journal 30/04/11 (california)
A re-intrusion of the coast; or, rather, a never-leaving of it, turquoise-grey shadowbands & a sparkling continuum of our exterior lives. Here is one road, flat + rising, a glot of taquerias and you sun-golden licking chicken-oil from your fingers. Sand fills my boots & together we staunch nosebleeds under white turbines in the desert, run dizzily into a lifting landscape of sorbet red, your skin a pastel totem as in the wind-hashed night, a softer aura of Bombardiers & pink flamingoes continuously alight. Late leaving town, we sleep by oceans, roll in with killed engine & lapse back into movement quick before dawn. We become fluent in kilometre winds & thieving; your skin gathers salt in its divots & with time we acquire the slow tenacity that brings woodland animals to unflinchingly eat hummus & tomatoes out of our hands. More & more, I am inclined to stay — that is, remain in worldly flux with you as my singular anchor and/or constant. Even now, with you gone arcingly ahead of me, I am inclined to follow in flaring path, the greater suffusion of joy in my interior cubbyholes becoming a lingering and/or permanent healthy bombast of nebular colour telescoping, sweet-alinged, & vast as the American sky.
The toes of your tennis shoes dust-red from the courts that you fucked me on; the small vessels in my eyes becoming forever more pronounced with our feckless, sleepless nights, shivering long & richly thru pink neon & a whiskey finish, reclining lovingly beneath signs that give a sweetness & stupidity to expiring for love. Yes, you left me alone in San Francisco, but I will see you in a day — will meanwhile only think of you in fluorescent & uncannily bellying scoops of light. I’ve built a nest in you in a variety of places — most worryingly at a wind-rocked lot around which nothing but yellow fields begin & then slaggishly culminate, most gloriously at a bend in the road where the world seemed to continue in single image for good.
We began our voyage on the thin road to Big Sur & yet finished in switchback somewhere entirely different, myself freshly showered & stalking deer across short grass. “West Coast America is better imagined within the Pacific Rim region,” an expansive salty area linked by the everfold of ocean upon which my love like a tanker heavily slides. Josh, this is a crazy thing, the microcosm of your thighs riding a bike to the slim heights of the Haight, the forever action of your hand putting our initials into a tree as I sit in a sun-lanced field of basil, loving & forever loving you. The Infinite City after the real infinite city, LA sun-baked & strangely quiet, you and I sitting in windowsills in the Indio desert heat, sharing a beer and a couple of cigarettes as our friends roll blunts in an In-n-Out tray on the bed. Sure, I cried when The National played right through a desert valley sunset; it was only because I felt so happy, so whole, so giddily world-spent & suddenly attuned to the great slice of time that we all trashed & rushed through together, friends for life & true love just hurtling around the corner, something bright & crazily solid & wavering peripherally in the fat desert heat.
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Accepted into The Cheaper Show — if you’re in Vancouver this beautiful summer, I hope I’ll see you there!
