What is this Drift

a post vietnam audience with self

What is this Drift

He looked back, knowingly aware that a pain, a sad long pain, waited, it’s doorstep visited before, occasional whispers, saying “No...stay away...not again please”. Yet he walked on, backwards in time, memory, memories all coming into focus. Here at that plane of existence where lives no longer lived but breathed a certain toxicity into his lungs. How did it start? Where did it all come from? He looked about in those dark corners where faces meet other faces, saying, “Remember me”? and maybe you want to well up inside, tear, feel a little pause in your breath, come a little closer to the secret that keeps driving you to this place. But a numbness follows, you swallow hard, annoyed by your own lack of conviction, courage and fortitude. You sit there breathing in the toxicity, then a shadow of tears follows. What’s this? You can’t cry anymore? 

She belongs to your memory now. Your anger, your own stupidity drove her away. There’s nothing left but a sorrow deep within the wound of yesterday and there you wallow like the fool you are, hoping by some second chance, by some pipe dream that it will leave and another chance will come again. But they came, all of them came, both love, lust and magic but soon the whispers arose, lines formed into unknown places, you wondered, drifted away, then further away, never really asking yourself, “what is this drift”? Soon a stillness came over you. Brown hair turned gray. Bones creaked, somewhere in the shuffle of time you mixed confusion and order. “What is this drift”? Unlike many who passed this way before you, you find the aloneness bearable. You laughed, cajoled  yourself into some past tense nincompoop. There you stayed in some comic underground graveyard. The wallow rising from its depths; the question always answering from the grave, “What is this drift”? and you, of course, centered in the darkness of your unlikely being. 

So you can laugh. Big deal. Creation signs your postcards.....Big deal. You maintain the drift, you’re here now, wondering how it all happened and the only answer is the drift itself. No connection accept maybe some forlorn dead Viet Nam vet who doesn't even know you. He’s laughing because he sucked you in, made you drift, told you, “Yes, I’m dead. How ‘bout you?” You agreed because the drift can go deep, too deep, to long alone, to long in shadows where lines keep evolving into other lines and distance drifts into everyday, yesterday and then tomorrow. “What is this drift”? So you keep to the drift, Sure their are wallowing times, sad, dependent feel sorry for yourself days; drifts work that way. Surely you’re alone. Silence becomes primary; mental activity follows but the drift it stays, annoys you, keeps you cold, always there, standing guard at the door of those steps that you followed this morning. It will never say anything, there is no friendship or warmth in its heart. It merely stands, looks you over, pushes you in a directional drift. You may look back to see what direction you’re going in but soon, before an eye blinks a lostness washes over you and you wonder in your wanderlust, wonder about things metaphysical, heavenly, divine, hellish and it all comes to you in that drift. Somewhere, out there, you roam, where it is nobody knows.