A Letter to Uncrowded Highways (5/3/93)

Looking at you in the mirror...you smile, and I wonder why you couldn't do that to others.
Too many mad May nights of telephone conversation guitar plucking tales being told of Baroque art madmen ravers all the insanities of this little town. The phone like a handholding reaching out for others in hope of conversation but I can always just talk to myself and pretend I'm you like I do most of the time anyway. But the sun is gone, a shallow evening of moon splintering the clouds like the hands of El Greco as satellite beams of beauty power draw a purple silhouette against the popping trees of May. and all this up and down crazy back roads listening to James Brown yelling "I feel good!", to the fifty passengers in the back of my brain all sharing one seatbelt. And turning around at Clifton Store crossroads I hear Midnight Oil shouts of support for the monarchy, and the sun sets on your old empire with me shining brighter than my Indian killing ancestors could've ever imagined in their tree chopping Massachusetts turkey howls in other seasons, other days of this faded night Americana where old fork in the road mice filled barns still catch my eyes and lying on the docks at the shores of my free mind I saw water mingle into the current of sunshine and all was perfect in those spinning skies. Leave your Exxon card before you drive off to the setting suns of laid back New Mexico and its pink canyons with your windows down smoking a cigarette, and happy little REM songs move you past the pueblo apartments where they did laundry and ate beans while Europe choked on its plague of black burning Londons. And I shall come to your wild London but at my own willingness and I shall run its streets with a flower in my breast pocket drinking Coca Cola flying off into where Pink Floyd might've bumped into the Beatles who were in a time warp chatting with Oliver Cromwell as he chopped off the heads of those afraid to dance with color. The madcap postal service of love sending out postcards of half regretted glances and other twilight flirtations that make spring so livable despite the mosquito air and its water sweating air conditioner days where we all wondered at our radio ballgame of possibilities while a beach ball was removed from right field: some boy out there with dad, hot dog, and scorecard of all the Detroit baseball days licking mustard to himself and only thoughts of "will they walk him?" fill his diamond mind. Oh to be there in that industrial city respite looking in on million dollar dreamboys playing their beautiful poetry in the grass of my remembrance! In the flowerbeds where digital fantasies can't reach me I'm still that way but we can only blow on the magic of so many dandelions until our hopes are floating away with the seeds to root in some other mind where my reality won't interfere. Oh, but barefoot rocky stream walking and song singing of Bob Dylan to the circling hawk sky of our Bull Run wonderful hideaway where we would go for a walk beside a telling current and its Indian campfire stories so long poured out so we could sleep in guilt, but on swamp gas nights of beaver knawing there's still a hillside prophet firelight glimmering somehwere near that wild train bridge where we threw rocks at the trestles till the rains came, and we found our sleeping snake baby of faraway trail sunnings where no hobo trespassing solitary bather might've found so much young reptilia just snoozing beside the tracks running out to all the Ohios and Fredericks of Baltimore's night bag where all this will be headed in the end-me, in the rowhouses of urban uprising eating crackers listening to the radio and watching "Gumby". But back in our prairie adventure-oh fishing eyed bald eagle watch my line tugged at by little sunny your food not mine to catch and the spring brushes against my legs and my bare arms of goodbye April rejoice in the warmth of Julys not so far away. Be nice if you, girl, were with me to swallow all the sunny days of flower pastures where I now dream of walking in my sedentary confinement late night indoor pondering sessions. In lunatic binges of inspiration I thought you might care to hear my thoughts on these matters...