I was humming as if with a mouth harp, ballad called Home Soon I’m Not Coming. Onlooking children, thieves in the making, laughed at me crying as my horse rode off in a stranger’s truck—my last possession sold for meager provisions. Bloodshot, with a rucksack containing only a canteen and a blackjack, I took the footpath to find bodyheat for sleeping. Stuck out my thumb and the wind carried me along one route of wet leafrot, another of dust. A mountain range came in view and the sea I lived by fell from sight. Next, a desert. Then, a massive umbrella of artificial light hanging over an island of skyscrapers. I hummed the lengths of avenues, blues called Taxi Past Glass Towers. My light footfall drowned out by sheer height. Full of hunger I hummed A Week Past Hot Springs, then A Week Beyond Snowcaps, eating only what I killed or picked with my hands—the emaciated hen that wandered too far from her coop, the pear that hung so heavy it had to fall. Anything was free and mine until I sold it. There were regions, sometimes climates, between strained conversations, untrue directions from squatters and trainhoppers, thieves all. When I hummed the blues called Root of Tongue, the path gave way to thick brush or blowing sand, poisonous pink flowers or warm open wind. Under a new moon I faced off with a dark man. I balled my left hand, a callused fist, and thought, You are nothing without a song. He said, I was just thinking the same about you.
Jason Labbe is the author of a chapbook, Dear Photographer (Phylum Press, 2009). He has new poems appearing or forthcoming in Poetry, Boston Review, American Letters & Commentary, Open City, and other journals. He lives in Bethany, Connecticut.