I'm a little too familiar with gas station coffee (and restrooms) I know all of the roads and the mountains that line them I have known every cheap motel stared at every continental breakfast (burned coffee and rubber eggs) and I can pack for anything in ten minutes or less.
I have known cities lit by the night and passes comfortably fringed by fog skeleton trees on dead beaches gas-station Cheetos eaten at 3 am sleeping on a friends shoulder or listening to another iPod playlist alone in the dark the casual immodesty between traveling partners and wearing 3 layers of sweats to ward off the cold of the journey. I re-read poetry by flashlight while ghosts of headlights flutter as I leave everything behind me again.
I love the road blazing by because it takes me a way from everything I remember away from the family that is not mine away from the cages and bars and lies about my beliefs about my identity the oppression of mandatory religion the self-destructive hate who I used to be.
I wrote poems about my knives because they were my comfort they were beautiful to me I romanticized my pain because I was a romantic at heart but a romantic without love and so I turned to blood and knives and tried to make it into poetry thought that it could somehow be beautiful and the sad thing is that it was it gave more comfort than my family, it was closer than my friends, more reliable than any god.
The road scours that all away, reminds me that I can leave, I am free, there is more to the world than what I grew up knowing. More than Rush Limbaugh and misogynist preachers more than latent racism and open homophobia more than my shame in my acceptance of these as normal there is a whole world where people don't live chained to bibles and that gives me hope.
I have never known home here, but driving and driving and driving shows me that the world is larger than I know and maybe I can find it somewhere.