Slave To Freedom
REMINGTON GRAVES
There are no boundaries set
The time and yet
You waste it still
So it slips through your hands
Like grains of sand
You watch it go
There’s no time to be lost
You’ll pay the cost
So get it right…
– There’s No Way Out Of Here David Gilmour
Radical in rancid self-aggrandizement thought, ready and ruling the ruins with ravenous hunger, the menace on a black motorcycle—growling through my placid neighborhood where grandparents come to die. I twist the throttle as hard as I can while a thin, hot razor-sharp tear streams from my left eye to nestle on the corner of my mouth, salty and certain; human all too human, the blue fairy was nothing but a whore in hologram, and my strings were two feeble shoelaces atop cheap shoes designed to look designed. A white-haired senior almost bald and resembling an eagle, looks up from his walker and cracks a smile and winks at me, and that wink cuts me like a rusty knife, down to the cowardly core for I know in that moment: I am the world’s greatest fucking poser. With four decades under my belt, and nothing to show for it, except thinning hair and aching knees, I let go of the handlebars and lick the jagged line of my crooked front teeth hoping someone behind me smashes into me without restrain, with blind fury, with raging resolve. But nobody does…
A black family of three are sitting on the corner of Fucked and Forsaken, and the father holds a small bent cardboard sign that reads, “HELP.” Father and mother stare at the grass under them, and the daughter is wearing a pastel-pink sweater and she looks up at me and smiles with soft, shapely lips and her dimples remind me of two shallow graves. I shift to a faster gear wanting to escape the uneasiness. My engine tries to drown the sullen song.
I get on the Freeway knowing this could be my last ride, my last day on this beautiful ugly gyrating rock and get aggressive in my stance. The wraith in my wrath rings like thunderous hooves breaking light, and drivers look at their cell phones searching for another place they’d rather be. Truck drivers hauling those big, long beasts, smoke cigarettes with seven-o-clock shadows and sweat-stained western shirts, and through their aviator glasses the reflection of freedom no longer looks the same, not like it used to. But these broken bastards, blessed by Uncle Sam with taxes and sub texts too technical to understand, bleed on, bleed on…staining the white stripes and connecting the red.
To the left, gnarly trees no longer say look at me, since they’re contrasted with electric towers and transformers, the virus known as the human race has graffitied what was already a masterpiece and mastered it to pieces.
My reflection stared back at me, from a family van window, with bloodshot eyes; Children smiled and waved through the glass. I heard a harmonica in the backyard of my mind, and smiled. Closing may eyes, I wondered how long I could keep riding before I felt the need to open them.
If you’re reading this, know this about me…
I am still in that dark, with a sublime organ wailing and joining that harmonica in the vast nothingness of it all, while a chorus of women sing and sing on..
When you look out
You don’t see in
There was no promise made
The part you played
The chance you took
When you come in
You’re in for good