Night Walking

Walked to Denny’s with Tyler and Jared tonight.

Flip flops on side walks. Street lights and humming telephone pole wires.

Three stars. One, two, haze.

Sprinkler stains on dilapidated fences. White and grey.

Cars race by--screaming, screeching. Loud.

The city is loud. Loud in my ears.

I brace myself against the abrasions.

Sounds cut like a hacksaw.

I feel alien. I feel alone. I know where I belong, yet

I fight against that urge. Fight against myself and what

I know is truth.

Why must it be about me?

Why can’t I be happy leading the normal life?

Why am I so selfish in my desires?

I sketch pictures of granite walls and blue-backdropped trees in my mind. A quite, contemplative scene where I can retreat and recall. There is peace in the quiet of my mind, the solitude of my recollection. In reflections. In memory. In sounds only I can hear.

A pack on my back. Boots on my feet. A ringed fire with the smell of burning pine. Dirt under my fingernails. Melted snow cascades and finds its way into my water bottle--sweeter than honey. The static lightning that flashes as I slide into my sleeping bag. Home.

But I’m not home, leastways not in the deepest sense of my meaning of “home.”

There must be others like me. But I hope not.

Thunderhowl

The call the call

The howl

The tear of clothes to hair too teeth gnash

No more orange clouds night!

No more no more stars!

Why why why?

And the thunder in my ears

Is the only truth I know

So no wonder why I run run

After my headsound as it thunderfades

Back.

Retreating to a place I cannot go

Want to go want to go cannot go.

It is the green of the shade, of the ground

of the air, of the moss on the side of the stream.

It is the blue of the sky, of the wind in the leaves

of the shade in the evening.

It is the white of the sun in the hot of the sky,

of the feathers of breast of the beat of the bird: Fly.

Why can’t I go

Why can’t I leave

Why can’t I howl

And clutch at the stars like

the sound in my head?

Neverend neverstop--the peace in the silence

of thundering with my howl.