Nomad's Land

A poem observing the nature of writer and the human need to run.

She left, 6:48 AM,
an airplane from Frisco,
simply to return in a week,
I have never understood vacations.
the act of conscious escape,
then willing recapture,
by the ebb and flow of real life.

Call me an escapist,
the idea doesn’t appeal.
I wish in early morning reverie
and somnambulistic midnight palpitations of dream
to throw off the chains of responsibility
my mid-day-and-mid-night 
single crimson stream of consciousness
leading from my pre-frontal cortex to an early grave.

To hew through these chains
like a mad prisoner in the wilderness of Tennessee
hack-sawed hallelujahs,
the precursor to slipping grips
and rough shod amputations.

Like the negro of the 19th century,
I scream for freedom.
My soul sings spirituals,
calling out to God, Jah, Buddha, Jehovah,
whoever will sit down and listen,
deity or day-tramp,
praying for change as the sun
drunkenly trundles to bed.

I am the perpetual Houdini
and like him too the great escape will elude me
and I will die drowning in handcuffs
of my own machination.

To preface, I have vacationed before
left and returned to many places
I was unable, still am unable, to call home.
Each time I wished for a slow burning plane crash
to tenderly deposit me somewhere new.

I need a change of scenery
my mindset bleeds for the land locked blues.
My mind is set.
The day I leave California,
I’m building a bridge and burning it behind me.

I feel as home on a kitchen floor,
roach-motel, or equally roach infested mattress in a friends garage,
as I do at “home.”
I am a homebody for homes not my own.

Abandoned houses and burned out storefronts,
are the Hilton and Ritz and Tiffany’s of my generation.
We sleep in places of abandon, with equal abandon;
because it is the closest we have to being free.

We wander the dusky faced night,
our faces as pricked and be-thorned 
with man-child stubble, as the night sky
is with glittering stars and patchy clouds.
We wander the hallways and avenues,
the corridors of the house of night,
with strange ideas and stranger haircuts.

Left-handed homicidal hack jobs,
like civil war surgeries, 
we barely made out alive.
Frames of reference cut with scissors,
fabric and nail, and razors,
both electric and eclectic.

In public bathrooms, back yards,
and over winding park rivers
near places we never called home.
Each cut an exercise in spontaneity and insanity,
paying not a cent, so as to save
for cigarettes, drugs and booze.

We are magnificent, starry eyed dreamers,
Just sane enough to live,
but mad enough for the world to notice us.

Is it the madness that draws us together,
or the mad negro spirituals of our souls,
screams to Gods, named and nameless,

“Set me free, oh Thou monikered madman
He (or She) who waits among roses,
and stars, and the mischievous smiles
of rapscallious children who play
beyond the keep out signs, 
You oh pseudonymous lord of madness and motion,
set me free lest I die.”

One day I think we will all be free,
perhaps I am wrong.

For now, a half chill cup of cafe-au-lait,
brewed stanza’s ago,
swirls of rising congealed cream
like gasoline in parking lots
3:00 AM, illuminated by passing headlights
tires screaming a freedom song of their own 
towards highway 99,
sits beside me a constant companion.

To stave off the ice creeping into my legs and toes,
as I sit in glassed-over-snotty-eyed conjuration,
hammering endless nothings,
of freedom and travel and friendship,
or escape and hair and bridges,

simply wishing she was here.
To kiss my half shadowed, stubble wrecked cheeks,
run her hands cross my knotted back
and tell me to put on some socks,
before I die of hypothermia like a damned fool.

By Torrin A. Greathouse