SONG OF THE DAY: The Great Northern Coal Company

Most afternoons I day dream about walking through empty coal train yards, scribbling nothing prayers to float across nowhere, back and forth from mountains to ocean as earth’s guts get scraped out to keep all these screens feeling lit. A post-industrial late American empire message in a bottle of sorts, except there’s all sorts of other messages in bottles stuffed onto the coal trains too, in every open spot sometimes, and you sit there when blessed by one rolling past and look for people you know, or wish you knew, or folks you love, and some you don’t like at all because you know they’re full of shit and fake as fuck. It all floats past.
Most nights I lay in the bed, staying up too late, worrying about how I’m gonna do everything that needs to be done, plus the shit I wanna do, and have enough time for family, for friends, much less my solitary pilgrimages along the tracks, “silver blazing” as the great American wandering poet Marcher Arrant calls it; and I don’t get enough sleep, and I wake up tomorrow even more rest-deprived, with the need-to-dos stacking higher, and you shovel as much of that shit out of the way as you can on the weekends, which means the weeks never really end… just the responsibilities you get paid by some fuckers for bleed into the responsibilities you squeeze around bleed into each other and all over any dreams you once had, which is why you can’t sleep. You don’t dream anymore… you just keep trying to shovel the needs down as fast as you can, but they’re piling up even faster, and it’s a fucking nightmare, but this is how it will probably be until it all collapses.