From my window:
The sun
On a hot, cracked day
Of dry and gusting spring
Shone only to blister
The land that god forsook.
From my window:
A lonely horse grazed
Amongst the ragged dirt
For the remains of neglected hay
And chased, in dashed hopes,
Passers by.
This land and city that bore me
Into this land
And drew me back
After I too had left it
Trembles in spring's dry heat,
And the dusty wind
Catches in my eye.
I walked along the gravel drive
To dispatch the mail today.
The wind blew my hair behind me
One way, and before me
Going back.
The sky's as pale as a dead man;
That faded, strangled blue.
Nice.
Especially the last lines.
Makes me think how every day dies, as we slowly erode back to dirt.
And yet it's all still beautiful because of the words we can use to describe what catches our eye.
__________________ Time is still the infinite jest.
Thank you. I hate Lubbock, though. It's one of the bleakest, boringest places on earth. I remember the day I wrote this, not the precise date, but I remember the day. It was windy as all hell, and hot. We had a dry spring, and the reddish dirt deadened the sparse green of whatever plants had blossomed. The grass was green, but it was crisp underfoot. I took the mail the fifty yards out to the mailbox at the edge of the property, my shirt billowing in the wind. I felt like I could get airborne if I played my cards right, blown out and away above the bare cotton fields and the patches of trailer houses that stretch for miles and miles to the south, eventually giving way to prairie grass and nothingness and Midland.
I fought my way through the wind as I walked back, grit sticking in my eyes and getting in behind my contact lenses. It hurt. My hair was filled with dirt when I got back in, but I felt too defeated to take a shower at that moment. Sat down at the table to smoke, and I watched the horse across the field to the east of my house. He had, a week before, begun standing at the gate to his paddock, lowering his neck and swinging his head back and forth. It was one of the saddest damned things I had ever seen; he was so lonely and mad with boredom. No one ever went to check on him or anything unless they were putting feed out for him, once every two days. Every time a truck drove by on the little dirt road near the gate, he would chase after it and then just stand at the far corner of his paddock, watching it as it left him in dust. That's when I wrote that, as I was looking at that poor fucking horse and severely overidentifying with his existence.
He was bored and trapped, which I understood entirely. Living here, I think if you can call it that, is the simple act of being bored and trapped. I think that's why people here act the way they do, why people in this town beat the shit out of each other at more than twice the national average per capita, why so many people just give up and get old and die before they're seventy. But no one is willing to change it. Most people who don't succumb to the quiet apathy this town engenders have sense and means enough to run far away from it. No one really worth two shits stays here, and if they do, whatever was good and dynamic about them dies slowly as time and stark boredom and the attitudes of the walking dead grind them down and turn them into just another Lubbock person.
Growing up, that was always my biggest fear, that one day I would be like that, old and broken before my time with five kids and a fat hick husband who fucks strange women at bars because it wears on him, too, and that's the only way he knows to feel something anymore.
And then I got out. Two years and three months in the LA metro area and then three months homeless in Mendocino County. It all ended when I decided it was getting too cold to be a bum anymore, and my only recourse was coming back to this town.
That poor fucking horse, I see it everywhere.
And the winds, and dry hot sands mingling and mixing into our tears. I feel it.
I will not miss it here.
Probably why Robert Plant didn't write, "Going to Lubbock with an achin' in my heart."
Right now, I am also dreaming about a warm valley of the sun.
Some paradise lost.
__________________ Time is still the infinite jest.
