Metaphysical Travel Agency

The shaving lather sleeps in my hand like the tongue of oblivion. I lift my hand and smear it all over my face. This is how I kiss the morning. My fingers find their true vocation. They like it when grains of sand pass through them. Today they came in handy when I used them to tie a knot in a small piece of twine that I used to tie a corner of a towel down to the leg of the chair to protect the newly reupholstered seat from our cat's claws. I have a table to wipe and a sense of purpose in doing it. I have somewhere to be when I feel like going somewhere. And if I don't I create a destination. Creating a destination is easy. Drink a pint of whiskey, then throw a dart at a world map. If the dart keeps missing the map, you should probably stay home. But if the dart hits China, I would start packing and picking which socks to bring to Beijing, which shirt to wear in Shanghai, which tie to wear in Tianjin. Something multicolored, I think, and feverish, like an abstraction culled from the brain of a coffee table. Or, if you really don’t feel like going anywhere, but, on the other hand, you really do feel like going somewhere, you just can’t make up your mind just yet, you can always elect to put on airs and pretend you just came back from Mars with a golden pterodactyl tie pin & angels of music weeping on your lapel. Like I say, you don’t have to go anywhere if you don’t feel like it, you can just fake a Martian tan by hyperventilating & rattling your emotional trinkets. Travel is the work of the imagination. It's easy to imagine travel when you’re in a chair. It's hard to imagine travel when you travel. When you travel, traveling consumes the imagination. The archaic becomes literature. Reality breaks its chains like King Kong and does things that no one expected. It gets undressed. It drinks a glass of water. It misses its place of birth. It yearns for love & acceptance. It does a tap dance on the eyelid of an Indian deity. It describes Spain with a cante jondo. Are these words going anywhere? Yes, they were minced to fit the density of mass & make it explode into light & shadow. I like objects. Objects make good subjects. So let's go look for sapphires in the plains of Asimov. Let travel come to you. Don’t go to travel. If you let travel travel you can sit and gaze out of the window of the moving train you just imagined & put on the palm of your hand. Travel is easy when you don’t go anywhere. It’s when you go somewhere that travel gets sticky and the maps get crazy and the glove compartment gets stuffed with the weirdest souvenirs available to your imagination. Imagination is where it all begins. The scarf flaps, wrapped loosely around the neck, here at the end of the world. Here it is: the final destination. Already pregnant with time.