Languid, At Times

I think it's very lucky for me that my car knows the way home. I strap myself in and start the engine and the car, suddenly aware of its purpose, takes off and I sit back and wrap a layer of dense radiance around my head, covering my eyes and I don't come out until the car is parked and idling, waiting for another cue or to be turned off and locked up. It sleeps then, its hard shell turned out, for this city is no longer as safe as it once was, dreaming of roads it has never seen. It hears and communicates within the hum of trucks and vans and small compact cars that ribbon the highways and wander aimlessly down black roads, across a world barren and empty, thought so, simply, because there are no roads to investigate the damp underbelly of the earth. Among them there are braggarts who tell wildly implausible stories about deep forests, still and intact and demanding tribute, but how is this possible? There are no paths but those that ring this city and those that reach across the wastes to the other cities. Above all it stares, dimly into the future, hopelessly denied any glimpse of life after the stock yard and the compressor. And the night passes thus, half remembered and never understood until the sun comes and warms the metal and sneaks through the glass to fade the leather and crack the dashboard. Some days it sits alone, endlessly mistaking the noises it hears for a command to drive, waiting until nightfall and again slipping into the cacophonous dreams of cluttered highways, and sometimes of clear nights chasing stars while I sit wrapped in radiance riding on the back of a beast whose sole purpose is to travel and wait and to travel and wait.