you can’t see what you’re looking for

you can’t get what you need on the internet…

we’ve the lost the road, the long way from there to here, our ways across a big america, the miles and miles to ourselves, hand cranked windows and a hand on the wheel. we’ve forgot that it’s not where you’re going that matters, but everything on the way, the lonesome exits without even a gas station, just a stop sign where no one stops and grass gone to straw and righteous wire fences with nothing on either side, and a road in both directions like an idea you had once.

you can’t find what you’re searching for…

we are all of us always on our phones, never alone or with anyone really. we don’t talk or even write out an email, we text message or pose some fiction on instagram or blunt twitter thread or a fake facebook feed. we hide our hearts behind brevity and immediacy and pixel thin lives we traded for our marrow bone until we’ve become almost see through. we search google until we know everything, computer server instant pings and still it seems we don’t know a single thing that matters.

the world wide web isn’t on a screen…

we fly across the country now, from city to city, place to place, never knowing the mantra of a motor and tires on chip and tar, oil on oil and the miles in between, a nowhere, nothing with a name, seen through a bug strewn windshield, a blue highway sign sighing “no services next 90 miles”. we never know what isn’t there, you can’t until you’re there, the dirt stretches and long drawn out highways run along a sky hung horizon. and you wrapped tight in a road worn loneliness with just your own wraith to talk to. all roads point to you.

be still…

and when you’re stopped, pick up a book, wood pulp and blood ink, a manifest of thoughts and wrought out heartaches, a proof of ghosts in your hands. the turn of pages like a little life and death, what rips and curls and wears like a body, something that was spirit made into flesh. read it, let the words echo your words, a whole life inside your head and heart, rib bones to back bones, clear through through a mystery of gut you don’t use anymore. and you’re alive, breathing in and a little less out, taking a piece of the everything around you with you.

it’s better to wonder than to know…

your soul is physical, it grows on hard suns and moonlights steeped through trees, on oceans and lakes and rivers made into rain, on dirt rock moraines and mountain scree and sod rich plains and sand and mud under your feet, in your hands, under your nails. the world is not on your phone or your computer, on a screen. it is at the ends of your arms, soft up against your skin or scraped across your knee. it is ringing in your ears, blinding your eyes, blowing in the rolled down windows, in the world, on the road, across the long distance of your heart.