Journal Forty-Seven Stitches In Forty-Seven Snitches

Today sucked. This whole week sucked. This weekend looks to suck too. I should be fair, next week will probably suck just as hard. That said, I'm actually in a good mood. Optimism!

I started to write this thing as a poem. Now I'm working on it as a prose poem (I guess). Or maybe I'm done working on it, I don't know. It's inspired by something I wrote back in college. It's also inspired by the desire to always be somewhere else. I'm very good friends with this desire. We go way back. Like "cookies and milk" way back.

Unsurprisingly, it's something completely and totally not based on anything that happened to me today. Hey my life, get interesting so I can write about you again! Anyway, here's the prose poem (prosetry). It's a little sexual and a lot homosexual. Also, a little bit country.

Hollow Body

My car is dead on US 60, minutes outside of town, which negates, I think, my swift exit from the town, from the family, from the two friends on either end of the friend spectrum-- one end come, the other go.

Go said to make it quick and I guess I did. I didn't pack anything. It's a new me, after all. But now it's a new, dead, empty me, such a hollow body out here. And yeah, the car too. I lean against the heat of its hood, but not the hood itself (I was told to never touch a carcass). Summer rises off its smoking, metal breast in squiggles. This is how mirages are made, I think, all these waves like water, all these simple illusions, all the wiles of nature.

They're solid in their way, the waves, so I forget I'm not really propped up, just floating. Something about the warm and the land and the heavy, melting sky sets me to sleep even though I'm still standing up, arms crossed, legs locked. I get to the half-sleep place and I slink over, but in the half-dream that follows, I've been tossed down a staircase by rough, hairy hands. There's deep, guttural laughter. It's all man, all masculine, all grabbing, grunting, groping.

I wake up and I have an erection and I'm down flat on the side of the road. Gravel is stuck to my forehead and something is bleeding, but I don't know what. Oh! It's my nose, yes bleeding, lots of blood. It's so much, it can't be real. It's darker than my image of blood too, like velvet or melted lipstick, not like Christmas, not like cartoon apples, not like the blood made from ketchup.

Hahahahahaha! Again laughter, more laughter, most laughter, laughter connected to a man full of beard, full of denim, full of body. He shadows over me. I'm scared, but I'm still aroused, I haven't lost the erection. He's been there the whole time, probably, a strong mass of a man, the likely embodiment of everything I'm trying to leave behind.

He reaches down and he lifts me and he brushes me off, but he kisses me too, so it seems like I'm still dreaming, but I'm not, he's really doing this, even with all the blood. It's no obstacle. Blood never seems to be the obstacle people make of it.

I think of how forward some of these country people are and then I think I'm a country person too, even if I run. I kiss him back, the stranger, I kiss him back and still I run away.