Another-Hitchhiker

you were not meant for this -- the night, sketched alone on a blank canvas in two colours: dark and dull, like an old blanket. the light from the TV screen humming in your head as you eat what makes your body droop but never sleep, and the same old conversations bouncing off the walls are all you’ve ever known to come home to. what to do tomorrow, and the day after that, and how to do it, and when, and the fear that rings behind your eyes and pulls your joints tight with weary anticipation! why do you wait now, in your hours, and keep them still? and why do you move about, heaving and gasping, through all the rest? is it for other peop

We’ll sing along with the songs on the radio whenever we know the words we’ll drive for miles ‘cross the borders on a whim at night take winter down south with the birds We’ll go off roads for adventure when the sun is out and I’ll touch you under the stars where we can’t be found and we’ll never say we haven’t been around. I’ll give you cool grass and rivers beneath your feet and the endless sky above I’ll give you a hand to hold in the uncertainty I’ll give you words and I’ll give you love I’ll give you a life unplanned and wavering like a leaf set loose in th

Now is a place to sleep. Paddy-flippers and mop-pushers and money-counters and money-spenders and lovers and poets and peddlers all need a place to lay their bones. Now is the perpetual night, swaddling minds in the distance of time, of day, of work and play, and all concerns that pound inside our heads. Now promises nothing except itself. The ground is beneath your feet, and your bed, wherever it is and whatever it is tonight, holds you. Now, they are not going anywhere. Be here. What pulls you cannot move you now, and all that pushes you has too gone off to sleep. Do so, and let the night catch you wholly. I hope that you can see the

Do not doubt that you are in everything. Stop now, and stand up. Feel your presence ring from the beat in your core through the tips of your toes. Your life ripples out, do you know where it goes? A pulse in the ground that will bring up a seed, a sigh in the air that will make a heart bleed, a piece of my chest, as I am of yours, which can weigh me down, or otherwise soars and no one’s quite happy when someone is crying and something does leave us when someone is dying. It exits our bodies, and gasping for air, we try to reclaim something no longer there. I think it is stronger this December night. The lives that have left us and

Night falls at five, and you can only see the snow when it slides off the glare of the street lamps but you can feel it all the time, and instead of landing on your eyelashes or the tip of your tongue, it fills the air with spikes and you can’t remember what the colour green smells like. When you close your eyes it goes black, but I remember the sunshine, and I remember amber-tinted blinks and waking up to warmth. I don’t remember much else. I remember the year everyone said Christmas didn’t feel like Christmas, but now I can’t remember what Christmas is supposed to feel like. I used to attach words to it whic

When I was small I didn’t believe in Santa Claus but I did believe in a bearded man, who wasn’t a man, and less so a woman, who was really three people, and one was a spirit and one was a son of the other. I didn’t know if he was very nice, or how big he was, but he felt like a box and I was in the box, and everyone said he loved me. I learned to let words roll off my tongue which had no meaning to me, writ in an old, tired English translated and retranslated so people like me could form them, and I was told to keep them in my box because they were the only truth, and not to question them. To this day, I don’t kn

I found so little where I was a city between winters the subway groaning back and forth and wishing you to enter would carry you back to the start and when the night was over although it took you to no place you’d find again you’d boarded. The walls did not know what they held that made me think of flying when I was weak and looking for a way to keep from dying. The blue light in my best friend’s room was not enough to make me stronger than my mother’s sounds: the sound of back bones breaking. At last one day I found my step I leapt and I was free, but when I flew I saw and knew the winter was in me.