Poem: "Back To The World"
Back To The World
I like to get drunk and believe in the identity
of my soul, and I like
to drive down the street, going nowhere,
and fall in love with people I see walking.
And then, in the A/C'ed cooler, big truck with big wheels,
I make up poems, rhyme imaginary names
with the rhythm of the pavement.
I've had a hundred husbands and wives that way.
I've made love to beautiful people, beautiful
strange people, people who are beautiful
and braided, twisted, gnarled as old trees,
people young and old and beautiful. I have
turned up the radio to the electric yowl of a guitar
and to the blues, and sometimes to
the surrealism of anti-folk and Axl
and made a soundtrack for the road.
I want to sing it to you, not with my voice, but with my wheels.
I want to take you away from here, you and the little
smiling princess, my daughter, and pack our lives into the back seat,
and find the horizon together. Someday we will, someday
there will be lights in our hair that are not streetlights,
will be salt under our feet that is the ocean, not the
litter-seeding of trucks frightened of a rainstorm in winter.
I want to hold you by the fireside, clean and sober,
want to listen to our baby make up new songs of her own,
want to watch her take the first steps of permission
for us to someday lay ourselves down and rest when she is grown
and know we've made the world just that much better for her presence.
This is a gypsy life we lead, you love it well,
like I do, like our daughter will. This is a happy life
we lead, though it is hard, though it is scattered.
This is life, life, and I am more alive with you
than with myself, and we are more alive ourselves
when we are laughing in the evening by a fire pit,
chasing dogs into the woods and chasing children
up the stairway with a towel yelling not to get the mattress wet...
And oh, I miss a life I never led sometimes, and oh,
how good and how hard and how perfect it will be
when we go back to the world again.
I like to get drunk and believe in the identity
of my soul, and I like
to drive down the street, going nowhere,
and fall in love with people I see walking.
And then, in the A/C'ed cooler, big truck with big wheels,
I make up poems, rhyme imaginary names
with the rhythm of the pavement.
I've had a hundred husbands and wives that way.
I've made love to beautiful people, beautiful
strange people, people who are beautiful
and braided, twisted, gnarled as old trees,
people young and old and beautiful. I have
turned up the radio to the electric yowl of a guitar
and to the blues, and sometimes to
the surrealism of anti-folk and Axl
and made a soundtrack for the road.
I want to sing it to you, not with my voice, but with my wheels.
I want to take you away from here, you and the little
smiling princess, my daughter, and pack our lives into the back seat,
and find the horizon together. Someday we will, someday
there will be lights in our hair that are not streetlights,
will be salt under our feet that is the ocean, not the
litter-seeding of trucks frightened of a rainstorm in winter.
I want to hold you by the fireside, clean and sober,
want to listen to our baby make up new songs of her own,
want to watch her take the first steps of permission
for us to someday lay ourselves down and rest when she is grown
and know we've made the world just that much better for her presence.
This is a gypsy life we lead, you love it well,
like I do, like our daughter will. This is a happy life
we lead, though it is hard, though it is scattered.
This is life, life, and I am more alive with you
than with myself, and we are more alive ourselves
when we are laughing in the evening by a fire pit,
chasing dogs into the woods and chasing children
up the stairway with a towel yelling not to get the mattress wet...
And oh, I miss a life I never led sometimes, and oh,
how good and how hard and how perfect it will be
when we go back to the world again.