How To Leave Willow Creek

As I raced the setting summer sun, weaving along a treacherous mountain path through weathered truss bridges and worn asphalt corners that beckoned me to take a fateful meeting with the waters of Lethe, She, like the Klamath that wound beside the path home, offered me only ephemeral eyefuls of her vast and apathetic beauty.

It didn't matter how fast the treads of my tires pulled me back north. She had been winning all along. The last rays of July were kissing the white knuckles of my shaking hands and I was too late to feel Her heat warm my tired bones. As swiftly She had risen, She had gone to sleep beyond the crashing hum of the river valley.

Without Her guidance, I scoured the dead zones of the night, imprudently pursuing a sense of safety that I had not longed for since the last time I found myself gripping the edges of a frame that held past and distant lives nor known since the first time I lost myself to my best friend, wrapped in a wool blanket in the back of an old Dodge parked under the stars.

When the 96 finally met the bright lights of the 5, after the Klamath opened its mouth to pour its body into lands unhallowed and unmoved by her power and motion, a pernicious laugh relieved itself from the claustrophobic cavity that once held nascent notions of love, and with one fatal breath, reminded my hopeful heart that my defiance against the doom of night had to be buried alive alongside the summer sun.

One Man Wrecking Crew

I consult the voices in my head the way a disowned flower child consults her dysfunctional family of lawyers and salespeople. It's less of a consultation and more like one of those mandatory meetings where you get your ear fucked by your boss and all their cronies. At least those people are real.

Instead, I'm sitting here gritting my teeth under my pillow because I don't know what the functional difference is between a period, an exclamation point or a colon followed by a closing parentheses.

When you're alone, you've got bigger problems than punctuation.
When you're a sacrificial lamb, you've got bigger problems than abandonment.
When you're worried about how much intrigue you can pack into two sentences, or if you've accidentally packed in too many suggestions, all you've got are problems.

I've got as many problems as I have voices in my head that ought to be flesh-and-blood friends. Each one is a haunting reminder of a wrong turn that left me wrapped around sign posts that could have saved me if I would have read them. None of them were ever real. At least, that's how it seems now.

Instead, I'm unintentionally yelling at my neighbors, forgetting that every wall can be broken through with enough of the right kind of emotion. Forgetting conveniently, so that I can keep my one man wrecking crew.

Magic Fever

The magic fever that pulses beneath my chest could cook up a mean stake in an adventure that could very well last a lifetime. I check ahead for the cumbersome bags of crimson semaphores and realize that you've found a way to tie an ethereal leash from under my nose to the tip of your finger and it's got me so eager to close the gap I've forgotten to leave space for the words I'd need to ask for more.

I wonder about the strategy books that line the shelves of your castle, the ones about how to set brains on fire, the art of lighting up the flesh of thought and soul in the darkest darkness while feet and hands flail and fight to keep doors open or shut--to smother the fire or to feed it.

This secret fire is hungry, starving even, desperate to breathe, yearning for the cool breeze of translation.

A Merry Caw

Take off, flaps down, from the place you fell in love, with its lazy summers of toads and rivers all interlocked with the firmness of a friendly southern handshake. The atmosphere, the love, the still evident dichotomy between us and them in the sort of romantic way cowboys feel towards the good folk of the city below--is creeping in, waiting for the viscous inhale to seep from one less entropic state to the next. Or maybe we're just caught up in the easy goers life. All I want from the land is to land in a spot to call my own. Are any of these still available?