grossly sincere

Skyline Drive

With wind whipping through the rear window,

I am pulled as we roll along winding curves,

Passing the gentle peaks peeking out behind each other,

Dashing through a brisk evening like deer in the twilight as clouds stretch miles above

And a lush, lively, and lovely expanse of spring surrounding me

Welcomes me into its hearth.

–

Picture-taking and light bickering follow the scenic cruise along Skyline Drive—an  hour and more of we-can-do-this or we-can-do-that, a journey of maybes and recalling distant memories fragmented across the way.

Let me know if there’s anywhere you want to stop,

And I want to stop here, this place looks nice—oh, this stop isn’t that great,

Maybe this stop right here—no, there are too many people, we’ve been here before, it was last week,

Then maybe we should stop right here and right now,

This might be a good place to stop—let’s get out here.

Are you sure this is the place? Oh, it’s already 4, we have to be quick,

So we rush down the path, follow the blue trail, stomp down the foot-high steps and venture out into the wild.

You’re moving too fast, it’s all downhill—

This is going to be painful

When we come back up.

–

There is a quiet desperation festering inside of me, a beckoning wish for something to come of this.

A bag of tortilla chips rustles inside the car as it passes through my hands and his hands and his, with a jar of processed nacho cheese tossed back and forth, emptier and emptier as it goes.

The cheese—oh, the cheese, it’s so good, isn’t it, and kind of spicy, too, right?—comes and goes, emptier and emptier as it is passed through his hands and mine and then his, the salt of the chips stinging the corners of my mouth as I mindlessly chew and swallow.

The crinkling bag full of sweet watermelon slices—it’s good, right?—sits lonely in a canvas bag, marinating in its own juices and threatening to spill.

Heads sticking out of windows makes us think of ourselves as dogs bravely facing the wind’s strength, and we do this in silence as our father stares straight ahead.

A song about a scattered life and moving forward with it blares through the car and into our ears and it goes in one way and comes out the other.

The day is getting darker and the fatigue of the day-long journey become players in the way that meaning is made today,

Short niceties and brief i-just-realized-how-good-this-was’s sprinkle the darkening car and the somber blue of the distant mountaintops bleed around and within the speeding sedan,

And as we are driving miles and miles away from the expanse of wood and leaves and grass, I give a resigned farewell to the forest.

–

In the kitchen,

Barbequed and slathered pork is being cut into pieces, the knife desperately hitting the plastic on the counter in quick slices as

Fleshy bits of pink and black-charred meat plops onto a cutting board following the collective retreat into privacy and isolation.

–

He mutters his frustrations under his breath unknowingly, unappreciated, unthankful, and I err in my listening, making out words like “bitch” and “shit” and “wasted” and that feeling I was wishing for dissolves in my heart as each syllable drives itself between then and now, a distance and a gap that can never be closed.

Another plate wasted, another day passes, and another set of worn plastic containers makes a home inside the fridge.

About this post…

I don’t even know what to call this, honestly. I started out, as you can see, wanting to write a poem about the beauty of Shenandoah, but I couldn’t ignore the feelings I had during the whole trip. That seems to be how all my writing turns out.

This is it for now, I definitely think I will touch it up more and maybe add or remove some things, but I feel like this is at a good point for me to want to throw it out into the void for all eyes to see.