walking

Walking. tonight.

Under stars and streetlights, half bare trees.

A song from years ago plugged into my ears...

The year I was sixteen and ran away from home.

slept under a tree in Berkeley, hitchhiked to LA,

thought I'd find this rockstar up in Laurel Canyon.

The exit from the freeway is miles from the hills

so I walked and hitched and looked

and couldn't find the place.

At Sunset Boulevard, over the mountains

at the other end, I ran across the street.

You can't do that, in Beverly Hills,

pedestrians are suspicious.

I'm busted, just like that.

They gave a choice:

call home or go to juvie.

I called home.

Waiting for my Dad to come

eight hours in a cell, nauseous,

because the nurse who took my blood

couldn't hit a vein.

Driving home four hundred miles

with barely forty words between us.

Another year, another night, stalking a ridge

where no one sees or hears me,

screaming at god, who doesn't hear me either.

Another year, another night

hiking into the high country from Tuolumne.

it's moonlit, so I can do this. slowly.

Some places I can only find the trail by listening to my footsteps.

I'm looking for this girl I thought would be there.

it's midnight, and I can't find them.

in the morning, I smell their breakfast cooking

but this dream doesn't happen

quite the way I was expecting.

Another year, another night on foot again.

far from home and broke, it's midnight.

and I'm walking through Dachau.

There's no one on the street. No one.

I'm shivering-freaking-jumpy.

I need a place to sleep, a bridge, a tree...

but there is nothing.

Outside the town, the night so black

stumbling through a fresh plowed field

kicking soft clods speckled with white

this place has something wrong,

it's still here or is it just my mind,

in this darkness,

I don't know, I don't know, I'm so tired,

but I keep on walking and walking and walking

until I don't feel it anymore, until I smell tall sweet grass,

crawl in. curl up in my ancient raincoat. and sleep.