When I was 4 or 5, I watched my mother carrying me into the hospital.
From above, like the blackbirds floating against blue, heads cocked, I watched.
Fading into and out of the dark.
The sun is barely over Bare Hill. Certain thoughts should not be given this much light.
Summer is over at the speed I’m driving.
This road heads south.

At the end of this backbone will be the promised land, I’m sure.
Signs in truck stop windows
tell me on the way in, cleanest rooms.
On the way out, please come again!
I can’t say I won’t.
I’ve been here before.

Oh to reach that promised land.
Oh to drive until daylight’s gone.
Oh to drive all night.
Oh to find cheap gas.
Oh why the hell am I leaving?
Oh road (you’d better be worth it).

12:38 am somewhere between Beckley and the Appalachians.
The waitress smokes between tables.
Seven truckers use payphones.
Two elderly couples are having eggs toast and sausage.
My coffee is half gone. The waitress slides over with a refill, winks. She never brought the bill.
I left $2 and an empty mug.

Dreams come. Almost always they involve great heights.
Rooftops, cliffs, mountain tops, bridges.
I’m always surrounded by people I know but do not recognize.
There’s always a woman. Always a woman there.
I wake as she allows me to touch her. It is never daylight.
This time I’m parked at an abandoned gas station.

Columbus, Georgia.
The old bar hasn’t changed except for the employees.
It’s been 10 years. A beer for old-time’s sake.
A second for the emptiness.
It’s an off night. Stale and overwhelmingly quiet.
I wanted the place to be packed like it was when I left.

Once I saw a gator snatch a deer by the head and drag it flailing into a small lake near here.

We were fishing for bass in a 15-foot john-boat along a weed bed 50 yards from the explosion.

The deer was quietly sipping at the shore.
We left the water ringing with the growing concentric silence
and blackbirds lighting out from the trees.
Years later blackbirds still remind me.

I don’t drive through Fort Benning to my old barracks.
I don’t stop for cheap gas
or to buy an air assault sticker from US Cavalry.
I do make a couple phone calls
to answering machines.
I forgot everything just across the bridge in Phenix City (Alabama).

I was used to forgetting in these parts. I had been this way with Eric (road trip, Memphis).
Graceland would set us free and his Honda Civic would get us there.
He hadn’t changed the oil in almost 10,000 miles.
It was dead Elvis week. We forgot about the Army.
We drank all the way. We mocked the King.
We stumbled down Beale Street.

Beale street at night. It hadn’t moved, but something in me did. Everything did.
I sat down on the curb. I was 100 years old right then.
Left over and full of nothing. That night I made a deal with myself over the toilet.
I had made this deal before with whiskey and beer.
There’s something empowering about making a deal.
The finality is settling

When sleep came, it was like I was dead.
Blackbird-black and real quiet.
I’d like to believe that. When you die nothing comes and gets you.
Nothing snatches you away screaming to the fire and pain.
When I die, I’ll just slip back into the dark
like a bass returned to its shadows.
 

_

By Matt Smythe, U.S. Army Veteran
Originally published in “Revision of a Man”
Dead Reckoning Collective, 2022