Out from the car stereo blares talk radio:
politics, sports, what, I guess, amounts to culture,
or whatever. I'm not listening with vested interest,
so much as I'm just hearing it.
Sometimes it's calming
to let someone else do the talking.
Give the voices in my head a rest.
Like cooling jets, we know they're going to scream later.
Running on fumes, fired up for a red-eye flight.
We'll bleed in caffeine, intravenously.
But for now it's cathartic
to let men mull over rhetoric.
It doesn't need to be insightful, genius, educated,
or even intelligible, just audible, expression, right off the chest.
Too much time is spent locked inside our heads,
staring down the pen at a desk.
It all runs together. It's incoherent, hardened into cement.
We pound our fists and heads into it to break it into dust;
individual thoughts. It's insane.
But that's what happens when you put too much into your thoughts.
You coat your lungs with the dust, and cake your eyes with dry blood.
I find it stabilizing
to be locked in a car driving,
letting other men send words over radio signals.
Whatever topic. Most I'd find nauseating in most circumstances,
but I can't care, because they're not real to me
when alone with their simple, enthusiastic tone.
When I switch over to lyrical marrow
under the radio:
Kozelek, Gira, Lanegan, Cave...
Westerberg, Pollard, Broadrick, Hoen.
Their words are therapy, AA,
a place to go and know I'm not alone
in some small hope.
