Road sign Lyric

[mnaz]

Crest and watch buff rock lay out-- living, long-suffering lyric of atmosphere-- each strain, rift and current a potential defining storm in a calm super cell, in waiting. Deep time. Read space, measure its measureless face with something known, a road sign punctured by buckshot on glow, spinning under blue and then black, no breath. Ear-shattering lull. "AUSTIN-- 149 MI". Possibility is a thin ribbon and peace reclines on a leaning sign ruined by a shotgun.

Sun is spray-painted, must be dust. Why is a country mile long? You see them end to end plain as day unless dust is up. A city mile is long. Empires occupy mere blocks, and crossing them takes years off your life. Look for the right storm without a sky, vertical canyons of religion in waiting. The wrong door could mean thirty years, and that's longer than a country mile.

You can't run to the strata, you have obligations, and the desert shrinks as spreads over me. Odd, the switch from one side of a ridge to the other, atop the last dry-boned spine I stumbled up. I drifted too far west; the mountain is nearly gone. Light storms press down and no one can withstand that intensity, arid-pure, though it begins to ease, a roundscape descending on my right, soft and vague as here appears from there, I see myth curving down. On my left are speckles on a valley floor. Someone keeps the light on. I must be home, dead mountain, living rock, lyric atmospheric.

But if you said I was sick of this place I would listen. If you said let's go we would find a new road. We would be our own pain, our own song to the rhythm of wipers in a rare desert rain. If you said I was ready I would listen. We would find a place, some place different against the wind. We would make a life of it I'm sure. It is damn quiet except for the wipers.

[mtmynd]

Fine piece you've gathered here, mnaz.., plenty of apparently complex but actually easily digestible lines provoking deeper levels of thinking for those that care... ending with the elements of water that makes the desert what a desert is... little of that moisture to give rampant growth to natures pants and animals, including we humans that find this desert so barren and 'without' which goes to show that those that 'go there' should never the there... and hopefully won't.

[mnaz]

...just fascinated by this geologic arid light thing, aren't I? Trying to make music out of it. How many ways can I say it? Repeat it?

Not a bad mix here-- starting to congeal. I reread it a few times. Thanks for the comeback, Cecil.

[saw]

really enjoyed the internal debate of the country mile vs. the city mile in the 2nd stanza.....but good points throughout for contemplation...

[mnaz]

saw.. that's about it. Started with an image or two and wandered into contemplation. For better or worse. (I can see both). Thanks.

Speaking of image, here's a random quiet one..



(Keane Wonder Mine)

I miss the shrinking Mojave..