The Duffel Bag

God’s blood beads on the tarmac and something rough is boiling up just this side of the vanishing point, so it’s probably time to get off this stretch of blacktop and into the wayside bar, where every cup runneth over and you breast a thickening fret of stogie smoke to get to the dank back room where a high stakes game turns against you despite your trey of jacks, and soon enough you’re in way over your head with nothing and no one to blame but the luck you’ve been getting since first you threw your stuff into a duffel bag and hooked up with the halt and lame, with the grifters and drifters, the die-hards, the masters of bluff, the very bastards, in fact, who are lifting the last of your stash. . . So it’s into the crapper and out through the window—you’re free to do whatever you must, so long as that purple-and-yellow blush in the sky doesn’t mean what it seems, so long as that lick of flame from the hard-shoulder spillage doesn’t travel as far as the scree of garbage in the lay-by, so long as that’s not your name in the red top front-page splash on the trailer-trash kidnappee. . . Just keep to the shadow-side, keep in under the lee of roadside billboards, bed down in the roadside scrub, your dream of Ithaca, that ghost town, though the rest is mystery— what brought you to this and who might take the blame, and how to get from the open road to a sight of the open sea.