(image provided by DWB)

In the Car

People used to think I lived in my car, because I carried so many items around with me in it, items that shall be (and are) elaborated in the following poem. Truth was, I did sometimes live in the car, but mainly only the times when I got kicked out of other places, and also all those times when I was on the road in America.

People used to think I only went on the road in America because of my passion for Jack Kerouac. And it was true that I did go on the road because of my passion for Jack (Kerouac and Daniel’s); but there were many other artists who often superseded Kerouac in my mind and imagination as my inspirations: for years, Jim Harrison, the great poet, essayist, and fiction writer Jim Harrison of Michigan and Montana, was my primary inspiration, and the list is long of other American drifters who also inspired me for years. Many of them were musicians.

And while a passionate fan of music and musicians, and while I can pluck the guitar and plink on the piano and blow the harmonica and drum the drums a little bit when the moment is right, I’ve never been a musician, because I’m not a performer in that way. I’m a performer in other ways, but not that one.

The following poem is about a nineteen-year-old girl, because I used to be a nineteen-year-old boy with a (not-very-obvious-usually) feminine side (everyone has both masculine and feminine sides, as Sigmund Freud both pointed out, and proved), and also because I now have daughters who are both eighteen at the moment.

Sketch Books

“A wayfarer by barren ways and chill…” – Dante Gabriel Rossetti

And I’m still looking

At the ghost,

She wrote,

That isn’t even there

Beside me any more,

After all, since childhood

When it had been.

My

Haunt-eyed closet ghost; so later will I label those

The Haunt-eyed Ghost of Warrior Traveling the Sky

Sketch Books

As she tossed the sketch books

Into the trunk of the car

With the rest of the papers

And notebooks.

The battered traveling library

Was spilling

Over into the back

Seat. Books

Are everywhere, and under

And next to

My pillows

From home.

Two sleeping bags.

Long, heavy watchman’s

Flashlight

From Grandfather.

For night time reading

And protection. And

I’m living in my car,

On the road

In Arizona,

New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming,

Montana, Idaho, Washington…don’t know

if I’ll ever go

Home!

D.W.B., sometimes referred to as The Drifter by none other than himself, has always had a penchant for moving from one place to another in a kind of restless, and sometimes listless, fashion, since this helps him to refrain from getting bored. He doesn’t take fancy vacations, or any vacations for that matter, but he does maunder from here to there on a daily basis – whistling in his soul.