the road

There were 120 days between
June in May
and
Johnny in September.
I spent the summer listening
to their music, but
there is more to remember.
It had been five years since
my knuckles started bleeding
and smearing the names of my references
on my job applications, when I started
punching walls, punching romance,
punching telephone numbers
to Ohio, to Texas, to Vermont,
to any vagrant female of collapsed sexuality who
needed to forget their
fucked-up youth for a few minutes,
small-chested wah-wah pedals,
unmolested garden petals.
Then I stuck my head in the toilet
(ebb and flow of aphorism)
contemplating the crabbiness of the immortal.
You were there for the beginning
of the blur of optimism, for the end
of the slur of pronunciation, you saw it all,
from tottering climb to glue factory fall.
I thought I saw a light,
I thought I saw salvation,
naked and rippled. Is the flesh
obsessed with the soundless thunder
of gog and bate, solid wooden hollow
of splendid self-hate? The clockwork
grimaced as splinters of my
hatchet-blasted-and-altered timeframe
pierced the storyline of Hackman and Holden
on a raft in your bathtub
(all newcomers to Mars receive a miner’s helmet).
the periphery spun the words into suicide,
lit the dynamite.
my brain went to the moon,
my grain to the sun,
my body to the earth,
and my scream to the Heavens,
June and Johnny strumming in unison,
further on up the road.