Driving Out of Providence

I can’t see anything at first. My eyeballs are air-drying in the night’s fake leather interior. It’s like I’m backwards crying, the tears sucked out from behind my eyes into the chamber of my head, sloshing there amongst the already wet deception-sensors and the spongy flowers of incorrect assumptions. But the front slits, the parts that saw you & wanted you, are parchment-dry. Gummy-dry. Amnesia-dry. Suddenly the road jabs its little white stick noodles into my area of expertise. You will always be hungry, the white beats say, but you will not die of hunger. Hunger feeds you. That’s when the radio kicks in and some rough edge writes itself into the smooth concrete of a summer sidewalk, carving deep & spitting out gray peels of what gets left behind. I don’t know what to do with all the remainders.

Hours later, my window rolled down, I realize I am on the precise border between away from and toward. And then I’ve crossed it, despairingly. I stop at McDonald’s but the restroom key breaks off in the lock and I pitch the pancake-sized Hamburglar key ring out into the lonely bushes and squat behind a turquoise Tracker in the parking lot, watching my pee collect blackly like oil spill under its wheel.

No amount of coffee can cut through last night’s whiskey, but the sun elopes from the water exactly the way I would want to emerge from bad luck, slickly and fatly, like a cell squeezing out of another cell. First you thought I was joking, because you imagine silence as cunning, whereas in my case it’s only shrugging, a goodbye waiting to happen. Those few wordless moments are heady, though; they taste like you, like plums & beer.