I'll miss your orphan tears

It's the heat

Don't think about getting hotter all over
On these warm nights in the South
Looking up at the moon every night
Watching it get larger with Mars just
Below and to the side glowing red
And watching us smolder

Butterfly

While waiting somewhat anxiously to sing karaoke in a Texarkana roadhouse, I happened to look up at a television screen in time to see a young person in a job interview. She said she wanted a career that made her feel like a butterfly.

Yes.

When it was my turn to sing, I let em have it all. Motorhead. A young man with a long beard told me after that people in the crowd liked my performance. Said a girl of 21 was filming me.

"This old guy is killing Ace of Spades right now".

Sunset: Arkansas

The sun is a big red ball I catch out of the corner of my eye perfectly balanced upon the horizon. The Natural State goes on and on, flat for as far as I can see, green and sultry and quiet.
It's not bad here- the only real darkness comes from
The natural state of me. 

Break Time

She's Nepali. Two years with her husband in a big Texas city working as a barista in a Starbucks placed at a terminally busy crossroads. Her natural smile has been professionalized. Her feet and back always hurt. America is not what she'd imagined. Everyone seems to be struggling. Maybe five percent of Americans are good, she says. the others all wear angry faces.

Saturday Morning

Home with trouble getting out of bed after sleeping well in a place where the crickets know me. Waking to a mess, neglected maintenance, regret and avoidance.

 I'm back on the road Monday. Let it sit. 

Southern Night

Stumble out of the bar alone after singing the last song on Karaoke Night. No one really responded. It's one of those nights, in a town far from home, when no one knows you or cares to know you. A sharp contrast to the magic and fast-friendships formed the last time I passed through here. Maybe it's something about the stink I give off when I'm alone and in my head.

Outside, the thick warm night and a slight hot breeze. I'm restless and a little drunk. Need to wait a while before attempting to drive back to the hotel. Open season on drunk driving Yankees here, I'm betting. Hungry. Food will help sop it up. A couple doors down is a 24-hour, Texas-born burger
joint I've yet to try, so I do.

The man at the counter is John. There's a crew of at least ten working inside and a line at the drive through window. John asks me how I'm doing so I tell him and ask him in return. His day started at 6 AM (it's now 2 AM). He is working his third shift of the day - one job to the next one and then on to this. His face and voice are calm and sincere. His eyes are tired, they hold mine the entire time.

He's got three children to feed. One was actually fathered by his cousin, he tells me, but she came home after awhile and they patched things up. Now he's got three jobs - fast food and retail - all right at about the Texas minimum wage. There's not a lot of time for sleep. He's not complaining, but his eyes... suddenly it seems a little harder to breathe, like there's not enough air in this room.

"You been in the military?" he asks.
"Marines" I answer.
"Semper Fi. So was I."
We smile and shake hands. We were in about 20 years apart.

"Hawaii was real nice."
We look around us quietly. He looks me in the eyes, seems to shrug without moving.
"Ain't nothin' but a thing, man."
"That's right, nothing but a thing, brother."

The hamburger is a good one, and I eat it in the parking lot leaning against the rental car. A bedraggled young woman walks up and asks if I can give her a ride. Her teeth are gone and her eyes are crazy, she's moving toward me in a kind of zig zag. Meth.
"No sweetheart. I'm not going anywhere."

But I am.
Tomorrow, I'll board a plane back to another life.
John will stay here to work another shift, and then another right after that.
I'm hoping he won't notice the thing about the air in there, but I know that he already does.

You Are What They Feed You

A gentleman explained to me with great certainty across the Texas airwaves that angels were created by God fully mature. He drove that point home for a good half hour as the prairie rolled by under the blanching sun. He used the word mature (pronounced with a hard t, not a ch sound) at least a dozen times. He said there has never, not in the history of all creation, been a baby angel.

Yeah? What's Cupid then? A dwarf?

Nightfall

ArkLaTex is what they call this region. From where I'm standing, you can just about throw a rock into Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas. It's 97 Fahrenheit degrees at 7:30 pm, and the inmates are exercising inside the fenced in yard. Basketball, calisthenics, wind sprints - white boys with buzzed heads in white t-shirts and yellow sweatpants. Most of the old downtown on the Texas side is abandoned. What was it like when things were thriving here? Where did it go?

Paris, Texas

When you're like this in a place, you know what it looks like but not what it means. No sign here of Travis or Hunter. The downtown now is a once beautiful, vibrant public square gone to antique shops trying to sell off the remains. Two blocks out from there and it's all but abandoned. There are a few small businesses in the downtown selling crafts, olive oil, and Paris, Texas memorabilia (not a single reference to the German director, his movie, or the sad and determined man in the red ball cap), but I can't see how they make ends meet. Property is for sale, renovations are being done, hope seems to stir. It's hot under the blue sky and brilliant billowing white clouds. But even in stark daylight there are more ghosts than people here, more past than present. Only one place for a drink I've found in town. Better start with water.

Embarkation

Maybe this is the place where the air runs out, you're thinking, but then you see the barista who fronted you a latte when you forgot your wallet, and the guy next to you watching the Red Sox tells you a story about the ghost in his bong shop.

In eight hours you'll be on another plane.

"Lunatic fringe", says the radio, "in the twilight's last gleaming".

Episode

What do you call this? A relapse? Just a lapse? Some kind of dry drunk in which I walk around titilating myself with memories getting so far gone as to be able to taste you and re-experience some of what it did to my chemical constitution back then?

You're still in love with her, someone told me. Is that why everything is muted? Is that the reason for this buffer between myself and what I am trying to experience? Is this why there is so little color or flavor or feeling - this damper, dampening, withering?

It's better to move. Take me back to airports and hotels and rental cars.

As I know you must...

Field Notes: Texarkana

• Texarkana greeted me with humidity and with flies.

• Warm evening, windows down, cicadas in the trees. The bartender makes medicine from Maker's Mark, grapefruit juice, Drambuie, sage, honey and bitters then tells a story of feeding Dramamine to a psychotic cat while stuck in Memphis traffic. Newly weds from Arizona in their sixties down the bar. He stands and pulls out her chair when she returns from the bathroom. We talk Alaska and suddenly I am no longer tired

• No Ubers out at this early hour. I call a cab and a pickup truck with a horizontal crack across it's windshield arrives. The flies are waiting for me inside the airport along with one fat and silent cricket. Security here is vigorous. There's about one officer for every three passengers. They open my carry-on to inspect a portable steamer. They are patting down a woman's hair now. Outside, the lavender dawn.

To Brooklyn

Signs on the Tappan Zee Bridge remind you that life is worth living in case you have forgotten. Richie Rich lives in New Jersey not far from that bridge. Charles Darwin worked out his theory of natural selection observing eighty-eight lanes of Northbound traffic merge suddenly into four from up in the rigging of the George Washington Bridge. I park across from a public housing tower in an industrial area - shift change at a bottling plant, I think, a Polish beer. Brooklyn. Walk around the block and there is the savage guitar player I've come to see smoking a joint and listening into a cell phone. When he looks at me, I nod and give him a thumbs up. He waves. I walk by feeling twelve.