drifters
by David McAleavey
after Rimbaud
They lied! And the news was even worse! “There was no evidence of kindness.
Their gauntness was as frightening as real life. It was necessary to act, to flee.” In the encyclopedia of imagined things, a real book, floats a droll book with no clothes.
It must have been time to plant carrots, for farmers and gardeners were doing just that. I could hear something, something pastoral like Robert Burns, drifting like smoke in the background as convincingly as the thing itself.
Whelped and then given over to bravado until exhausted, that pretty much sums up living. An itch, negating any peace of mind, also attacks the largeness of any bit of rhetoric, as in the hands of Samuel Beckett, hydrochloric acid, – if yearning could ever describe it! – the stage curtain gathers itself in the moment.
At each of the rest stops, with contradictory energy, a percentage of vehicles exits in search of a superior condition, – involving a Cinnabon and coffee, and letting the bladder empty against porcelain, and some of us stretching like we’d once learned yoga.
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