Tales of Brave Ulysses

Lost all I had to lose & landed in a truck outside of Zoorleans.   Everything looked like pictures cut out of an old magazine & they’d been tacked up in the sun & rain so long they were rippled & faded & you had to have some kind of imagination to figure them out.   I was knee-deep in emancipation & swampwater & didn’t have the time or the sense left to imagine much of anything.   I let the road reel me in.

Suffused in bygones, all waving & unused, I drove as far as that ’64 El Camino would carry me.   It died an untimely death in the Mississippi mud & I left it there.   I wound up selling my surfboard to a black lady in Jackson.   I think she was psychic.   I shuffled around for just about a month until I felt the Pacific calling me back & so the road.   A nightmare bus to Baton Rouge & the thumb from there to Houston & somehow further.   A badass vato on meth wanted to kill me in Las Cruces.   Maybe he did.   I can’t remember.

Albuquerque looked like Dakar at dawn, or Juarez at nightfall.   I remember spending a night in Tucson.   There were locusts as big as your foot wandering the streets & climbing the old adobe walls & cinder block.   The stars crashed down into abandoned Navajo pagodas where Keats died.   The plastic minimarts selling pulque & beef jerky & fuck magazines.   You just have to keep walking.   Bullet holes in the roadside saguaro, bullet holes in discarded beer cans, bullet holes in everything, including the sky.   The Aztec gypsy surrealist said, “You been gone a long time”.   “Naw,” I said, “Not so long.”   “Well, you will be soon enough.”

I had a long conversation with a lizard outside of Tempe.   His eyes were silver & he quoted William Blake quite a bit.   I got bored & started to refer to him as Jim Morrison.   He didn’t like that & after a while he scampered off into the brush & I caught a ride to L.A. with a drunken Mexican & a whore from Vegas.   They were in love.