the abbreviation now stands for Strong Independent Woman, so I search "mixing diphenhydramine alcohol."

Vertigo

I want to forget and forgive at the same time, like wanting amnesia and nostalgia all at once.

GUTTERBOUND

Bowling ball by the side of the street. Whose patterned green fluorescence is gutterbound tonight?