roadblocks.

you open your eyes and it’s dark. you can see a cherry glow radiating beneath the window covers; the glow, it comes from an alien aircraft or the christmas lights i still keep on though it’s april. you can open the covers once in a while, most often annually, and you’d see the unfinished rotting boards, aged grass and the sun, sometimes masses of snow and a snowmen army. across the room there’s a doorway and a bed and two tables. you could sleep in the bed and it would be the most comfortable bed you’d ever find, resembling something like silk or hay or stone with satin sheets and too many pillows and not enough covers.
you’d slip from the warmed bed to the cold oddly padded floor that feels like puppy feet and fluffy socks and wonder if it’s really hardwood or linoleum or if it was your meth induced hallucinations and drunken laughter that made you think it was hardwood from when you crawled in just after dawn this morning.
the desk that elevates the glowing red numbers from the clock radio (reading 5:14) could make you ponder curiosities of whether the bed is too low or the desk too high or perhaps, even you yourself, are just not tall or short enough, enough of something, maybe not stoned enough or drunk enough. maybe even too drunk or too stoned.
you attempt to enunciate yourself to someone in the dark, someone you can’t see, someone who probably isn’t there but your words are slurred and tedious and sluggish. they're messy and harsh like lemons. you find drool on your pillows, on your cheek and his hands. it's warm and gooey like friendly familiar interesting juices being excreted from somewhere down south. if you weren’t afraid you’d taste it and discover tropical tangy flavors of oranges and pineapples and something with a core or pit. after the enunciations the breathy enthusiastic words of backseats and backdoors and unlearned jobs, coming like bolded bubbles in a comic, would inveigle the dark silence you mastered through time.
suddenly you’d find yourself in a different place, a different timezone, millions and billions of miles away, possibly in the dry plains of africa or somewhere in the deep end of the bermuda or in a sunset along the oceans of california or florida or elsewhere.
but in this moment, right now, maybe seconds ago, just in the distance, a few feet away, possibly one or even two, there’d be whispers and cries and moans. a song would be playing out from something with busted and blown amps and twinkling lime green lights like stars.
your greedy hands could roam a chest of mounds of treasure and golden pointed things meanwhile calloused tips could stroke a sachet hiding another treasure, a nicer prettier treasure, the prettiest of pretties.
you’d realize an astute exchange of supremacy could almost control the atmosphere if you’d let it but you wouldn’t or couldn’t because then you’d neutralize yourself. your mind would deactivate over a succinct amount of time or space before falling into a well, a deep wet well where the walls fall into you and fall over you. you'd swim in the well and pretend your activities are habitual like a friday night party or sunday morning brunch or a late night finger food snack before you’d let someone push you, and continue pushing until they couldn’t push any further. finally you’d succumb to it all and experience everything there is.
still on a high, you’re on a plane where you don’t need safety belts, oxygen masks or a pilot, an attendant who tells you to watch your step before you board flight. you’d experience it all and never want to come down because you know there’s still going to be something worse than coming down, but it balances since there’s always something better if there’s something worse.
you’d experience all there is to be experienced without words that reveal everything that doesn’t need to be revealed in words or actions and it would be greatest because nobody could experience it like you do, in that moment, at that one second of perfection because that one moment of perfection was all you ever wanted.
but when the experience is over, the meth wears off and there’s no booze left in the box or in the fridge or in the rusting seats of my 68 chevy out back, there’s still hands hugging and the low breathing that could stimulate a heart and soothe an empty soul. then there’s almost nothing as the heavenly lull escalates to desperate mews formed on chapped lips before disappearing into the dark silence and the silence is real because there’s no noise, no springs, no words, not a cry nor moan nor gasp, nothing. it's silent. s-i-l-e-n-t, you know, silent. then the sky blooms to orange and purple and smears with something like egg whites as the stars, we’re hoping, are still burning above.
now my skin feels ruby and singed. i'm no longer roadblocked or neutralized or deactivated but it’s still dark and that cherry glow beneath the window covers is radiating stronger and smoldering my heavy lids. it's late. too late that it's early.
but now, sleep. sleep. sle-zzz-eeep. and possibly a dream, a dream to end my hallucinations or encourage others and inspire anxiety before a resurgence of tomorrow, today, whatever it may be. now i'm repeating myself because all that’s left, first, is to sleep. just sleep. and possibly the dream.