Thoughts From a Car Ride

I wrote this in my Take 5 (journal, kind of) yesterday from the time I was waiting outside the library to be picked up to the time I pulled into our parking lot. I thought it was kind of cool, so I'll share it. It's really supposed to read as a poem, but this is the way I wrote it. Walls stand still, and people walk, and cars and clouds go by. The sky gets dark, the people leave, the gate it locks them out. My uncle comes, I knew he would, he does it every day. Things don't change, and yet they do, a smile here, a whispered word. Smells and sounds and thoughts that change, pastel colors in the sky. A billboard conjures memories that really aren't at all. Slate gray mountains and apricot dips 'neath dusty-rose bellies of clouds. Trees like black monsters from far away, car lights like sparkle dust on the highway. My nose is tickled by a smell much like pickles. A hamburger-concrete and comical in a Georgia O'Keefe world. Wind like the thunder blasts in my right ear, a crinkle of brown paper from behind. Louisiana, it says, in red curly letters. Wind surfer, tundra? words that mean nothing. Black meets white there, and fades into gray, ominous thunderhead... The moment is lost, words cut like razors, the only sound irreconcilable. Cell phone like live coal, calls from my pocket, shrieks from the back seat tear at my ears. Here I am, on the ground, no longer free in the images. Trapped once again in a world where people actually care if George Bush is compared to Adolf Hitler, in a world with street lights and speed limit signs, and skies that fade to the black of the mountains.