...all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable.
--Freedom, Jonathan Franzen
The talented Gatsby knew It--the whip that
Snicker snaps--that drives
Us clean cut across bluegreenwhite A-merihca, up and down,
Diving through the gorges deep like gashes,
Leaping across the plains wrapped in cotton clouds and
Over mountains coughing smoke
Like the Indian Chief on my red cigarette pack;
It’s a picture snapped in perfect madness.
It drives us away from the perfectly sane slice we carved from our homeland,
The devices of vices and people, connections and notions of commotions
Will be to me as nauseating as the pile
Of black trash bags on the
Corner of King and Liberty
Sizzling with fried-egg smell
In a summer heat weighed down heavy with flies.
“This is not enough,” we’ll say,
Looking to the things that are ours.
It drives us like it drove those first restless,
Relentless feet from the old world west,
Like It drove those first men from the Great Rift Valley and the Horn,
And the first ape to walk erect,
And Eve to the apple and East.
“What is not mine--I must have it,” we’ll say,
Looking to the road.
For us, there is the road, not Jack’s road, mind you,
But a road all the same winding
Like all sorts of arguments, leading us
From one place to another, where there is no
Direction or destination
Except one alone; one place hardly known, just out of reach,
Soaked, as we are, in the Lethe.
It leads us, above all, to something else.
My road cradles
Us between its lines and curves
And black colorless forgetting,
Whispering promises to me already forgotten when they reach my ear
through the open windows.
Alone is the road in the timelessness of its travelers,
We who travel are the junkie-children of Silence and Slow Time;
In a reckless abandon the Mind of America lurches forward, but on my
road...on my road
Minutes creep on to days, and hours last for years
As the houses of men dash onward by; we are static
In our pile of metal gasoline glass windows--
Only on the asphalt when it is
Burnt half melted through with rubber
In the harrying sun,
Or dark like the sky in
The gray lights of the aging bearded night,
Only there can we beat our terrible hunger,
Can we beat the Fear!--
In vain, but to try! at least to try! at the awful desire--
To forsake our slice
For the road and the road
And the shrouded and shadowy road.