Pacific Cuba

(written on the drive home from Mountain Home, Arkansas)

Serious people with the realest of hearts, handshake
with violence with no suffering.
I'm stuttering when I have something to say.



ashes of camels
hash embedded in floorboards above&below
clinging to a worn out shoe
scrape off a little sacrifice wherever I step

the grinding away of perception's hooks
the empty road at deadly speeds, none of you on my brain
the empty road and becoming it

Heavy eyes giving way to split-second
caffeine delusions
when there's no dexterity on board
higher than the mountains leering back
tracing rusty fence lines with one red eye
from the seat of a convenient monstrosity, that god
has given Us to conquer

I'm as much the illusory sky and beyond
as much a worker in the factory gargantuan of my homeland
the centrifugal life, never flying off to extremities
average and white, safe and clear, ignorant
of death and strife

hands and eyes to this road
transfixed on the right speed
where I can dissolve
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As we flew on 4 wheels spinning hot against concrete in August Ozark sun through towns like Old Joe(no population listed) and Midway and Mt. Olive we had the music of Carnivale with that slow mournful banjo echoing minutely against distant mountain faces I would wonder about the people there, what kind of lives they lead in these quiet pockets of gOD-fearing Arkansas life. I hail from an unremarkable suburb in the middle of the Midwest with so many other unremarkable people, trudging through this uninspired life and an ever-diminishing consciousness. We spent countless hours touring these backroads largely filled with forested mountains and the occasional incursion of houses antique and new. And driving here, a place I'd never been, I felt so at home. No strip malls, no billboards, no construction, motorists few and far between. Just me, one friend, the mountains and that solemn banjo, the kind that would be heard at hill-folk funerals.



I don't come from these parts, but my father's family were originally from wilderness of West Virginia, true hillbillies. I believe in genetic memory and their untold generations spent in the backwoods must be embedded in my brain, a yearning for that insular life on land. So now I know: when I want to be far away from I where I live, I just want to go back home, to where I've never been, but where I know I belong.

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To those who don't comprehend, I feel the same about you, your faith in society in family in make-believe, that all you choose works out for you and you alone. You're just characters in a story already inscribed, a crutch made of style and service to the non-existent. I'd rather be honestly miserable than falsely happy. Humans are all born diseased. The only cures are self-induced chemical catharsis, foreign chemical cataclysm...and exegesis. Hate is love decayed and deranged, affection not reciprocated, apathy freedom. Without terror in our hearts we are hibernating, waiting, paralyzed by our own electric drool, pathetic stimuli can't fulfill our extant purposes. Perception is a lie swallowed whole and reality alone can choke your throat. Perception is a wash, a gleaming of the truth; the grist of your mind has to be broken down over time.