Swerve

After midnight the late shift starts. The street is quiet for a short moment, you pour a glass and find the music that will pull the generations out of you. Allow it to pass over you, swirl alongside the alcohol and scratch its nails across the flimsy scars you've built to cover wounds that would not heal. It tugs at your heartstrings and sifts through the pools of blood to discover morsels of words about what it is to be what you are. A deadline looms, and you are never better than at the precipice.

A hundred and fifty years ago people made a great journey across the ocean and were never allowed to look back. You looked back so many times you eventually straddled the globe and never could rest.  Some days I think I am not lost anymore, that the tendrils turned to roots and I belong to the world, but I am only kidding myself. On a cool summer night of twilight until dawn, on a wide highway through the western deserts, when my language skips a track and I do not hear it, when I see that holding on to the roots in this soil means burning the ones that came before, I know that I am just as lost a child as ever, perpetually wandering the planet in search of a feeling that is no longer available to me. I sleep well, these days, I sleep fine, and you can't even tell I don't belong even when you look closely.

But I've been homeless for years and I don't know how to make it right.