he starts the car, turns the stereo up too loud for the early morning, puts it into gear and heads down the road with no destination consciously in mind

one day he will find that which he searches for, even if he doesn’t know quite what that is, the specificity is secondary to the road ahead, dangerous curves

his head thrown back as he sings along to the music, the sun rising in his rear view mirror, the dust from his tires blurring his past as the guitar wails onward

a pile of emotional corpses left behind to rot in the sunshine, his lined face has always been unable to bear facing of the faces he so cavalierly avoided

the music makes the turmoil that knots his insides relax, two minutes at a time, his foot presses down the pedal and the trees blur into a single file line of green

if he stopped, thought about the eventual destination he would most likely pick a new direction, but he goes off impulse, drives on drive and need not thought

it is those quiet moments between songs, as he skips until he finds the next distraction, as fears worm their way into his head he can feel the broken glass churn

what is he doing, five hundred more miles under his belt, seven or eight new poems in the wind, no closer to home, to finding her, to finding peace and safety

does any of it even exist, has he been searching for things that don’t exist, running from the things that actually do in his fool’s quest for that proverbial more

luckily the music comes on and he can fall into it again, fall away from falling apart, it isn’t the miles but the standing still that slowly kills a man

so he pops down the shade and races the sun down the highway, it is less about the destination than the ability to lose himself in the trip

one day maybe he’ll wake up where he always needed to be, maybe he ends up overturned in a ditch mere miles from home, doesn’t matter at all

running toward or running from, driving or being driven, he’s scarred and exhausted yet burns with the need for more, and he willing to give it all for it

whatever it is