three of spades - large nameless quiet friend

�7# �.�sssss� �� Mx�� *.s. San Fransisco seems so far away. Why am I haunted by the three of spades, the three of spades, the three of spades? She left and went one way, I left and went another way. The hotel room stayed in the middle, the coal remaining after our brief meeting had lit up the night sky. And now I was driving, driving, driving, half-blind, the fingers of last night�s lust still tickling my belly. On the dashboard the three of spades. On the radio a trucking song. Play, music, and float by, dashed lines. I am driving, it is night, and God is everywhere around me. Somewhere in the darkness a raincloud looms. It is silent, it has given its thunder to the freight train that rolls and howls beneath it, away off my left shoulder. The singleminded intensity of this train is terrible, gray, mourning long before the night gives up its holy shroud. All I do is drive through space, tiny and wide awake with awe. It rains. Somewhere over the horizon, lingering in another land of which the billboards sing, there is a stone wall that barely holds out the rainstorm. Here, on the highway, you can hear the storm if you listen. Back in Denver I had a pretty good life. I worked in a bookstore by day and played guitar in comfortable bars at night. Walking home from a fizzy, tipsy gig one night, I saw something flitting around in the pre-rain breezes. The superstitious part of me bent over and picked it up. It was a playing card, slighty warped. I turned it over. It was the three of spades. I slipped it in my pocket, and walked on home. Your call came a couple of weeks later. I had spent two years not thinking about you like the white elephant. Finally, I won. You called. You had that crack in your voice where all the golden light spilled out; you missed me. I spent two more weeks not falling for it, knowing you just needed something and as soon as you got it you would dispose of me again. Then I got in the car and started driving. We would meet in the middle. Digging for change to pay for cigars at a truck stop in Utah, I found the three of spades and put it on the dash board. Safe inside the cool confines of the anonymous hotel in Nevada, I loved you. I let it all fall away, strip away, sluice away, everything washed downhill in a great muddy flood and I totally abandoned myself to your body and my body cried I love I love I love and we melted together like a mudslide, and I cried as I came in you, long, hard, rolling waves, and I cried and tasted your tears, your come, your piss, your blood, your mud. We left a soggy pool in the middle of the sheets. Now I am driving through this alien terrain. When I see the mountains before me at last, I will go into them like laughing at the table with family. They are all the family I have left. I will play at the bars again, hear the chuckle of the drinks, the whisper of the smoke, and I will sing songs about how I can never have you. I am writing a song now, in fact, named after the three of spades. It is full of images that do not make sense. Some songs you write just because you don�t know what the fuck else to do, because you cannot explain what you see, what you taste, when you roll down the window and let the rain come in, glistening on your arms, your hands on the wheel, mixing cool with the warm of your tears. ulCharcoalCharcoa � �� @ /�0�d ��̿ $�� $�$�� $�$�� $�$�� $�$�� $��A-head�� 00��7 hx��pH$�@� �� U�� 7h�#�&p&q*�.�/-/�/�3�3�3�3�3�3�3�3�3�7�9�9�9�9�9�9�9�9�9�9�9�9�9�9�::::::::�;�?�HH�@�� Rt(��HHg `�'�� R=�/��BH-:LaserWriter 300/LS Ͱ�::��:(�=(�