Revy clutched the tiny bag close to his chest by fading daylight.
Cars whirred by beneath and off to join the sunset where it blurred wide and low across the skyline. He took in the scene, leaning out a little from an overpass, then shrugged and stumbled slightly farther on.
Should he take another from the bag? Was he bored enough yet?
Words were scribbled then to an open, rumpled page, definitely in someone else’s handwriting.
A talking vegetable.
Smiling to impress u.
Carrot.
Dancing with teddy bears.
Space.
Dinosaurs.
Planets of peace.
A smiley fish tipping his hat.
Be there.
“Be there” was enough.
Another down, and the chalky bitterness made him shudder worse than a sudden shot of liquor.
Then another.
Why not?
But shouldn’t he be hiding better from all those hazy faces down in cars? Wouldn’t they be looking up to see? He was famous, wasn’t he?
Oh yeah.
A hand like Revy’s began to twitch and vibrate sideways again, capturing more words before their meaning could begin to wrest his spangled mind’s approval. The wrist shook like a flimsy reed, drawing his gaze down to partly watch as black scurried but failed to fully fill in dingy white.
Liquid worms on screens, flashing.
Chipmunk-faced detectors on ships, looking at us.
I see them.
Hahaahhaa.
They are alien spirit robots from the future, all rolled into one.
It’s whatever we want it to be (whatever we want it to be).
For a moment, Revy saw himself skirting the pavement, dirty, and draining what remained from the last of his special medicine. And there would be no more, he knew. For designer drugs were just one of the perks reserved for signed recording artists instead of aging flakes, lost and wasted, roaming city streets alone.
‘Talking vegetable’…? What the…?
The cars became as comets once the sun was laid at last to rest. And Revy’s clump of frayed-edged papers, torn from the back of his old spiral notebook, made for more of a mess than the trash he saw scattered in most directions. Still, he gripped the bunches tightly, each page almost filled with . . . what? Pieces of spaced-out visions, or…? But there was only a deep, deep throbbing left . . . a strobe tied to all sides of his soul.
Then another’s voice. But the voice lowered and became his own as that now familiar foreign hand scrambled once more to close the gap and take a final corner.
UUUUUUUUOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Who gave it a gun, ma?
Who let it write that just now?
That’s what I was looking for.
A person inside the person.
A hidden connection.
This could be a song.
Or this could be your life.
You write poems now from the inside!
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, THAT CAN’T GO THERE!!!!!!
You’re writing about writing again, JOURNAL! JOURNAL! JOURNAL!
NO SHUT UP.
THEY’RE WATCHING YOU.
NO U HAD TO SAY ALL THIS (no u had to say all this).
This was all part of it.
But you missed half of it (all part of it).
But u missed half of it (all part of it).
Revy wheeled around and forced his soft-shod feet to continue their rustling, now a little quicker.
Home!
He had to go, not that the bitch there would much care either way. Who was this one, anyway?
Well…
Revy caught a vivid picture of himself slapping Jodie, her mannish hands rising in dumb, instinctual defense.
He could scream at her in his mind. But she was as gone as his band, and his songs, and his…
What are lyrics? What are songs?
The questions were a swarm of ticks that had bit, and dug, and latched, and threatened to never ever release or die.
And there was that strange new voice again. A woman’s voice. A voice he knew he never would have heard, if only…
But it was only that he didn’t understand it yet, right . . . and hadn’t quite worked out that secret age-old combination for what music with words was meant to even be?
Journals about his dissolving life, and/or scribbles of what his disappearing drugs might show, seemed worlds apart from whatever it was that just sort of happened whenever he simply rose to greet the sound of his guitar . . . that grand old union serving always to call him outward from all his silly stabs at explanation to embark on new adventures, raw and primal, and…
Tired, but he reached to almost touch an age-old freedom . . . maybe the only constant to transcend a world where trends kept shifting, leaving age by age to whine while passing through in past others’ noisy shadows and lame dust.
It was the searching . . . the reaching . . . that alone was real. And it was all Revy had ever really wanted. But how could he hope to find its shattered pieces once again?
Or had it ever really been?
I don't know anything 