Mines Eye (original) (raw)

Starsburg, Stressburg. Strasburg, Colorado was half an hour east of Denver, but it might as well been on the fucking moon. Not even a traffic light. The pizza place I'd cooked at before had four tables. The horizon was so open. Damn good homegrown weed. Waking up to train noise. Stars splattered out everywhere in the fields at night.

My third job in four months was at a gas station. I was stalking sodas in the cooler with a coworker when I came across a bottle of Tommyknocker soda that has this dwarf miner character as a mascot and I joked that it looked like one of the regulars. He was this short runt of a guy with a long red beard and mellow nature that was always buying chew. My coworker told me that he'd been in a bad wreck where the engine had been been shoved out on his legs and it was burning him and crushing him. The pain was so bad that he kept hitting his head on the headrest to knock himself out.

Alone in an ancient laundromat. The soda machine doesn't work. I had been in the bathroom trying to jerk off to some women's fashion magazines that had been left behind, but someone came in to do some wash. I stood out side the backdoor, having a Camel and listening to the machines. I was waiting for the rain to really come down. It might. Might not. You can never tell on the plains.

One last night we sat together in the doorway of our apartment and smoked and talked. No more scotch, I was still recovering from an act of god hangover. I still had something lodged in my foot from when I'd been wandering around in the fields at night. I was hoping to catch a glimpse of somebody fucking in an open window somewhere, but there was only television.
"No matter what happens I will always love you."
"You shouldn't love me."
"You're such an asshole."
"I know. I'm sorry."

Denver to Atlanta with transfers in St. Louis and Nashville. While waiting in line we endured some nasty rotten fish smell coming from a mystery puddle on the floor. This one black guy says out of nowhere, loud, "it smells like a dirty woman! Everyone else thinkin' it; I say it! I don't care." It was hard to keep a straight face. This black girl is bitching to her friend that, "it smells like period and shit." Then it was back to lugging around the guitar, two suitcases and a large box.

The last time I saw her was against a bland blue and gray wall before boarding the bus. We'd just had a smoke. Her double rows of eyelashes like shark's teeth were holding back tears. She looked beautiful. Her plum hair. Freckles. Black rimmed glasses. A brown Etnies T-shirt and jeans. She offered me some smokes, but I said I was alright, which was far from true.
"I love you I love you."
"I love you, too."

It was only too appropriate that the sun was setting as we left Denver. The buildings in half shadow passed away, passed on. Everything looked like a Hopper painting. This nutjob next to me had brought his own seatbelts. Later that night I overheard a conversation between the nutjob and some other guy.
"I can read minds."
"No, you can't."

Tried to read Life: A User's Manual, but just couldn't focus. Hands turning on lights, stretching like sped up films of plants, plants that activate their own day. The ceiling is silver and all else is black. Streetlights and signs are sketches through the scratchy glass. My head shadow on the seat in front of me looms like a tunnel, like a cannonball hole.

Waiting for the next transfer, I sat on the hard floor of the bus station with all my shit. The intercom speakers were buzzing and hissing with muffled bumps that sounded like a microphone being dragged from behind a boat. People clapped after it finally clicked off after what seemed like an hour. Time flows differently at four in the morning when you haven't slept yet. To tell you the truth, I kinda missed the sound; it soothed me. A low blue moaning drone.

This one bus driver had a ball stud under her lip and would say at every rest stop, "if you're not back in ten I'll leave ya." She was always cracking up the guys in the front that would get loud and wave their hands like a bunch of alley cats on a fence in an old cartoon.

After St. Louis we went through the very southern tip of Illinois, around Mt. Vernon. We were surrounded in streaking walls of green; tall trees sheltering us that reminded me of the view from the Amtrak observation car back when Mom and I were moving from LA to Chicago. At times the dense groves would open up to patches of open fields, some with cornstalks. The setting sun sharpened the greens of the trees and the golds of the dead grass. I felt a temporary peace, a sense of God.

Nashville had a ton of strip clubs next to the terminal. One stop shopping.

By the time I met up with my mother in Atlanta, I was dust. No sleep and barely any food. Then the interrogation begins. Grilled. What a thrill!

My brain no longer jewels
wouldn't hold down a boulder in a breeze
I refuse your sleep
I leave it kicking in real density
I tore a hole in the sun and tarpapered
every blank face in shadow
I tore a hole in silence
a ringing gaping sore

Angel, you are an excruciating witness to all that I'm not.

Went to sleep and woke up old. I'm a naked old man on a giant banana leaf that's floating down a river. My skinny arms and legs hang off the sides, stroked by the passing water and the occasional shy nudge of some fish. She's there, unaged from the last time I saw her, naked and beautiful in the waist deep water. Her blonde hair is sparking like an aura, backlit by the dawn. Birdsongs clash in a lovely chaos. She's got one hand on the leafstem to steer and the other is on my chest. Ocasionally she plucks out one of the meager gray hairs there. I wince and she smiles.

"You need to call in sick," she says.
"With such short notice?"
"They'll be fine without you. Don't worry so much. You aslways worry."

The canopy of trees overhead causes the daylight to flicker. I feel an odd nagging ache, a nostalgic sadness that I can't quite pinpoint. I'm forgetting something important.

"If I don't go, will you stay?" I ask.
"Ofcourse. I'm not going anywhere."

She leans over and kisses me. Its like being a teenager again. My heart pounds and my hands shake nervously while tongues slide slow, switching mouths.

I tug at her. "Come here. Come closer."
"I can't"
"There's enough room."
"We'd sink, dummy." She smiles.
"True enough. Then, Captain, I suggest we find a friendly port for the friendliest of shore leaves."

We've got to get out of this river before it dries up. The water is already to her knees and her shadow is stretching over me in a great yawn.

In the village we can finally stop to rest our tired feet after so many miles in the muggy jungle. We're in front of a bonfire, shoulder to shoulder with the natives with our faces framed in the black black night. She's passing a bottle of cheap wine and I have to keep giving the kids cigarettes to keep them from pestering me. I'm nodding off where I sit while she's just warming up, dancing with the men to the insistent beats; headless in rhythms. The simple mathematics lead me to sleep like an usher with a flashlight in an impossibly huge and bodiless theater.

You'll fade change again in your vacation away from me.