Sven Briar, '87 Fleetwood, I-77 S

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In the backseat, resting on the soft fabric of someone next to you's sweatshirt and you're mostly gone, but sometimes occasionally the headlights of oncoming cars break into your dream and some part of what's playing on the radio, maybe just the bass or the backup singers' part seeps into the snowglobe world behind your sealed eyes and feels like something vibrating out the surface of your brain instead of thundering in from outer space.

Maybe you wake up and it is true night, the kind that doesn't exist in a home, the time where there is no time, when the numbers on the radio are green blurs and your head feels stuffed with old quilts.  It is like a dandelion seed knocking around in the breeze, it's free.  You're nostalgic for what you've left and hopeful for what you approach.  You're the light from a dying star on its journey to the big wet eyes of a fluffy young stargazing earthling dog, on an infinite journey, half-conscious and taking in the view.

You could put a potato chip in your mouth and crunch it against the roof of your mouth with your tongue, let the sound and the texture and the flavor dissolve into your nerves together, anonymously strumming on your senses.  You could smoke a cigarette right now and it would perforate your soul like a shot of heroin and let the night wind make concourse inside of it.  Your soul is on a zipline and the real bottom is death, that is the sub-basement below sleep that you know by its scent, fruity and decrepit, in this earthy cellar of sleepiness.  Death is a silver pool, cold and cushy, but that's not where you're going.  You can't grasp the handle that long.  Something may occur to you.  Just an idea, but one that's dense, it is a hub of other ideas that turn on after its activation, it's a domino figure 8 or a design painted in gasoline after just one corner is ignited and then your whole head is on fire and you have to remember that you have a name and a place that belong to you, that you've cuffed yourself to rails and bedposts all over town, not even that you've made mistakes, just that you made decisions, that you steered the rudder instead of floating up and with the wind like a helium balloon to be hugged by vapors and gawked at by gulls.  You have a pair of pants and a toothbrush with your spit drying on it, there are papers, hundreds and thousands of them, that bare your name.  You take up space instead of spiriting through it.

These proteins that are vehicles for your images and thoughts slide into slots like numbered balls in a lottery drawing and it burns your head like when your arm wakes up and the blood stabs back into your veins.  And then you're just a man in a car and it's late and you're tired and there's 8 more hours to go.