Promised Land

L again,

‘round about midnight it was storming something awful on highway 1 near big sur when you ejected monk for love hurts because you said gram and emmylou make you laugh, talking about how we always ended only to begin when the road broke and all the cars merged into ours and you went through the glass again to land in that truck bed you like so much but this time i heard no screaming or moaning, just chuck singing “promised land” louder than fuck and i found myself again at waxidermy music. inside the bright sun burned my eyes as i looked into the store’s plate glass window where the blood streaming from my hair i knew was yours and i would’ve licked up every drop had i not been distracted by our aborted child henry playing peekaboo between the store’s letters. it was like being born again when i heard tim call my name, while marty just grunted long time no see and keala didn’t smile like she usually did because she was busy fighting jack white to the death near the wall. for chrissakes, marty said, don’t rip it and then gushed about the chick from lodi hugging him whenever i was there and how she knocked his dick up to his watchpocket. i wasn’t listening, chuck sounded so great, tim was playing him because he knew i liked the old masters and he said i looked like i could use it. i stood lost in the music and the window and might never have come out were it not for keala’s hands on my shoulders turning me away from henry looking so abandoned, like it was my face he was wearing, nudging me toward the replacements bin, muttering how that awful girl was always leaving with some customer before he bought anything. her words missed my ears because chuck’s promised land had captured my body like it was my heartbeat, my head bobbing so hard your blood spattered the window and keala, who smiled and said blood’s easier to clean up than to spill. i didn’t hear her talking to marty because i had been pushed into the song’s slipstream and was floating back to that moment just before it came into being, where it jostled among countless other songs, i heard some kind of love and it’s alright, ma and i’m turning into you and more i can’t remember because they weren’t mine to take, and i knew somehow all songs came from monk’s scattered chords bouncing around like atoms, the dna of creation, and it was so peaceful hearing them, like drowning is said to be, though my lungs were burning when promised land released itself and i was chuck’s poor boy again bound for the coast except this time when i touched down i had no one to call, i knew your cell was off when you were with someone else, and suddenly chuck paused like he forgot to write the next verse, like he was henry and you had disappeared him into that record-spinning-needle-bumping-crackle-static one always hears just before heaven’s signals converge with hell’s cries, given way to a giant orchestra forever warming up, your beloved jack single-handedly playing every fucking instrument mozart ever knew, each instrument out of tune with every other, and you were there beating the shit out of the triangles, this monumental discord like your face in my mirror. i was back in the again again and looked to henry for help but just saw tim in the corner trying to fix the record player, muttering this has never happened before, but i knew that orchestra, it blasted whenever you shouted i’m gonna come, babe, and then marty must have punched the cd player because a tune familiar like an echo you can’t stop crept into the store, cowgirl in the sand, maybe, because it pops up whenever my phone flashes your deleted texts from your blocked number, but, no, it was a girl’s voice, mine, singing love interruption like you do with jack except the lyrics were love hurts and my laugh was yours singing love interruption and love hurts simultaneously like all moments are one and there’s no escaping any, i couldn’t stop shrieking in your voice like meg or maybe robert plant when jack’s got a knife to his throat so as to crush his balls to make him sound like you singing with him, and this terrible tickling down below moving me to highway 99 to hitch back to you, your perfect rimjob tongue telling me it was your world again and i’d never leave it. that’s when henry screamed too late, no, daddy, stop, i felt a detonation like april in hiroshima, a wet dream atomic blast, i didn’t mind dying, if dying was all, i just felt so bad for the records melting, when the window’s flash revealed it hadn’t been you licking my ear so good it seemed my scrotum, it was the queen of rock and roll himself, little richard, coming tooty-fruity all over me like the voice of G-d, and there’s tim holding up a vintage “here’s little richard,” been saving it for you, man, as keala rings it up, saying it’s a record store, baby, grace is everywhere, take what you need you think will last, my eyes blinking warp speed through the tears because it’s henry not richard on the jacket pointing to where chuck had replaced jack on the wall, saying he had chuck bring me where all songs come and go and come again to release me from you, because some kinds of love can’t interrupt the song that you are, or maybe it was keala who said that, she always talked to me when marty was in back, and we went home together and played misterioso and sang promised land all night long because waxidermy wasn’t a dream, you were the dream, this is life and my life only and it’s divine.