roads and lights

roads and lights, but mostly darkness and the moon, and highway signs.

you were a driver with your windows down and the music up, painting yourself the wandering solitary American soul. was 27 just roads and exhaustion?

i liked trains a lot, but the sitting, not very much at all. who do we write to when we are alone with ourselves?

i kicked out my father the other night, and it was a long night. you're not supposed to kick out fathers, but sometimes fathers are just men who slept with a woman you knew, who did regrettable things for years, until the woman realized that this man most certainly didn't love her, and sometimes this woman was not your friend, nor your roommate, but your mother, who happened to have a kid, or a handful of them, which makes it harder to just leave.

did you think you were a suave, cheating man? i think some men find it easy, and some men find it actually not what they thought they wanted at all, but what is a man, but a woman with different parts?

on fridays, I don't remember much on the road. the sound of strangers having feelings and talking on their phones accompanies me the way the scuffling sound of a hungry rodent in the middle of night, in a dark house does, in a very unwanted way.

something blue

Sometimes, when you fall in love,
you wake up on your unmade bed
& bare mattress,
curled up
& cold
on soft bags of clean laundry.
The pale morning light lingers.

The only scent in the room, is yours
& the beach,
which is where you'll drift to again.
The ocean & the sky are the same today.
Mermaid souls,
ebbing foam,
are clouds today:
sweet, white,
& quick to dissipate.

There's some joy to wading & swimming alone.
Summer is lovely.

There was something you forgot, as a child, about solitude.

The sky,
sleepy, and full,
of the occasional, distant, passing planes,
will always be your lover.
Sheets of paper,
bright and rectangular,
will always be your lover.

The bed,
which you have pushed against your window,
and have piled high
with pillows, will always be
the constant sandbox
for your girl body.

As a child, you did not think much, but you listened,
to the song
of the wind & cerulean,
and the rattling car drifting down your street,
past your house.

Your heart
knew the happiness of counting things that flew.
Your body
fit the square frame of your windows.
Little, round, black chimneys
of the houses across the street, were wonderful
on your tippy toes.

And now, you live elsewhere.