Migration

Must of been hard to of been Bob Dylan. Can you imagine being able to see through people that clearly, to be so preternaturally aware of the subtext of their lives and situation and only having this anonymous audience with whom to connect?

Whom you know understand it, are innately aware of it yet unable to articulate it themselves, and are still unable to connect with on any personally meaningful level? To be on another level, psychologically and lyrically, able to weave these immense tapestries of beauty and remembrance, to know the future in such an oblique way, to stand at that intimate place which is so close to people and yet at the same time constitutes this permanently removed gulf which you can only shout across? Words coming out on the other side which are so clear to you, with images so complete but in their odd juxtaposition represent a new and unknown language to those on the other side. Faces you can see but can not touch. This irreparable schism of which you are both the locus and the bridge across.

To gaze meaningfully at churches feeling yourself drawn there as if to some kind of peace though you've given up the belief long ago and will again. To know that everything you've lost and abandoned will again return to you only to be lost and abandoned again, this eternal cycle of which you are but a part and yet it weighs so heavy on your mind.

Imagine, something so simple as shopping for oranges, gazing at them, tuning out the chatter and the canned music, looking for some spark of the eternal in the produce section with a guitar strapped to your back and a harmonica strapped to your chest, lyric sheet in your back pocket all wrinkled and stained.

The dark glasses, the stare, and the misanthropy. Why do we do this to our geniuses, why do so many turn out like this? Why are so many reduced to digging through the waste piles and landfills looking for that ineffable gateway that will lead them back to themselves? Why is the need for abandonment so strong, the theme of desertion so prevalent, recurring, again and again. The instinctual seeking out of some untouched wilderness and the appeal of newly fallen snow, the spell cast by new and unpopulated territories.

As if we would find some still beating heart buried there beneath the wet leaves and abandoned behind the thick walls of some civilized atrocity.