Downstream

My last semester at University is in full swing, so is my dreaming.  I still don't understand why such things happen but I have come to accept the not sleeping and saga-like dreaming as an intrinsic part of myself.  They are small shadows in the corners of my mind that each have their own story.  Sometimes they begin as one thing but upon waking their meaning migrates and shifts.  I am in a 'Capstone Class' right now and its focus is the Prose Poem.  The very nature of these poems I find so ambiguous that I have yet to define them.  Experiences, dreams, visions, and inklings seem to merge.

Downstream

You're like the mystifying sinking lure that all the young cannot resist.  They dismiss their tomorrows for the opulence of today.  They know not of that currency, the unbalanced trade.  They cannot see the reflection of the old carp staring back at them from the long nights ahead.  They only know one another; all soft wisdom-less flesh.

My car sat stifling in a heat mirage on the pavement.  There was no liquid space.  If I didn't get off of that road, I would've collapsed like the bridge in town that had been touched by the hand of God in the storm.  The storm that came in the night, in the dark.  Wet cement and steel had sunk into the chilly gray gurgling water.  Built to stand beyond us, now embedded in a cold mushy womb.

I made the first right.  A dirt road that led to a paved road that led to an undulating descent of a patched road.  Patched over time, budget permitting, resembling a cows back.  It separated a shire of the abandoned McGill farm where we ran as barefoot children.

My work shoes on the gravel crunched as I stepped out of the safety of the car.  I was part of it now.  I turned to look at the slow hill behind me.  A faded red and chrome pickup truck whirred by, windows down, like the wings of a thousand geese.  I wanted that tunnel of air inside that truck.  It roared up the hill leaving the dust to silence.  Slowly the gurgle of the stream found me.  

Carefree isn't free.