Still Got More Traveling
Than I Really Wanna Do

Her mouth full of the merciless drivers of the American South, motorists insulted by the very existence of the merge, no zippering on roads or jackets, only minds. Breathe sharp, let ‘em go. Hands at ten and two, phone face down, music low. Smog test and a breath mint, she was glad to go. Not her first rodeo.

Consume the cosmos in windshield-sized slices, a galaxy nothing but a feather boa allowed a moment’s rest on the back of a chair. Venus could still be venous and a pustule of angry smoke and char. Men in diners confess too readily to erectile dysfunction and times they’ve been loose with their hands on those who loved them once.

Our beds had wheels but didn’t hide, didn’t trundle. We sped down hallways, flying on buffed and polished black and white checkered linoleum until mattresses went sailing out that far window and continued in flight, sheets flapping as luminescent wings in the folded newspaper of sunlight. We learned to travel early, but we were consigned to lick the salt of gravity and had to move like everyone else.

You cannot send desire a-packin’. It informs everything we are and everything we do.  Buddhism has much to offer, but in this regard, it’s got nothing on a Motown song. 

Asphalt alliances should be based on truest stuff, histories built on empathy and shared experience. All the music and roadside stops gleam with deeper meaning that way, fingertips caught on the rigid pages of an old school photo album. Stories told in capsule form. Transient bonds do have their sparks though, allowing strange interstices to crackle and expand into the hand fan on which we trace the roadmaps of our years.