Daybreak

1.1

I only wanted to taste Denver by morning, to prove unity other than some fuse burning quick to solitude. To touch you again not be simply an ignition, an end. I wanted to prove that the road is not suture between two, but splay in landscape that huddles to each roadside flourishing in headlights. That unclean cut cross-country, where towns arise from where the knife pauses to settle deeper then up through booms of slaughter houses, where oil derricks jerk their heads endlessly in empty fields. I stayed in a half-abandoned hotel alongside the two-lane-highway that said vacancy with blue-neon light. Behind the window of the check-in desk, the night auditor sat at attention as the well-dressed man walked away with keys for a warped wooden door. Stifled air inside waiting. Still. Mites in the bed sheets.

1.2

A traffic signal flashes red into my room. Says stop. Past sunset blue condensing in its pauses. The momentum still pushes my back forward. An unseen inertia set out of place. The dead at sea thought to sink endlessly.

2.1

That town’s been driven through. I won’t remember the roadside or the whole empty plain moving silently beneath darkness, cut off where the sky dips and a constellation rises, the lack of vanishing points in circular darkness.

4.2.1

I still see the solitary glare then pair of oncoming headlights that threatened to collide and fold my car’s steel over itself. Fiberglass with the mold of my face, a concussive pillow. With one eye dizzy and leaning over the lane with sleep, the swath of an eighteen-wheeler, an empty shiver warbles the car frame.

4.2.2

Darkness erases all distances.