Notes on Travel

Gray Sky here looks like gray sky back home

Look at me sitting here, same bedraggled look, my red beard grown out and weeping towards the floor

My eyes still red, little red fault lines splitting my eye into sections, seismograph jagged lines of my eye sing me the reasons for staying up until the birds chirp at 5 am

Look at me sitting here

I've reversed the American dream and headed east, over ocean, onto a little rock in the north sea,
With a figurehead queen on its pound notes, little monarchial line of kings and queens Blood line trailing down and loosing clout
Only to become pictures on the notes she now pays taxes with.

I like the pound note with Darwin on it.
Is it the fiver, or the tenner?
Evolution would never make its way onto American dollars, not if its In God We Trust.

Darwin on the dollar would let us know there's been some hang ups with ours and Gods relationship, little mishaps, inconsistencies with Gods whereabouts as of late.
And honestly,
He hasn't shown us, really shown us, any good signs that he still cares,
Oh God,
A hallmark card would be nice, just something to let me know you still
Want to hold me at night.

But there's nothing,
Jehovah lied and created us not equal
Rather struggling to crawl
From plasma riverbanks to fireside meat roasting sessions where we would acknowledge
Flavor through grunts and little more.

Little more then a grunt. Tiny communication, no syntax, no structure, just bleating and thumping chests, swinging crude tools shaped by stones strong enough and of the right mineral composition to sharpen other stones. Was this paleolithic or some other era named in hindsight.

It's unfair that era's are named in hindsight. Jurassic. Mesolithic. Paleolithic.
Why not age of The Green Fern, or the era of the Flint and Flame?
Something more romantic. Or even less.
Just a tiny grunt to pay homage to times
When communication was guttural and not digital
Not something sent through cell phone towers and wireless router hubs.

Look at me writing tired poetry burnt out and stripped of passion

But I must attempt attempt attempt
All I can do is attempt
I've done it my whole life and one day I even hope to make an attempt at death.
Not here in England but in some dell carved out of an American hillside.


I long for a west I've never seen.

Yesterday I was telling the British and Greeks about lumberjacks
Paul Bunyan and his axe,
His ox, and his towering stacks of pancakes.

They laughed as I told them the story, but I was serious. I told it like it was a true account.

The way one would talked of Puritan's burning witches at the stake. Or of slavery. Or of women stuck in the kitchen in 1945. Or some other tale that took place during the molding of my country.

They say Paul Bunyan is just an old folk story, old tired story passed down through the lines like monarchical destiny.
Little mouths spout strands of Paul Bunyan's life but then say he never really roamed the forests of the north.
That his boots never set tread-marks on the soft soil, soft rich amber soil of riverbanks.

I still say his axe cleaved the divide between the North and South
And when he lifted the flint head of that great axe
Wood chips and dust fell and took the form of Confederate and Union soldiers.
Thats my story and I'm sticking to it.

Look at me sitting here, slurring myths of Americana in my little flat in the United Kingdom and wishing I saw John Henry float by.