8. They Paved Paradise

Can’t sleep. Head’s splitting with words. Linked connections running

inky roots feeling

for overspillage

or is it

slippage?

Short bouts of dry-heaves shake me in fits and starts… and the feelings behind the words…

Bite back, swallow hard: it’s what I do thesedays.

Bite back, swallow hard: to keep from drowning.

Nib poised hooklike fishing words out into the light letters spilling onto the paper splashing. Words. Pages and pages of paragraphs. Not bad for a person who hasn’t spoken more than one or two short sentences at a time

(is that Mahler on the radio?)

eversince

.

.

(no, too morose)

But now isn’t the time. Spin dial. It’s America.

Ventura Highway

in the sunshine

where the days are longer, the nights are stronger than moonshine

you’re gonna go, I know

‘cause a free wind’s blowin through your hair

and the day surrounds your daylight there

freedom’s crying no despair

alligator lizards in the air

.

Trip to the bathroom to pee can’t get a grip slippery hands yet the words keep coming like a chain-gang of dusty men under a heavy sun sweating black marks across these pages quicker than I can turn them. Swallow harder. Repeatedly. The way you do to stop your eardrums popping when the plane plummets in for a landing. But the words fight their way back defiantly like healthy salmon leaping against the current. I gulp again with two fingers down my throat - Upchuck City
.
… here we come… where happy days we count on thumbs… and nothing ever gets us down… How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
.

Wordsminglewave at length at the ones oozingketchuplikeslow through the speaker. Joni Mitchell:

.

Don’t it always seem to go

you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone

they paved paradise

put up a parking lot.

.

Successfully counting cars crawling the street outside: unsuccessfully counting down to abeyance. Sleep is a far-off land I can’t get to from here. What to do? Sick of TV and books. To do what? Wrestle helplessly with hopeless restlessness while awkward boredom abounds?