A Poem for One Shot Wednesday....

Posted for One Shot Wednesday hosted by the wonderful One Stop Poetry.  

I do think it's appropriate to call this a ballad, however unorthodox the theme and of course it has its personal elements, hopefully eased by use of the second person.  And, it doesn't rhyme-- but to me, a ballad nevertheless...xxj

The Ballad of Highway 14

You were shattered enough

Clawing at your arms in withdrawal

To lie for a scrip of Valium

Buy a gallon of wine

And head down Highway 14

It was raining hard enough in you

For you to stumble to the clerk’s desk

At the Motel 6

Grab a key and check in.

Then you sank into the naugahyde chair 

The ghastly stillness

Against the muffled thrum of semis

Cruising at warp speed along the highway

You’d forgotten how it felt

To feed a cat or boil an egg,

Poured your booze down an ant hill

Detoxed from benzos

Only to have the Fourth of July

Explode in your mind

All those synapses firing

For the first time in years

With it the rolling panic attacks

That drove you out of bed

To doze on the edge of town in your car

AA gave you the snowball’s chance in hell award

And you fled the Serenity Club

With its crowing dilettante women

And their cagey pronouncements

The dark men in ball caps sucking

On cigarettes with their surly tongues

A husband who bore down on you

Like an angry pecking owl

Get well, get well, get well.

How you wanted to believe

You could.

Days passed like a waterfall

Of waking dreams

You came and went from the admonitions

Of one time friends

Bolstering yourself with the Big Book

The Bible, anything

Hugging the dogs

By then half-afraid of you

How you would scream alone in the house

And throw the furniture out into the yard

At midnight

So you thought

It was past time

For a mercy killing

A self-euthanasia, and took

The cheap room on the truck route

And sat in the quiet

Looking out at the blue blue mountains

At the grade wine with its

Taunting gilded label

And the valium valorum, both together

The means to get some sleep

For eternity.

But something in you

You thought had died stirred

With lifting wings

Something that tasted

Like hope, some grateful salt

In your mouth: the mountains called

Over and over to the eye

And the nights of lovemaking in the fields

And the geese keeping on

Heading into the cold

Like your nomadic heart

Or the all-enduring will

of a polar explorer.

  

You rose and gathered up your things

And left that place to its peeling paint

And its stench of smoke

And lonely masturbating traveling salesmen

Homing, heading west,

Into the welcoming dusk

Your surer self waiting open-armed

For you, at the end

Of  Highway 14.

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011

All Rights Deserved....