I can’t believe I wrote this when I was 18. I don’t know if I could write something like this now. That’s a scary thought for a writer.
A Road Out Across the Water
Three days we would drive before we hit the shore.
Empty hotel rooms and gas pumps would blur by.
At night on the road,
while he lay in the back seat
mapping intergalactic travel
through my rear window,
I would light up a spark behind the wheel and
cover the ceiling with eddies of dense smoke.
We’d drive fast!
Out onto the water,
chasing the moon over the horizon,
never stopping to let the sun catch up.
Using some sort of
concept he had derived from
an extraterrestrial theory
we would keep our tires skimming the surface.
We would drive four days!
Hail down the occasional cruise ship
or oil tanker, pay them
double or triple the price to fill ‘er up.
At some point we would stall,
empty tank
in the middle of the ocean,
no where in the world.
I would suggest that we take a swim to
stretch our legs.
He would suggest that we take off our clothes.
There’s no law out here, natural or instituted.
No one to chase us down for indecency
or defying the properties of water.
We would climb out the window and
dive off the roof.
Then standing up, our vertebrae all aligned,
we would flatten our souls out on the surface of the water.
I would stand there for a moment and then
crouch down, tense up my calves and leap off the surface,
arrow into the silent water.
Later I would lay stretched out on the hood,
sunburn in the moonlight,
blinded by the stars that were invisible from land
while he rigged up a contraption to distill salt water
for drinking and pouring into our radiator.
“Will moon light make it work?” I would ask.
“Only this once,” he would say.