The Next Town

The road is endless possibilities

The road is what you force it to be

The road is unjust cruelties

The road is home to me

The road is honest.

The road means being on your own,

sometimes

The road is ever changing, with sharp unforeseen turns

And washouts and crashes and crooked cops and flaming fires and ripping floods and radical heat waves

where the nights do not cool down

And the AC compressor belt snaps

The milk becomes warm and sour

So you head east again

Windows down, sweating the whole way

to The Next Town

And whatever the road to it brings

The road.

Unscheduled turmoil

Unwanted excitement

Unusual love affairs

And Unfortunate, inevitable

Loss

It’s plagued by poison oak rashes encroaching the groin, parasite infections inflaming the legs, dysentery, thieves, strange mormons with their convictions, depraved border agents, crooks with and without badges

But, it’s graced with double decker hammocking in the redwoods overlooking the Pacific, warm ocean skinny dipping with a new lover, shared meals and beds with strangers, long hugs after lonely months, hysterical laughter, knowing and understanding new people and places and music, late night tears of joy, and pure-childlike happiness

The road is the treasure chest

The possibilities

It’s Allons,Tennessee tonight,

but it may as well be

The Middle of the Sea

Last week in Middle Minnesota,

the girl you tried to seduce,

the one who met you at your ramshackle motel room at ten

and liked you the night before

And told you secrets

And gave you kisses

Is heading awkwardly out the door

You scared her somehow

Maybe she saw through the fake smile

Maybe she’d been tricked before by someone on the road

Someone that left for the next town the next morning

On the road you find love

Almost as often as you lose it

There is nothing quite like falling in love on the road

With women you know you’ll never see again

But somehow, god, or luck or something like fate

Brought you both together in the strangest place

An Icelandic lawyer in Costa RIca

An Italian on the run in Edinburgh

A German Teacher in Switzerland

A starry-eyed French Canadian in Colombia

A model, movie star, singer

and your best friend

She was from

from Michigan

The perfect girl

All of them,

At the moment in time

You’ve only got just that weekend, or night, or harvest, or winter

To live out a lifetime together

You ride all of the usual waves of romance

All in hyperspeed

And it is equally as intense as it is precipitous

The Goodbye’s become dulled after the first dozen.

On the road the food tastes better

It is better

Like fried Crocodile in Baton Rouge

And cold cuts on the shore of lake Michigan in the summer swelter

And candy bar dinners at rest stops under the bright lights when the blizzard halts progress

And three course meals in France

Mushroom stew in Ukraine

Chicken with Rice in a Colombian Jail

Pinot Noir Straight from the Barrel….

But sometimes there are frozen nights in Utah

Where nothing is open and the snow is unrelenting

And you're aching for food and rest

And then, yet again

you feel that you're very far from anywhere and everyone

People out on the road are genuine

But sometimes genuinely scary.

But that’s the best part of the road. It’s what you don’t know.

It’s the possibilities.

What may happen if you strike up a conversation in a bad bar

Or ask a stranger for help on a hot day

Or apply - on a whim after some beer-

at at the best restaurant in the entire damn state,

three Michelin stars

It’s where the politicians, the winners, and musicians eat.

And you feel an imposter

‘Yes, sir, Good Evening, Would you Prefer, Can I interest you in…’

Your all showered and shaved and wearing deodorant

Looking impressive

Going to bed each night early

Rising before the sun

Yearning for the day you’ll quit

Give back the choking collared shirt the require you wear

And head out

On the road

For the Next Town

When you tempt fate

and ignore all inhibition

And warnings and signs and doubt

And live life out on a limb

Always extending your own olive branch

Finding Silver Linings

And storing them

You're going to need ‘em

The road is a place for gamblers

For people that double down helplessly

There are many losers on the road.

When things go right you’ll feel like a rockstar

And you’ll start dressing like a rockstar

And making love like a rockstar

When things go wrong you'll feel like a castaway

stranded on the far side of the moon

The earth and everyone on it

are out of sight

And on your mind.

Everyone on the road loses sometimes.

Sometimes the loss is big.

Sometimes the bummer days come back to back to back

Your body even begins to reject you each morning

Aching from nothing

Hope is a black hole

Cold, in another parking lot alone

Drinking the rain leaking in so it doesn’t soak your bed

Wondering why your still out on the run

Still running.

Still trying.

And, then, you decide it’s time to go back

To say hello to Mom

And to Nick and Tayler too

And you apologize to a lady you once loved and twice cheated

But she doesn’t care anymore

And your friends listen to your stories

But they don't hear them

the way that you want

them to hear them

You tell them of wild parties in London

Of making love to an Ghanaian princess near Bourbon Street

Of winning big in a Scottish casino, twice in the same night

Of getting lost on a salt flat in the Atacama desert near Chile

You tell them about

The cold nights and the warm sunsets

And the good moods and the bad highs

Of how cool you really are...

A modern day Kerouac,

You proclaim

Confidently,

in vain

And they tell you about a mortgage

And of savings

And settling down

And being content

And they tell you they found true love

And they have a career

And they’re going to camp near the beach next holiday weekend

And they want kids

And they take the dog for a walk at dusk when it cools

And they water the plants methodically

Conserving

Planning

And that all seems foreign to you

And you wonder how they can be content

staying in the same town all these years

And you wonder if you're secretly jealous.

If secretly you’ve always wanted all those things

Stability

But, you’ve always run at the first scent of normalcy

Never trusting totally

Always lusting liberally

Leaving

Searching

Gambling with love, life, and happiness

On the run

On the road

With blind faith that someday soon you'll hit the jackpot in life

And prove to everyone you were right all along

That you had a path

They just couldn't see it

Each time you return home from The Road

You have fewer friends

And fading relationships with family

People grow tired of the guy who’s always leaving

And the guy leaving eventually grows tired of coming back

And this is the crossroads where you realize that

the road is your home

And there is no going back anymore

There is no back anymore.

But, you’ll be okay

The Next Town

That’s where everything will work out.

You feel it

That’s where you’ll fall in love, again

Find a dream job,

Make real money

Find out what ‘real’ money is

A job where you wear a suit and tie

And fool everyone you know

Everyone Back There

Fool them into thinking your grand plan has come to fruition

Finally.

But this is all an act in the play

A wave you caught by chance

Because inevitably

Just as soon as things calm down

And you learn those winding city streets

And have friends to visit on off days

And the bartenders know your drink

And everything feels right and steady

The woman starts hinting at next steps

The job offers a raise and manager position

It’s all going well

It’s all calm and stable

It’s all so...

Mundane

Boring

Flat

Limp

Docile

Domesticated

Easy

Total Monotony…..

It’s Another Cul-de-sac

You either plan on parking or make the U-turn out

Because the love wasn’t all that

The city wasn’t all that

This job

This suit and tie

That new girl

The mild winter weather

None of it is stimulating anymore.

I never feel quite as good as the moment that I merge onto the highway

Navigation set for Away

Leaving everything and everyone behind in that old town

All the problems that water down existence

The 9-5, the suit and tie,

the commitments, appointments, and the disappointments

All those little stresses evaporate at eighty on the interstate north

Pedal to the floor.

I could afford the speeding ticket now

Heading again towards endless potential

I feel hope again

Happy again

Absolute Freedom

Total trust, at least in that moment,

That whatever comes next will be better

It’s just me

En route to somewhere new

The next town

Where there are no limits to what may happen

A new happiest year perhaps

A new hardest laugh

A new, technicolor layer to love

The next Town

That’s where it will all make sense.

And the road to it,

the free place always accepting me again when I’ve given again up in every Next Town

The Road.

Home.