Getting There

A frustrated road poem

We are back on the road, gone too late and coming back too soon.

Our Home Away From Hospital, and this time, for some reason, we're driving the Ambulance ourselves. 15 under and too fast, we are getting there shaken. Nervous.

We want to love this.

We want to love it so bad, it is feeling like hate.

It isn't just this trip. The trip is a metaphor, of course, a metaphor for life. Not LIFE all caps broad wonder, I mean this life, my life, our little universe of trash and travel and talking to the void for a living.

It isn't bad, in fact it's so good it's nauseating.

Too sweet to sit with too long, so we stir and drive and wonder - is this really it?

All the carbon pressed time and philosophizing just to get here dressed like this?

Happy couple in a trash heap?

Black cat in an old RV?

Chatgpt prompt come to life and hungry.

Attention please. Me no want real job, only money thanks.

Is that too honest enough? Is it enough at all? Not to have, but to reach for.

Contentment is not meant to dampen what we dream of, only to temper what we get.

We are reaching creatures by nature and the lesson is not to wither away, but to root in. To settle the self, lower beneath the canopy, if we cannot yet be the dirt, then be the trunk, the roots.

Flail your limbs reaching until desire snaps them, cast loose the selves not suited to high winds.

It is okay to reach and fail and break. It is okay to want something you don't get. What you can’t let creep in, is wanting something you won't have or shouldn’t.

To reach and hope and want to get and miss, is not the same place as not-having and still wanting and wanting. It is a subtle sense, a slight shift, but an important distinction for those of us who've long strapped ourselves to contentment's sinking ship.

It is a hell of a drift, but the ship never sinks. Hand over fist, even Sysiphus is bucket bailing sick of this, but the ship don't sink.

She won't and don't know how.

So neither do we.

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Thanks for reading y’all,

Alex