Highway Mars

I taste spark, sharp copper, igniting like a flintlock gun under my tongue. We've traveled into a snowstorm on this February eve, the world transformed, chalky bullets pelting our windshield, blocking out our every view so all we see is black negative space and streaming, savage snow.

Violence. Viscerally visual violet violence violating the sanctity of the soft season. That's what I see.

We talked about the sky again, the sky here on Mars. I feel extraterrestrial sometimes when I look at the world. Sometimes so dead, sometimes so full. I talked about how I know I'm home because the sky is orange like a mid-summer peach. She retorted that it was only light pollution. I felt, maybe this is true, maybe it just was light pollution, as if, in the light of day I seem so much worse than I do when lost in the nightly abyss where people don't look you in the eyes or look down at your feet but stare straight ahead. We ignore our own pollutions-- we're all polluted souls, buoying up and down in the ocean, wrappers clung to us like art deco garb or bows that glint faux sparkles on birthday presents opened first and then forgotten.

Sometimes, I’ll find myself crying. They find me sometimes this way. They’ll coo over me, sipping their mason jar macchiatos with the layered milk and foam to make up for their vapid convalescence. “What’s wrong?” they preen, as if nothing could ever be wrong on this floating celestial orb of vulnerability. I tell them I’m sad, I’m sad because the Mars rover is sad. They laugh. Always. The Mars rover is a robot, it doesn’t feel anything. I know it feels sad, I know it feels wonder and discovery and other obscurities it interprets as either happy or sad. I know it feels lifeless and I know it feels alone. It sings ‘happy birthday’ to itself, it watches clips of Gene Kelly dancing in the rain, it takes pictures and filters them for viewing pleasure. I know it feels sad, because all it does is watch and wait--this is all I do, this is all I can handle, and I myself feel sad.

We pass signs on the highway. I can see them between the snowy wall, technicolor dreams, lost Las Vegas lights, vanities sympathizing with advertisers so billboards are an amalgamation of lights, mirrors, and posters. I see many for motels of kitsch heritage. Wooden signs for diners advertising sumptuous black noodles and smoked salmon. A red psychic sign with a yellow palm and green eye that goes through the motions and winks, winks at all the cars passing, passing by.

We were damned here, of this I am certain. We talk of heaven and hell as if they are above and below us. How do we know that this isn't hell? That the written gospel has fallen from heaven down to the literates of hell. We crawled out of the thick polluted gunk they called water and evolved, gaining more sentience and humanity, damning us slowly but surely to a life of feeling and caring and flirting with our own demises. The more knowledge we caught and stamped onto walls the more we realized that living here was the cruelest fate.

Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids, In fact, it's cold as Hell, And there's no one there to raise them if you did. Those words echo into a silent car as we catapult towards a final destination--hopeful safe and free of this apocalyptic precipitation. I love so many things that my heart is often ripped about, savagely, like the Romans, when they tied a man to four different lions and whispered so tenderly to the lions to go towards the light, the light that streamed in from each and every doorway in the Colosseum.

The church choir sings to me on the radio. They are good, but I’m not ready to buy what they are selling just yet.

Meet me on the bridge. Take a car, take a train. Take a ship, take a plane, take a ship and a plane combined into one and sail over the mountains with basket in hand. The red bridge with the lights, I want to see the lights. I want to be in the desert and see the lights that glitter so heinously above us that they scream because they do not understand that the lights are trying to save us from this hell we’ve created or maybe they’ve created and now regret. I feel so alien around you. I feel so alien all of the time. I was born of flowers and free flowing water--I will die in red dirt, cold and cratered, alone, alone like the rover, constantly roving on, roaming the far plains, pains in my side, strains in my veins, or so I claim, untamed, maimed, shamed, blamed, give me a name, I have none, I am no one, I am thing, I am being, I am soft so often I crumple and float and dive into crater and often I am drenched in snow and they will not find me, they will not find me now nor ever.  

HIGHWAY MARS

I see the sign, I see my life spiraling off into the darkened abyss and I feel fine, heaven is fine, heaven is fine, I can’t stop the car and it carries on towards the end of Highway Mars, pacing itself, interpreting its own time, a time unbeknownst to god nor man. We are traveling at speeds undecipherable. The snow moves quickly, the ground moves slow, the gods jeer at us, the snow like wax candle shavings that burn the hood of the car.

I am anxious most nights. I destroy myself, then those I love. In the morning, I attempt to put the pieces back together again, but the defiant deed defies even me, with cracked hands, worn nails, soft palms raw from holding the floor in place and falling onto it from a precarious perch where I go to steam my eyes and let the tears fall where they may.

The moon called to me, in a sweet, lilting way. I know the moon does not speak, but it has stories to share, soft and gentle, reclining on it’s back in a slender crescent. It beckons me, roundness full and dark against an indigo sky, don’t go, don’t leave, not yet, look at me, look at me and remember where you are. Are you supposed to be here?
I grind my bare knuckles into sharp, grainy asphalt. I shriek, scouring the bone down and down again, tearing the flesh as the light from the car illuminates my every mistake. Am I enough? Am I more than this pile of flesh that speaks up only sometimes, only sometimes am I alive? I cannot tell you all I’ve seen, all I’ve done because you wouldn’t listen to my desperate praise in order to salvage some pride. You see what you want to see from me, and I know that I cannot change it because these words pry and crawl their way from my lips inarticulate, but from my fingers that drawl, they linger, they breathe.

We're all so lost. We all live on the highway to somewhere, somewhere as cold and as foreign as space. We think our time spent in the car means all the world, but it does not. It is an anxious, trite time, a time that means nothing, a time that means nothing only something when the sun shines and the wind gushes in and strokes your cheeks, but without this the ride means nothing.