Jon, Janie and I
Simmer cigarettes and burn rubber
Three kids born on the fourth of July
Our perfect lives pulped asunder

Strewn across these desolate roads
An absence of light, imbibing our souls
Perceptions of an american dream corrodes
In our hearts appear neat, little holes

A transient band of fireflies
Riding high behind a suttee machine
I stare to the moon, reprising our goodbyes
Still, my mind, it calls for Colleen

I wring my hands
I lay back and rest
I close my eyes, life beyond these lands
I won’t die across the graves of the midwest

Jon he smiles, his teeth newly formed
His cigarette, it hangs limp
His eyes bold and his brain is stormed
Our passion drive us, that august imp

Austin, our goal, it calls
A serpent inside strums for our cause
Maybe I’ll play guitar, paint mural walls
Act or write about what gives us pause

We drag out of a microcosm
A puissant wind pours into our car
David Bowie’s voice I hum
Estranged, I ponder the meaning of a star

Jon, his posture, his laugh elate
Under the blue moon, nothing feels amiss
Satiating in the midst, ill-assuaged by fate
Tasting our cigarettes, only these moments exist

Dead are the troubles of lives former
Inebriated, Janie lays her eyes upon me
Everything on her, california white and dead fur
Done are the days, ne’er to be taken seriously

Old Maggie Heat, scarlet gum between her teeth
Hell is frozen; words just ooze out of our minds
Misery is docked on a departed heath
Y-shaped and taupe is our way, acute little lines

Gone to the edge of the world, a beautiful view
Of course I’ll send a postcard, if I remember to
Did I ever, for breaking my heart, thank you?

I don’t feel secure
I don’t feel blah
Only this I can be sure
In the rearview is the law

We bump upon a rocky trail
Discerning are we of the blue
Speed accelerating, gravel-hail
Sirens scream, cursed foxes pursue

Jon doesn’t stop
His eyes glued
Swerving through corn crop
The devil he eludes

And, even in this moment
My old-self would panic and cry
But it is he whom now I resent
And it is he whom now I defy

Janie, she roars and screams
She is wicked punk, my Mick Jagger
A flame is held; a prelude to a dream
Absorbed am I in her swagger

She flips off the cops
Whose car is far, far from ours
And on the windshield, raindrops
Pouring down hard from Mars

I play an invisible piano
I look at Janie in the rearview
Exquisite, shadows of droplets flow
Her sleeping breath I try to eschew

Jon looks over
Calm as the droplets streamed
He examines me examining her
Rapt under her glow, as it seemed

He flips on the c.d. player
Billie Holiday does croon
The vast emptiness, I’m its surveyor
Towered by the first sun, bows to the moon

The beginning of a day
Melting morning glory
The treetops are green and gray
A visage from a romantic story

As I watched the pavement glow
Spring sun to blight the dusted trail
A question, I’ve pondered long ago
Does finally lift its cryptic veil

Defined success, hazy and hunted
Lies not in happiness or money
But the little moments, unstunted:
Janie, dreaming, glossed golden as honey

Admittedly a wild night, not the last
Until Austin, I won't sleep
For how can I now, myself is cast
Into something unforeseeably deep

Though hope for a world untorn
Is foiled by history we can not return
And for that threadbare world we mourn
But one for us, on the horizon, is born