mem or ee

the fall is for brooding, open highways, and the ghosts of the ever lingering lovers so far gone the memory cant recall, cant conjure them on command, like the known sign no longer visible in his for reflecting rearview mirror. beyond the hills infront, just like those heinous empty nebraska plains, recently passed through, what exists i can not know or remember only imagine. i sat on my front bumper at an all too familiar gas station - as he had so many times been - between my past and the unpossessed future. only the past is mine.
'how can you do that - walk backwards through life?'
he, or i, the subjects - life or story? the direction you view, i look, everything is twisted fact or fiction, twisted and ravelled and ravelling around each other, around themselves. 'theres nothing back there for you,'  he thinks she is disgusted, she hides it well, but i could see it, coiling behind the veil of her eyes.
in his head or out loud i say, 'theres nothing back there at all.'
'what?'
'things imply substance, and theres not, theres no past beyond the stories and the corner crouching ghosts,' she has been sick of this, is and was, and will be even later when they, we, have stopped talking. i know she isnt here, thats just a memastory, this is just the haunt, the milemarker. 357 where the light swung left to right no matter which direction one faces, for the light was always just remembered even when he was living in it. i thought it looked like silent blonde streamers, fragile and resolved.
white washed blue eyes and her fingers at his wrist, checking for his resting pulse. 'i cant feel it' from beneaht the shest she says, '.....
he remembered it as a confused sleepy wandering question, childish but then i remembered it differently something about the sound of the highway- maybe more a mocking tone. and it all seems to blur, the bedroom or a gas station in limon, colorado. was it her voice or the old mans that mocked me like pearl mocked dimsdale, 'thou wast not bold, thou wast not....'
it was a carved grey beard and the frayed cowboy hat then he recalled asking him
'where you headed?'
and before i could answer he rambled on about some place in texas, about a job or a girl or whatever it is spectres on the great american highway always find themselves crawling towards. the old man was headed some where, for there was nothing the old man told him, for him or i or he or them in this place. there was and is nothing ever here, something is always elsewhere, over there beyond the ridge, beyond the hills, the horizon until there are no more horizons - for that is what death is, the end of horizons. and living the movement through the nothings of this place, ever real, and not, he or i thought, to be confused with the nothings of the past which were not even real, to the place where one no longer look into, and through what was not towards what might be.
i think i grunted, i am sure i didn't speak.
'what about you? you headed home?' the old man couldnt have seen my licence plate.
i said no, or i dont know, or 'i dont know where home is'
most places are like most other places, from the over hang of a gas station florida isnt much different from east colorado, or alabama from virgina. go to enough places, see enough of the spectrum and the gaps between the majesty of st marks and the mundanity of your average road side diner falls away, or into itself, a place is everyplace, is no place. and like all the memories of summer days become one day of bright summer, or one bar of golden light so do all places become a, or any, gas station.
and too the voices and the people and the old man and the girl are there, saying in both voices, unique and uniform, choral and monotone the words, the question
'... where is your heart?'

Calypso (to 'nýja lagiδ')

they had been laying on the floor of her living room for hours.
suspended, inclosed by the screaming white walls and carpet.
everything was still, unadorned- except for the massively oversized mirror
that hung above her couch, framed by roughly cut cardboard.
the world had stopped for them, nothing moved.
there was only music
they spoke at times, and then went unimaginable expanses without words
he traced lines, shapes, words, sentences, secrets
with his fingers into her arms and legs
when he asked how long they had laid there
her heavily lidded eyes pulled open
draconic  and lovely and green
she answered 'always'

later like a shock.
the sun breaks. pouring in through the gossmer drapes that hang
over the rarelly openned double french doors.
the illusion of their forever trembles
in the adamant light of celestial physics.
'it's almost tomorrow' he says
'no, no' her soft pleas, 'make it stop.'
he pulls his hand through her thick hair,
newly illuminated it is a cascade of garnet and copper.
'i dont know how'
'if you just put this song on repeat.
and we dont ever go to sleep
it will stop.'
he could not help his smile, at the sleepy laze of her voice
'will it?'
'yes, just stay here with me,
in this room,
in this song,'
she says softly,
'if we dont go to sleep, it will be today forever.'

Jessica

you werent recalled
the feeling of remembering you was evoked
it was the sky, its moody sullen grey
hanging as it so often does in the fall, so close
to the awaiting earth, and the turning grass
more like escaping air from an exhumed tomb
than an actual memory
your large ovular eyes, so dark
the line was not decernable
between
pupils and your irises
peering over your freckles
and your cocktail glass brace

i couldn't shake you, and stood
there in the nearly empty parking lot
at least as long as our last red light
embrace
and i thought then i was too damn old
to be haunted by the ghost
of some other man's wife.

The Ardah

The highway gives way.
and out of the tangled tentacles of asphalt and cement the city rises.
shuddering to a standstill the panting six cylinder
and we pour out the doors and on to the sidewalk
pressed collars and matte hair paste and loan shark smiles
in doors at the bar we bang fists and cheer to the tv screen
choral waves of temporary fanaticism fueled by booze, from the low rack.
predatory glance from the blonde on the corner.
keys in the nose in the bathroom.
they take my cousin's id at the front gate and we mull around the crowd on wall street for a while moving in and out of the unnecessarily strange themed bars the circus freak joint opens to the urban mexican cantina past a few groups of people of color to wink and flash disingenuous smiles at the pack of girl who don’t know where they are they're drinking twelve dollar martinis in silly cocktail glasses admist a sea of waist high held clear plastic cups into the steam punk bar and out into the pavement to assault the street vender with fists of ones and home remedy whitened teeth.
manifest destiny.
hot dogs for everybody.