notes from a waking

immortality is two kids smoking cigarettes by the side of the highway in a small roadside town. this is nowhere. this is where you come to leave your bones.

you never open all the way up. you explain yourself using the voice you were given.

you turn irish when you talk about your parents. you decorate curiosities to avoid the truth. you vanish into mobile homes, old trucks for sale, daytime headlights, miller’s point, something she said to you at a back gate. three birds glide along the hubcaps as you pass cemetery road. you promise yourself that you’re going to kill something in yourself as you slip over the lane lines. you’re a weary whistle-stop. gray’s river. hull creek. corrugated roof. a bench no one has sat on for years. you wait on yourself and then you go away.