Blind Shepherd
My head hits the desk, lightly and lovely.
I'm blaring Sisters of Mercy through the computer speakers.
I smell leather. I see back twelve years.
...and I like it.
Sometimes, if I reach that place, that perfect point of blown away by a combination of liquor and random chemicals. The way a black lace n' patent leather child of the night might have felt streched out over a dirty matress with a screwdriver in his hand. Nik Fiend in the eyelids and Johnny Depp in the eyes.
I smell leather, and I'm on my knees. And it is my perfect place because I am in total control, with no control. I am free. I can do anything I want and I choose to do this. I can hear the thunder of the speakers in the middle of the day and I sleep sore, ripped apart by the club that night, bathed in sweat. I am surrounded by shallow depth and the same desperate seeking for the spot you just can't reach that fires up into the night and makes people dance in the street, drink wine from the bottle and fuck a stranger.
I smell leather, and I see the road.
Hundreds of miles passing under tires. I see city after city after city. The East Coast and the West Coast war on the place to be. The west has Portland, San-Fran-Fucking-Cisco (to which I've never been) and the only real natural disaster you fear is "the big one" and if that happens, well...
...fuckit.
Oh my beloved East Coast, where I spent most of my formative years. Ah the Big Easy. Now there I've been. Miami, a party in the heat, sunrise on the beach, black cuffs rolled up to my knees and a lace shirt on the first night a person ever asked me-
-if I was a boy or a girl.
I smell leather, I feel heat. I see the road.
I know that Lindsey will be angry that I took my backpack, my sleeping pad. Those things were fucking expensive. I'm pretty sure she meant to keep them.
And I think of a promise I made to myself a long time ago. That I would pack up, step outside, and walk north...
Just north, stopping where I can, going on retreat with the Monks and all that pathetic hipster bullshit.
Maybe to atone, maybe just to live. Perhaps I'm just dreaming.
But I'm your average corporate hack now, and I can pull down mad cash if I really really have to. It's the mild reward for the chains of the man after all.
In a month I could save over a thousand.
In two, perhaps enough to get by for months. A year.
All the ones I love hate me, and all the ones that love me I am afraid of breaking.
I want to know if I'm black as midnight or bright as the sun. I've been thoroughly convinced of both and each time proved wrong.
I don't know if I'm being born anymore or I'm dying.