free filigree

There’s a boy who comes from the dead side of town. He walks down the back-lit, half-burnt alleyways in which old hobos holler on their old guitars, drinking whiskey and singing to him of the life that has passed them and him by. His profile is bright, that light creating a halo around him, as if someone had taken his photograph and etched out the details around his edges. There’s the general feeling about him (it seems to jump from his eyes, slide off his clothes onto the things he brushes against) that cries for the end of these songs that he’s always hearing, these self-absorbed ballads of despair and unworthy destruction of all that might have once been worthy. But today he is not bothered by this. He’s decided that it’s time to move on down the train tracks, to that point at which they meet on the horizon, where he’s heard nobody knows your name, and no one hides their own shame. He’s got it bad, that itch that must be scratched, that drives you crazy in bed when you know that you still haven’t earned your night’s sleep, that you just ain’t quite done what you have to do, that there’s some other action that you must bring into this world before you are allowed to pass into another. He often wonders if he’s already passed into that other world, and if this whole time he’s been trying to go back, if he’s been always as long as he can remember stuck at that point of infinity where those two parallel lines meet, where the dead has composed and rotted long enough to become the food for the living. What lies in the West he knows not, but the life of the East, of the men who do not sleep but live in their dreams, yes, this draws him on. For to the East lies the beginning, the fresh birth that smells of newly cut grass and spring rains, where the hobos drink strong whiskey and play fine guitars, singing of the falling-apart of the world as they know it, singing of the apocalypse and crying for the life that is… we’re all hoping for the end, all holding onto the beginning. Who wants the destination, when the road is so difficult? But he sees his reflection on the clear nights, in that ruddy light cast by the planets upon the pothole puddles, and then he feels that solitude in which you know that you’re the only person in your head, not even anybody else’s voices or songs or feelings or saying or thinkings, just you and your realization that you are.