LJ Idol Wheel of Chaos: "This Lonely Highway"

[halfshellvenus]

This Lonely Highway
Idol Wheel of Chaos | Week 16, #1
Kako no ashoito (memories/events/influences from the past)

x-x-x-x-x

Wheeling through the dark,
light lost to the stars
and the city far behind us,
we travel the barren highway
toward a distant promise.
The moon gleams cold as ice.

On a looming hilltop,
a lone steer stands, starkly
black against the dimness behind it.
The unfenced land crowds close,
the highway an inky ribbon
stretching into the night.

Nothing thrives in this desert,
in this unforgiving land
along the road to somewhere else.
Time waits frozen, as unyielding
as the desolation
of this lonely, forgotten place.

Wakeful, I watch the hills unfold,
mark a field light's deathly glow.
Ghost songs on the radio
float up through the static
in this in-between nowhere
caught so very far from home.


--/--

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Comments

[rayaso]

Great poem, as usual. You usually write fiction, but your poems are always memorable. I loved the lines "Ghost songs on the radio/float up through the static". It sounds so lonely. I have been on trips like this, also through eastern Oregon, but I always had great company. The imagery here is so lonely and empty.

[halfshellvenus]

I thought I'd used the line "ghost songs on the radio" in a story years ago, but it turned out not to be true. It has been waiting to find a home forever, always related to this setting or something like it. And all of this imagery... I think it's so much clearer and starker as a poem. Prose would only water it down.

Thanks for reading and commenting!