on the in-betweens

...Santa Cruz Lake, New Mexico, neither New nor Mexico.  I remember now to look and really see.  Worn faces and ramshackle places, all clean and kept for company but eroded at the edges with hints of the layers and barriers between, though it all just passes by as soon as I see, I saw.  Vast sky and little baby faces, voices, laughter, choices that ease us on down the road and the ones that shock us into knowing where to go.  It ain't all gonna go down so easy, so I'll let this wash over me in the sun, sitting on a log, journaling with my favourite right behind.  Haven't looked, but if I do I know I'll find him there.

Somebody's always floating, some are diving down deep, some drown.  There's a warm, powerful breeze on my skin and a little touch of lost underneath.  I don't know if I'll ever stop wandering away...

...Fell open into the Rio Grande, with a feather in my fist and a steering wheel in my other hand.  I'm on a Texas road, red soil, coyotes, full moon on the mesa, and I couldn'ta dreamed it better than this way.  As I sit down to write I'm losing the light of day.  Always wishing I was better is wearing me down, whittling me into a frown which I do not wish to claim.

A man on a boat with a parasol.  The turtle rock.  Your back against my legs as we sit on a rock and praise the moon for her beauty and grace.  Late night pictures in the fullness of our imagination.  Kind strangers.  So, so many kind strangers.  The light is fading by the moment.  My pen bleeds into the dawning black.  Who lives here?  What is it that these people experience?  It seems so different, but I suspect that it's very much the same in every way that matters...

...and for now I'm happy to be sitting still-in-motion, it makes the familiarity just that much sweeter.  Walked an underwhelming famous Austin strip last night before having my mind blown by an ordinary backyard scene, complete with community and redemption from ego.  I'm alone in a crowd, pressed against the universes inside the strangers, appearing separate but so obviously orbiting around one another, brushing up against infinity and pretending it's not incredible to feel skin-on-skin.  Maybe I am out of control radiation, needing to be controlled lest I give the world cancer.  Maybe I am just a blink of an eye, a twitch in the night, a faltering word that belies a deep emotional undercurrent.  Maybe I'm on fire all the time, and all I really know is that someday, baby, I'm gonna die.

The breeze is different everywhere you go.  Sometimes the air sticks to you like an entity, others it just disappears and sucks you dry, so that moisture becomes coveted like a dream...

...leaving New Orleans, driving in a Subaru named Rosie straight into the heart of the apocalypse.  Back to the roving consistency of the trio, our stuff, our destination hanging in the future like a mystery puzzle we do not hurry to solve.  I am so affected by the heartbeat of the city behind us.  The air is so wet that the skin here glows, bodies press together and anything goes.  Part celebration, part self-destruction.  I am drawn to this particular pulse like a magnet.  There's something in me represented by this place, see?  Raw, passionate, dirty breath of humanity in all its glory and pain.  The streets run with blood, you can sense it, and somehow that means priorities have been straightened out, lives reexamined.  You can't dance with death that closely without tapping into life, I suppose.  Colors and fabrics and characters swirl around the voodoo alley where the mistress keeps her secrets and mine in a fake coffee can that smells vaguely of Vicks Vapo-Rub.

Murky water, bridges, tunnels, pockets of magnolias and live oaks, the smell of frying bread and bird, music in the distance played for change.  I never knew before I came.  Never knew from books I read.  You can't kill us, we are already dead.  Ghosts in the alley, filling up on cheap booze and tempestuous sex, sin, and cajun kin.  I wish I was enjoying the shit out of today, but really I feel heavy, tortured, alive, inspired, tired.  Do we have to talk about it?  I think so.  The city is a swamp, hot, black, watery, steamed up, potentially dangerous and spectacularly beautiful...

...A day off in Taylor, Mississippi.  The porch is the town square, chatting away, wiling away the hours of the day.  Touring - road life - it turns out, is an art.  All this outward energy, socializing, performing, being hosted, gracios, present, friendly, thankful...it's a lot of hard work.  A lot of easy work too.

We forgot about breakfast, and here we are hungry and planless.  I draw Queen of Wands from the Tarot and skip away to the corners of my mind outside the limitations of space and time.  Tomorrow is very far away.  Ok then, bye bye now...