Dream Harder

I can't believe in 2015.  2001 will always be the future.  Everything since has been a scam, 365 scraps stitched together & painted in Seasonal colors, each copy becoming less defined, falling apart, burning up at an alarming rate.

Google-roving the streets between Shoreditch & Hoxton, I kept thinking, "a one room flat in Hackney...a one room flat in Hackney?..."  Ohhh, there you are--Robyn Hitchcock on a tape deck in 1988, ghost-whispering from the virtual reality of my lost future.  We were in a parking lot in Diamond.  Or Granby.  Looking for thrift stores & flea markets in little towns outside Joplin.  Sarcoxie.  Racine.  I couldn't point you in their direction.  All those names spun around my corner of Missouri like a roulette wheel.  Anderson.  Seneca.  Our marble landed on faded black, tarred cracks, and a place that might have once sold Western wear, brown paint peeling.

SP:  You didn't tell me there was saxophone.
Me:  There usually isn't.  But that's why I brought this one.
She listened with her eyes on the dashboard, quickly losing interest.  I never could get anyone to bite that earworm & there was entirely too much sun in the sky for our alternative layers.  Google-roving through my own memories, eavesdropping on a couple of overdressed teens in a Honda.  The girl looks irritated.  The boy looks depressed.  She is searching for something.  He's along for the ride.  Always the passenger.  "I think my mom's mom was born here."  Did he say that, or did I?
 
There are unexplained gaps in my post-Y2K journaling.  I supposedly moved from Joplin.  Three hours of Bjork's "Vespertine" on repeat, following red taillights into a chilly evening.  Terrorists hit New York, and the murderous buffoons have been proliferating in the cracks of the world like mold in a cheese.  In "2013", a wanna-be Banksy poster is peeling on a brick wall along Regent's Canal, Mickey Mouse in a gas mask, "Fight the rich, not their wars".

Early 1987, a snow-covered chat pile in Carterville & a quiet black-haired kid.  I really don't want to be out in this cold, but if we share a sled, he might have to put his arms around me.  Ten years later, I'm standing at the window of a dark, unoccupied train car somewhere in Serbia.  Warm air whips the curtains, the moon reflecting in random patches of water, and I've never been so far from home.

I burrowed into a hole of an apartment, emerging long enough to be saddled with a house & lose my best friend.  2008 gets a gold star.  Gin hallucinations in the back yard, mind-numbing cicada scree, fireflies cauterizing the humid night.  2009, 2010, the morning glories dwindled as the roses took over.  2011, the garden is gone, two cats in the ground, a multiple-vortex slug erases almost a quarter of Joplin.

I thought I could let go.  Maybe I did.  As jets left trails of coloured smoke above the Thames.  As I felt myself dissolving in the shadows of Notre Dame.  As I shivered with LB in the early morning at a rural Gascogne train station.  Maybe I opened the cartoon cage of my chest and that bird darted away with the crows in the dark pine.

(...2013, 2014...)

Late 70s, sunny California, outside the shower at a camp for fruit pickers:
You:  "I'm running away.  Don't tell anyone."  Sweat-dampened hair.  Freckles.  Bicycle.
Me:  "We're leaving today.  I wish you could come with us."  That last part unsaid or unheard.
Marina Tsvetaeva: “What is this gypsy passion for separation, this readiness to rush off when we've just met?"
I imagine I met you again, years later in Needles.  You didn't recognize me, but your smile was the same.  Already rusting in the desert, the city became a ghost town when you left.  I pulled my jacket closer & something pale circled me as I tried to write by the stars.